I hear you - you’re reacting to how people throw around the word “intelligence” in ways that make these systems sound more capable or sentient than they are. If something just stitches words together without understanding, calling it intelligent seems misleading, especially when people treat its output as facts.

But here’s where I think we’re talking past each other: when I say it’s intelligent, I don’t mean it understands anything. I mean it performs a task that normally requires human cognition: generating coherent, human-like language. That’s what qualifies it as intelligent. Not generally so, like a human, but a narrow/weak intelligence. The fact that it often says true things is almost accidental. It’s a side effect of having been trained on a lot of correct information, not the result of human-like understanding.

So yes, it just responds with statistical accuracy but that is intelligent in the technical sense. It’s not understanding. It’s not reasoning. It’s just really good at speaking.

A linear regression model isn’t an AI system.

The term AI didn’t lose its value - people just realized it doesn’t mean what they thought it meant. When a layperson hears “AI,” they usually think AGI, but while AGI is a type of AI, it’s not synonymous with the term.

I’ve had this discussion countless times, and more often than not, people argue that an LLM isn’t intelligent because it hallucinates, confidently makes incorrect statements, or fails at basic logic. But that’s not a failure on the LLM’s part - it’s a mismatch between what the system is and what the user expects it to be.

An LLM isn’t an AGI. It’s a narrowly intelligent system, just like a chess engine. It can perform a task that typically requires human intelligence, but it can only do that one task, and its intelligence doesn’t generalize across multiple independent domains. A chess engine plays chess. An LLM generates natural-sounding language. Both are AI systems and both are intelligent - just not generally intelligent.

What does history have to do with it? We’re talking about the definition of terms - and a machine learning system like an LLM clearly falls within the category of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an artificial system capable of performing a cognitive task that’s normally done by humans: generating language.

AI is an extremely broad term which LLMs falls under. You may avoid calling it that but it’s the correct term nevertheless.

I often ask ChatGPT for a second opinion, and the responses range from “not helpful” to “good point, I hadn’t thought of that.” It’s hit or miss. But just because half the time the suggestions aren’t helpful doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s not doing the thinking for me - it’s giving me food for thought.

The problem isn’t taking into consideration what an LLM says - the problem is blindly taking it at its word.

It doesn’t understand things the way humans do, but saying it doesn’t know anything at all isn’t quite accurate either. This thing was trained on the entire internet and your grandma’s diary. You simply don’t absorb that much data without some kind of learning taking place.

It’s not a knowledge machine, but it does have a sort of “world model” that’s emerged from its training data. It “knows” what happens when you throw a stone through a window or put your hand in boiling water. That kind of knowledge isn’t what it was explicitly designed for - it’s a byproduct of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information.

It’s not as knowledgeable as the AI companies want you to believe - but it’s also not as dumb as the haters want you to believe either.

How is “not understanding things” preventing an LLM from bringing up a point you hadn’t thought of before?

There’s a certain irony in people reacting in an extremely predictable way - spewing hate and criticism the moment someone mentions AI - while seemingly not realizing that they’re reflexively responding to a prompt without any real thought, just like an LLM.

A tool isn’t bad just because it doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You just take that into account and adjust how you use it. Hammer isn’t a scam just because it can’t drive in screws.

Anyone who has an immediate kneejerk reaction the moment someone mentions AI is no better than the people they’re criticizing. Horseshoe theory applies here too - the most vocal AI haters are just as out of touch as the people who treat everything an LLM says as gospel.

One is 25 €/month and on-demand, and the other costs more than I can afford and would probably be at inconvenient times anyway. Ideal? No, probably not. But it’s better than nothing.

I’m not really looking for advice either - just someone to talk to who at least pretends to be interested.

The level of consciousness in something like a brain parasite or a slug is probably so dim that it barely feels like anything to be one. So even if you were reincarnated as one, you likely wouldn’t have much of a subjective experience of it. The only way to really experience a new life after reincarnation would be to come back as something with a complex enough mind to actually have a vivid sense of existence. Not that it matters much - it’s not like you’d remember any of your past lives anyway.

If reincarnation were real and I had to bet money on how it works, I’d put it down to something like the many‑worlds interpretation of quantum physics - where being “reborn as yourself” just means living out one of your alternate timelines in a parallel universe.

Someone want to explain to a muggle in plain english what this does and how it’s different from simply using a VPN?

That would by definition mean it’s not superintelligent.

If you’re genuinely interested in what “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) means, you can just look it up. Zuckerberg didn’t invent the term - it’s been around for decades, popularized lately by Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence.

The usual framing goes like this: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an AI system with human-level intelligence. Push it beyond human level and you’re talking about Artificial Superintelligence - an AI with cognitive abilities that surpass our own. Nothing mysterious about it.

Judging by the comments here I’m getting the impression that people would like to rather provide a selfie or ID.

No other than it’s geographically closer to my actual location so I thought the speed would be faster.

And as a self-employed I only know how much I earned at the end of the year which could be wildly different than the year before.

EU is about to do the exact same thing. Norway is the place to be. That’s where I went - at least according to my ip address.

FUD has nothing to do with what this is about.