Stupid Computer

I seriously doubt that intelligence can be captured in mathematics, but I am sure it cannot be captured in probability. As people start to talk about an artificial general or even super intelligence, the Public Enemy in me is awakened: ‘Don’t believe the Hype’. Think about Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ as scientific revolution is something that has to be forced against the ‘common knowledge’. This is already difficult in times of institutionalized science, but it becomes nearly impossible with machine learning models. Your attempt to change the existing consensus will take not some to convince, but all of sublimated history to contradict.

To explain this a bit clearer: Suppose we had LLM’s in 1543 and Copernicus published ‘revolutionibus orbium coelestium’. It seems now obvious that he was right about the movement of the planets and the sun being in the center, but given the fact that his current scientific consensus was that the sun revolved around the earth that is all the LLM could ever acknowledge. Obviously not because it knows anything about the movement of planets, but because it learned from the texts it absorbed that more information was available on the sun resolving around the earth than the single voice of Copernicus. Given that stochastic information it will return the old ideas. Funnily enough this is both true in a quantitative sense: There was a lot more collective knowledge on the sun resolving around the earth up until then. As in a material sense: Copernicus idea was much simpler, better ideas usually are, doing away with a staggering complexity of concentric circles describing the planets movement. Leaving even less data for an AI to process.