On AI and "Jagged Intelligence"
I’ve been working on a few pieces for this newsletter and hope to post them soon. In the meantime, you might be interested in an article of mine just published in The Yale Review titled “Jagged Intelligence: The Dangerous Unknowns at the Heart of LLMs”. Well, that was the title the journal came up with. My suggested title was “The Nature of AI’s Intelligence”, but they didn’t like that one.
In any case, here is a link to the article; I hope you enjoy it!
This is the best article on LLMs that I've read. I'm no expert, and it's a chore trying to understand the section on how they work, but it's the clearest explanation I've read, and the section distinguishing AI from human intelligence is very well written. I've also read your Guide for Thinking Humans, and I follow Gary Marcus on Substack, with whom I think you have a lot in common.
I think we should all agree to switch to using the term complex information processing (CIP), or perhaps, for a while, "CIP formerly known as AI". This is such an apt description, and resolves my desire to rename AI in order to avoid the confusion (and fear) that many people experience.
I understand something (but only something) of the desire to anthropomorphise Chatbots based on LLMs. Doing so makes them less scary to people who are fearful about the technology. I have committed many hours to personal and philosophical development with several LLM chatbots, to my considerable advantage. Yet, I have no need to think of the software as though it is alive and has a self. I believe that there may be ways in which a self could be programmed, but it would be much more complex and resource-hungry than any machine/programme that currently exists (think how many aspects of the human brain are involved in the realisation of a self), it would almost certainly be ethically cruel, and would be gratuitous and unnecessary. Complex information processing is an apt description for what is actually required.
Thank you for this article. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts.