I don't think I agree with your characterization of the second definition. Time scales matter. It's not much use to be able to solve human-scale problems if it takes millennia. And it only takes months to train an LLM to the level that it can solve cutting-edge math problems.

There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.

Imagine an alien that matches your abilities across every domain, but has a 10 billion year training period, something many orders of magnitude more expensive than an LLM. I simply don't believe that alien is less intelligent than you.

We also don't expect humans to be competent in every domain. Most humans suck at most things. We will usually call someone intelligent if they excel at solving problems in one or two narrow domains.

I'm still going to deny the premise of your argument, becasue I think we should define intelligence in terms of capabilities. If a system can discover a cure for cancer or solve P vs. NP, it doesn't matter how many FLOPs it took to train.

The "like" phenomenon is less of a verbal fluency issue and more of a cultural one. You can listen to someone smart like Donald Knuth speak and he will definitely stammer and stutter a lot, but he doesn't use filler words. "Like" is more of a West Coast or California thing and I also find it annoying and distracting.

Your analysis completely ignores the physical and biological sciences, engineering, and the humanities. It mostly applies to a small subset of academic fields in the social sciences and medicine. You're also ignoring the changes that have happened since the replication crisis. Preregistration, publishing all code and data, reporting null findings, replicating results, etc. are becoming the norm.

"We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain."

"I was surprised at our findings because the word ‘brain’ implies a contiguous organ that likely has a singular origin," Jokhai said. "But even 500 million years ago, there were these separate neural systems, which now almost operate as one, which is very cool."

I don't hear much overselling or hype in this, I hear an accurate description of the research and a bit of nerding out over it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768418

Points: 3

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He does have an approach to certain questions to say that it's the wrong question to ask. For example, to "why does the universe exist?" he would say that the question presupposes that everything needs an explanation for why it exists, and the universe is not that kind of thing. This is actually super common in philosophy, but I could see it coming across as pompous to someone who had never heard an answer like that before. He's not saying that the question is stupid, he's saying that it literally doesn't have an answer.