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FT News Briefing
Superintelligent AI: can chatbots think?
Dec 28, 2023
Emily Bender, professor of computational linguistics, discusses the true intelligence of generative AI systems like GPT-4. They debate whether the systems truly comprehend or just respond to cues. They explore how GPT-4 identified fraud in the Enron scandal and the limitations of AI in human-level reasoning. The speakers also touch on the emotional connection to AGI and the challenge of separating machines and humans when interacting with AI.
29:27
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Quick takeaways
- Generative AI systems like ChatGPT excel at pattern matching and stringing words together, but lack true understanding of the meaning of words and genuine cognitive processes.
- The impressive performance of AI systems in tasks like legal reasoning often leads to misconceptions that they truly understand and reason like humans, but these achievements are based on pattern matching and statistical inference rather than true intelligence.
Deep dives
The Limitations of ChatGPT and AI Reasoning
Despite the impressive capabilities of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, some experts argue that these systems are not actually reasoning or thinking like humans. AI systems like ChatGPT excel at pattern matching and stringing words together, but they lack true understanding of the meaning of the words they use. These systems can pass exams and solve problems, but often they rely on surface-level cues and memorized patterns rather than genuine cognitive processes. The skepticism surrounding the reasoning capabilities of AI is supported by experiments in which ChatGPT fails when faced with complex reasoning tasks and struggles to provide explanations for its answers. The debate over the intelligence of chatbots raises questions about what constitutes true intelligence and whether artificial general intelligence is achievable.
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