this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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sigh this isn't how any of this works. Repeat after me: LLMs. ARE. NOT. INTELLIGENT. They have no reasoning ability and have no intent. They are parroting statistically-likely sequences of words based on often those sequences of words appear in their training data. It is pure folly to assign any kind of agency to them. This is speculative nonsense with no basis in actual technology. It's purely in the realm of science fiction.
Claims like this just create more confusion and lead to people saying things like “LLMs aren’t AI.”
LLMs are intelligent - just not in the way people think.
Their intelligence lies in their ability to generate natural-sounding language, and at that they’re extremely good. Expecting them to consistently output factual information isn’t a failure of the LLM - it’s a failure of the user’s expectations. LLMs are so good at generating text, and so often happen to be correct, that people start expecting general intelligence from them. But that’s never what they were designed to do.
I obviously understand that they are AI in the original computer science sense. But that is a very specific definition and a very specific context. "Intelligence" as it's used in natural language requires cognition, which is something that no computer is capable of. It implies an intellect and decision-making ability. None of which computers posses.
We absolutely need to dispel this notion because it is already doing a great deal of harm all over. This language absolutely contributed to the scores of people that misuse and misunderstand it.
It’s actually the opposite of a very specific definition - it’s an extremely broad one. “AI” is the parent category that contains all the different subcategories, from the chess opponent on an old Atari console all the way up to a hypothetical Artificial Superintelligence, even though those systems couldn’t be more different from one another.