The challenge here is in trying to decide whether LLMs are intelligent or have a mind. Famously, the criteria for intelligence seem to slip with each advancement in technology. But going back to Turing, his test was actually more carefully phrased than we remember: he said that when machines could pass the test, the question of whether they are intelligent would become moot. That seems to be what we're actually seeing: if people can't tell the difference, it kind of won't matter whether they're "truly intelligent" or not.
People also misunderstand the bar that was set by the test. It was more subtle than “Can the computer convincingly carry one side of a dialogue?”
His “imitation game” had three participants: a human participant, a computer participant, and an interrogator. The interrogator’s job was to talk to the participants and try to determine which participant is human and which is a computer.
He wasn’t interested in computers being able to fool the interrogator on occasion. The point where he thought the question of whether machines can think becomes moot is when the interrogator is unable to do much better than chance over many trials.
That’s a pretty high bar, and I don’t actually believe that LLMs have closed the gap with it by all that much. They still have so many obvious tells. And those tells are something Turing anticipated and accounted for. He explicitly considered deliberate deception as an essential part of the test, right there on the second page of a 30-odd page paper.
sethev · · focus · HN ↗
bunderbunder · · focus · HN ↗
His “imitation game” had three participants: a human participant, a computer participant, and an interrogator. The interrogator’s job was to talk to the participants and try to determine which participant is human and which is a computer.
He wasn’t interested in computers being able to fool the interrogator on occasion. The point where he thought the question of whether machines can think becomes moot is when the interrogator is unable to do much better than chance over many trials.
That’s a pretty high bar, and I don’t actually believe that LLMs have closed the gap with it by all that much. They still have so many obvious tells. And those tells are something Turing anticipated and accounted for. He explicitly considered deliberate deception as an essential part of the test, right there on the second page of a 30-odd page paper.
michaelmrose · · focus · HN ↗
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