People are just as bad as my LLMs

What is most characteristic about human intelligence is the ability to abstract from particular, concrete instances of things we experience. This allows us to form general concepts which are the foundation of reason. Analysis requires concepts (as concepts are what are analyzed), inference requires concepts (as we determine logical relations between them).

We could say that computers might simulate intelligent behavior in some way or other, but this is observer relative not an objective property of the machine, and it is a category mistake to call computers intelligent in any way that is coherent and not the result of projecting qualities onto things that do not possess them.

What makes all of this even more mystifying is that, first, the very founding papers of computer science speak of effective methods, which is by definition about methods that are completely mechanical and formal, and this stripped of the substantive conceptual content it can be applied to. Historically, this practically meant instructions given to human computers who merely completed them without any comprehension of what they were participating in. Second, computers are formal models, not physical machines. Physical machines simulate the computer formalism, but are not identical with the formalism. And as Kripke and Searle showed, there is no way in which you can say that a computer is objectively calculating anything! When we use a computer to add two numbers, you cannot say that the computer is objectively adding two numbers. It isn’t. The addition is merely an interpretation of a totally mechanistic and formal process that has been designed to be interpretable in such ways. It is analogous to reading a book. A book does not objectively contains words. It contains shaped blots of pigment on sheets of cellulose that have been assigned a conventional meaning in a culture and language. In other words, you being the words, the concepts, to the book. You bring the grammar. The book itself doesn’t have them.

So we must stop confusing figurative language with literal language. AI, LLMs, whatever can be very useful, but it isn’t even wrong to call them intelligent in any literal sense.

An LLM has a stream of tokens, and it picks a next token based on the last stream. If you ask an LLM a yes/no question and demand an explanation, it doesn't start with the logical reasoning. It starts with "yes, because" or "no, because" and then it comes up with a "yes" or "no" reason to go with the tokens it spit out.

If you go by that then a lot of people (no offense) aren't intelligent. This includes many vastly successful or rich people.

So I disagree. There's a lot of ways to be intelligent. Not just the research and scientific type.

Sure. If the goal is intelligence then LLMs fail. LLMs do not currently have the same intelligence as humans.

If a human being in front of me were to answer my question like an LLM does, I would think they are an overly confident parrot.

Not saying LLMs are bad, they are an incredible tool. Just not intelligence. Words matter.