How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

Yes, but we can choose to ignore it. Ignorance of our human nature potentials is our choice, too, and that's the reason for the inertia of the world's societies, including ones that claim to be religious.

The key is that, just as our physical bodies have developmental stages of ever-increasing capability, so does our moral compass. We must learn how to not only use it, but to develop it and fine-tune over time, and we must train and use our mind to self-evolve ourselves.

Note that we can use our free will to de-tune it as well so that we have pointed ourselves in the direction opposite to our happiness, and that of those we come in contact with. In other words, we are free to use our abilities to create unhappiness, out of sadistic pleasure.

The first step of the spiritual path is awakening to this highest of human potential, where we learn to willfully and with difficult effort develop our moral compass in the direction of compassionate concern for the well-being of our fellow human beings. This is why the selfish -- to themselves and their in-group -- people of the world are loath to hear the term "woke"; they take pleasure in remaining ignorant of both the unhappiness they cause and thus karmically receive by their selfish actions. And the same impulse within us that seeks to keep us ignorant of our highest human potential, is also keen to keep its ideals, attitudes, and behaviors off other people's radar. The development of a selflessly compassionate morality become like garlic to a vampire (and they do suck, and suck the life-blood out of the world's systems and people, for sure, causing so much misery by their efforts).

So, yes, our moral compasses are each in various states of development, from the utterly ignored to sometimes-positive-sometimes-negative to the fully developed. As usual, such distributions follow a bell curveish shape. But only the long tail in the positive direction understands and manifests the highest morality. The middle bulk are hit or miss, per their cultures' predilections and the circumstances of their life. And the negative tail are the uttlerly selfish evil bastards of the world.

You can find a full explication of our human nature to self-evolve and the process of manifesting such change in the deep dialog I had yesterday under my comment to Maria Konnikova's poetry article submission. You have to skip past my initial reply and its grand-reply to get to the meat of it.

> I don't think it'd be fully correct to say that knowledge is only encoded by relations between words. The input/output of the model is tokens of text, but internally it'll be converted into high-dimensional semantic vector spaces of concepts.

All right, how about this: LLMs do have actual knowledge - the knowledge that was encoded in the words in the training data. That's not how they store the data internally, but the actual knowledge comes from there.

And I wasn't saying that that's enough. I was saying that the LLM advocates think, or at least claim, that it's enough.

The term "artificial intelligence" is still used, quite correctly, to refer to fully-deterministic algorithms controlling NPCs in video games of all types.

The field of "artificial intelligence" still has "machine learning" (of which LLMs are a product) as part of it.

The problem is not, and has never been, that the term "AI" was used incorrectly to describe LLMs. It's that people (like Altman) who almost certainly do know better started making marketing claims conflating them with "AGI" (aka "strong AI"), and pushing them as being genuinely "alive" and reasoning.

Most of us in the tech field, and a lot of people outside of it (eg, most gamers) fully recognize that "AI" does not automatically mean Skynet. It takes active, deceptive work on the part of the people selling these systems to prime them to make that leap.

> General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on.

One thing I've learned over the past few years is that _nobody_ knows what intelligence is, and it may not even exist as a genuinely measurable attribute. What you've described is certainly _a thing_ that is worth describing and thinking about, but it doesn't encompass everything that we think of as intelligence, and ascribes intelligence to processes which most of us don't think of as intelligent (ie, evolution and plant life).

The problem we have is that for the entire history of humanity, there has been a single example of something that "thinks like us" and our conception of what it means to be "intelligent" or to have "reason" or to "think" is just inextricably tied with all the other attributes that make us human.

I'm not at all sure that intelligence _must_ arise out of a process of evolution and natural selection, and i think that it may be possible to create an intelligent entity which completely lacks the ability to survive in an ecology on its own.

On the other hand, it's often said that while humans domesticated plants and animals, those same plants and animals also domesticated _us_. Human life rearranged itself around the requirements of farming and animal husbandry, and just in terms of pure biomass and range of habitat, becoming "domesticated" was a tremendously successful evolutionary strategy for the animals that we domesticated.

Human society is now _again_ re-arranging itself in order to take advantage of AI, and we're spending a lot of money and labor building these systems and maintaining them. It's hard to say that they haven't adapted themselves to surviving in an ecology, it's just a more abstract ecology than the sort of blood and claw ecology that we evolved in.

In some sense, these AIs are the ultimate expression of "memetic evolution" -- ideas that are able to spawn new ideas, without having any meaningful embodiment at all.

thats the jackpot question I think.

personally I am leaning towards yes, the human mind is nothing magical here, just more advanced wetware.