I think what makes this discussion hard (hell it would be a hard PhD topic!) is:
What do we mean by smart? Intelligent? Etc.
What is my agenda and what is yours? What are we really asking?
I won't make any more arguments but pose these questions. Not for you to answer but everyone to think about:
Given (assuming) mammals including us have evolved and developed thought and language as a survival advantage, and LLMs use language because they have been trained on text produced by humans (as well as RLHF) - how do we tell on the scale of "Search engine for human output" to "Conscious Intelligent Thinking Being" where the LLM fits?
When a human says I love you, do they mean it, or is it merely 3 tokens? If an LLM says it, does it mean it?
I think the 3yr old thing is a red herring because adult intelligence VS AI is hard enough to compare (and we are the adults!) let alone bring children brain development into it. LLMs do not self organise their hardware. I'd say forget about 3 year olds for now. Talk about adults brainfarts instead. They happen!
a 3yr old is actually far more similar to AI than an adult. 3 year olds have extremely limited context windows. They will almost immediately forget what happened even 20-30 seconds ago when you play a game like memory with them, and they rarely remember what they ate for breakfast or lunch or basically any previous event from the same day.
When a 3 year old says "I love you" it is not at all clear that they understand what that means. They frequently mimic phrases they hear/basically statistical next word guessing and obviously don't understand the meaning of what they are saying.
You can even mimic an inner voice for them like Deepseek does for thinking through a problem with a 3 year old and it massively helps them to solve problems.
AI largely acts like a 3 year old with a massive corpus of text floating around in their head compared to the much smaller corpus a 3 year old has.
I think what makes this discussion hard (hell it would be a hard PhD topic!) is:
What do we mean by smart? Intelligent? Etc.
What is my agenda and what is yours? What are we really asking?
I won't make any more arguments but pose these questions. Not for you to answer but everyone to think about:
Given (assuming) mammals including us have evolved and developed thought and language as a survival advantage, and LLMs use language because they have been trained on text produced by humans (as well as RLHF) - how do we tell on the scale of "Search engine for human output" to "Conscious Intelligent Thinking Being" where the LLM fits?
When a human says I love you, do they mean it, or is it merely 3 tokens? If an LLM says it, does it mean it?
I think the 3yr old thing is a red herring because adult intelligence VS AI is hard enough to compare (and we are the adults!) let alone bring children brain development into it. LLMs do not self organise their hardware. I'd say forget about 3 year olds for now. Talk about adults brainfarts instead. They happen!