I think a thread on this topic will be interesting. My own position is that AI is intelligent, and that’s for a very simple reason: it can do things that require intelligence. That sounds circular, and in one sense it is. In another sense it isn’t. It’s a way of saying that we don’t have to examine the internal workings of a system to decide that it’s intelligent. Behavior alone is sufficient to make that determination. Intelligence is as intelligence does.
You might ask how I can judge intelligence in a system if I haven’t defined what intelligence actually is. My answer is that we already judge intelligence in humans and animals without a precise definition, so why should it be any different for machines? There are lots of concepts for which we don’t have precise definitions, yet we’re able to discuss them coherently. They’re the “I know it when I see it” concepts. I regard intelligence as one of those. The boundaries might be fuzzy, but we’re able to confidently say that some activities require intelligence (inventing the calculus) and others don’t (breathing).
I know that some readers will disagree with my functionalist view of intelligence, and that’s good. It should make for an interesting discussion.
In discussing a mathematical result with Claude (OP forthcoming), I used the made-up word ‘numerize’ to describe the conversion of a predicate (which can be true or false) to a number — 1 for true, 0 for false. ‘Quantize’ is already taken, with a different meaning, so I settled on ‘numerize’. I like to play with language and it can be fun to test AI’s ability to recognize neologisms and infer their meaning.
My prompt was
Claude immediately understood what I meant and responded appropriately. He has abstracted the idea that adding -ize to a noun or adjective creates a verb that means “to bring about X”, where X is the antecedent. This isn’t something you’d intuitively expect from a system that is fundamentally built on next-token prediction, and the fact that AI is able to do it is yet more evidence that AI is truly intelligent.