"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all,

Which is why I specifically said "There are widely accepted ones too."

There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Absolutely.

There is value in recognizing the problem, not dismissing it. There are lots of defnitions, many of which are fuzzy, because people who want to argue that humans (or specific groups of humans) are "intelligent" while others are not generally have to define intelligence in a very ad hoc way to support their argument. People who are interested in studying the subject generally have reasonable definitions. The former don't like the latter's definitions because they fail to provide the desired absolute threshold they desire.

My point was that the LLMs claim to know everything but when they don't know something they just make things up where a human is likely to say "sorry, don't know,"

me pointing out that much of that "knowledge" is garbage. That's it.

Hm. Those don't quite sound like the same thing. It's like you've been caught saying something silly and you're engaging in a bit of revisionism. On a public, threaded message board with no edit button, no less. If one were being uncharitable one might point out that the quite human phenomenon of "digging yourself in deeper" often follows the one of making shit up rather than saying you don't know.

That's not entirely true. We don't have a good idea of how biological brains (simple or complicated) learn. There are some hints of how they might feed back error signals but we don't know in detail. There is the possibility, and people love to latch onto it, that brains are doing something that works better than gradient descent. There isn't really a good reason to believe that, and quite a few not to, except for handwavy comparisons like the summary makes.

Certainly the hardware is different, and that's where the obvious differences originate. The brain isn't really any more analog than your laptop though.

There are lots of definitions of what "intelligent" means. There are widely accepted ones too. There isn't really one where the human brain is, and everything else isn't.

Well, let's see... first of all, the brain is not digital

It's not?

My point was that the LLMs claim to know everything but when they don't know something they just make things up where a human is likely to say "sorry, don't know," or at least say "My guess is X" rather than "Oh yeah, it's X. Definitely X. What do you mean it doesn't exist? Oh, sorry, I just made that up. My bad."

That was good for a laugh this morning. Especially posted on Slashdot right after the guy claiming that what the brain does is uncomputable. Because... it is, that's why.

You can train an LLM to say it doesn't know, or even build pretty good objective confidence metrics. We don't, because people don't like it. We don't like it in humans either.

Everyone who's ever made that claim about something in the real world has been wrong. Why do you think this is different?

If a place is cheap to live, then your life is just as cheap to those running it.

In the end, there's a certain minimum cost for running things effectively and if the taxes don't reflect that, then as far as the corporations and politicians are concerned, nobody there matters.

Even amonst the rich clients, the malpractice incidence rate in the US is between 2-3 times that of the rest of the civilised world.

Worse, doctors struck off in one State for malpractice can simply move to another and get a fresh license. It happens.

The system is really bad.

I love that AI will never have a monopoly on nonsense.

A bit of a double edged sword (almost literally) to having an army of killers trained to overthrow despots. Kind of why history is full of military coups.

I'm wondering if it would be more cost effective to trap Bezos and other AI hypemen in a realistic simulation where they believe AI has achieved everything they wished. We would only have to run this level of simulation for perhaps 1000 billionaires and sub-billionaires. And could avoid sinking the energy and resources into trying to convince 8 billion people that AI isn't just a slop-making machine. Much easier to convince someone of reality-denying nonsense if they are already primed to believe in it.

Funny how the British whinge about their mild wet weather when they significantly further north on the globe than Quebec. If there was no Atlantic gyre moderating their temperatures, the Scottish highlands would be neck deep in snow 3 months out of the year. And London would be full of cars and buses slide down streets every Christmas like Minneapolis. So not just wet, but cold, and snowy, AND wet.

Humans are pretty good at reading the emotions of other humans, which can sometimes be useful in sensing if someone is possibly lying. But that's subtly different from telling facts from lies. Like if the person believes the lies (because they where conned or a a rube), then we're not going to sense deception from them.