Get the latest tech news
What is intelligent life? Portia Spiders and GPT
Our human minds hold us back from truly understanding the many brilliant ways that other creatures solve their problems
We might intuitively feel our way forwards – choosing, for example, to accept border collies and children, deny shrimp and slime moulds, and argue endlessly about different birds – but really it’s impossible to answer this question until we’ve dealt with the underlying issue. In this pervasive – albeit stylised and narrow – version of the human story, stone hand-axes and symbolic beads led inevitably to agriculture, writing and mechanised landscapes, setting the stage for more recent triumphs, including winning wars and Nobel Prizes, accumulating wealth, and reaching the Moon (first, preferably). Current large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT converse in sentences that are almost indistinguishable from those of another person, and their rapid search ability, multiple layers of tweakable parameters, and training on massive bodies of human knowledge allow them to succeed at standard intelligence tests.
Or read this on Hacker News
