this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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The issue is AI is a buzz word to move product. The ones working on it call it an LLM, the one seeking buy-ins call it AI.
Wile labels change, its not great to dilute meaning because a corpo wants to sell some thing but wants a free ride on the collective zeitgeist. Hover boards went from a gravity defying skate board to a rebranded Segway without the handle that would burst into flames. But Segway 2.0 didn’t focus test with the kids well and here we are.
The people working on LLMs also call it AI. Just that LLMs are a small subset in the AI research area. That is every LLM is AI but not every AI is an LLM.
Just look at the conference names the research is published in.
Maybe, still doesn’t mean that the label AI was ever warranted, nor that the ones who chose it had a product to sell. The point still stands. These systems do not display intelligence any more than a Rube Goldberg machine is a thinking agent.
Well now you need to define "intelligence" and that's wandering into some thick philosophical weeds. The fact is that the term "artificial intelligence" is as old as computing itself. Go read up on Alan Turing's work.
Does “AI” have agency?
That's just kicking the can down the road, because now you have to define agency. Do you have agency? If you didn't, would you even know? Can you prove it either way? In any case, this is no longer a scientific discussion, but a philosophical one, because whether or not an entity has "intelligence" or "agency" are not testable questions.
We have functional agency regardless of your stance on determinism in the same way that computers can obtain functional randomness when they are unable to generate a true random number. Artificial intelligence requires agency and spontaneity, and these are the lowest bars it must pass. And they do not pass these and the current path of their development can not pass these, no matter how updated their training set, or how bespoke their weights are.
these large models do not have “true” concepts over what they provide in the same way a book does not have a concept of the material they contain, no matter how fancy the index is
Is this scientifically provable? I don't see how this isn't a subjective statement.
Says who? Hollywood? For almost a hundred years the term has been used by computer scientists to describe computers using "fuzzy logic" and "learning programs" to solve problems that are too complicated for traditional data structures and algorithms to reasonably tackle, and it's really a very general and fluid field of computer science, as old as computer science itself. See the Wikipedia page
And finally, there is no special sauce to animal intelligence. There's no such thing as a soul. You yourself are a Rube Goldberg machine of chemistry and electricity, your only "concepts" obtained through your dozens of senses constantly collecting data 24/7 since embryo. Not that the intelligence of today's LLMs are comparable to ours, but there's no magic to us, we're Rube Goldberg machines too.
“Functional” was the conditional that acknowledges the possibility of a totally deterministic existence, but dismisses it for what ever we actually perceive as agency, as to argue one way or the other is a distraction away from the topic and is wholly unnecessary.
Also: “However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's [not labeled AI anymore]” -wikipedia
This should tell you that the term AI is commonly, improperly used to refer to computer actions when not properly understood. AI was coined by science fiction to do what science fiction does best, force humanity to question, and in this case the question what is consciousness. That is to say, a consciousness that was designed, and not self built out of the muck. If you argue that how its used determines its meaning, then fine everything from punchcard looms, video game bosses, to excel spread sheets are or have AI. And its designation becomes worthless. Once the magic fades these LLM’s will be as much an artificial intelligence as siri.
Hucksters sell magic, scientists and engineers provide solutions.
And finally i agree there is nothing “special” but there is a difference between large models and consciousness. If you leave an LLM open, and left alone, how long before it starts to create something, or does anything? You leave an animal or a human in a blank room long enough it will do something not related to direct survival.
It took someone to literally create a picture of a full wine glass in order for an “art” AI to take and generate one. This should tell you these do not have functioning concept of the subject matter. But are good enough at convincing people they do.
It's still an unsettled question if we even do
We have functional agency, regardless of your stance on the determinism. “AI” does not even reach that bar, and so far has no pathways to reach that with its current direction. Though that might be by design. But whether humanity wants an actual AI is a different discussion entirely. Either way these large models are not AI, they are just sold as such to make them seem more than they actually are.