Thanks Petter for such an amazingly thorough and careful breakdown. I’ve often felt that the word ‘intelligence’ in AI is actually a disservice.

It’s great for marketing but (as your analysis clearly shows) the underlying process in AI systems is very different from what we’d call intelligence - intelligence isn’t about being trained on trillions of bits of data to determine proximity. Rather, intelligence is the ability to generate new data on often very little data - an imaginative leap as it were. It is the ability to cope with situations where there is very little pre existing data.

I use the word ‘disservice’ for AI because by linking it to intelligence we set it up to fail. If we recognised that it is more akin to memory - I like to think of it as a logical search engine, where are searching abstract logic rather than for things - then we can really understand how best to use it (and how best not to use it).

I think also by using the word intelligence it’s making people assume we’ve solved all the problems, and that just scaling is all we need. That’s a shame, because although it’s an amazing technology and a great step forward, it’s just one of many more steps we need to take to truly create artificial intelligence.