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The Turing Test explicitly allows for just about any query under the sun. Literally no one, including the people submitting their bots to such a challenge, would make such an objection. If they did, they'd be laughed out of the room by their peers. You're making up a hypothetical here.
I don't deny that some moving of goal-posts is justified. AI intelligence is far more spiky than their human counterparts, and a lot of unexpected weaknesses exist alongside clear strengths. If, in hindsight, the metrics did not correspond to the skills we imagined, it is fair to challenge said metrics. I might promise to buy a car that does >x MPG of diesel, but if you then give me a car that's only there because it uses petrol, then I don't want your car. Worse, it might require a solid rocket booster and fall apart when it gets to its destination. A hospital that rewards nurses in an NICU for ensuring that preemied gain weight won't be very moved if the latter argues that feeding them iron filings was an effective strategy.
Words can be imprecise.
There exists no human alive that has as much crystalline intelligence or general knowledge as even an outdated model like GPT-3, maybe even 2. Expectations existed that an AI with such grossly encompassing awareness of facts would be as smart/competent as a polymath human. This did not turn out to be the case. We have models that are superhuman in some regards, while being clearly subhuman in others, being beaten by small children in some cases.
They are still, as far as I'm concerned, clearly intelligent. Not intelligent in exactly the same way as humans, but approaching or exceeding peer status despite their alien nature. To deny this is to be remarkably myopic.
We have models that can:
The space of capabilities they lack is itself becoming increasingly lacking. If such an entity isn't intelligent, then neither am I, because I couldn't solve the IMO or play chess at 1800 Elo like GPT 3.5. If I still am somehow "intelligent" despite such flaws, then so are LLMs. I promise you that even if I were to flatter myself and claim I could get there and beyond with sufficient effort, the AI will be beat me to everything else. This hold true for you too.
What is your understanding of 'intelligence'?
I would endorse something like:
"Intelligence is the general-purpose cognitive ability to build accurate models of the world and then use those models to effectively achieve one's goals."
Or
"Intelligence is a measure of an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments."
This, of course, requires the assessor to be cognizant of the physical abilities and sensory modalities available to the entity. Einstein with locked-in-syndrome would be just as smart, but unable to express it. If Stephen Hawking had been unlucky enough to be born a few decades earlier, he might have died without being able to achieve nearly as much as he did IRL.
Well, I will grant that on the latter definition, LLMs are 'intelligent'.
I don't think I would grant it on the former definition, because I take building a model of the world to be a claim about conscious experience, which LLMs don't have. LLMs are capable of goal-directed activity, for whatever that may be worth, but I think having a model of the world implies having some kind of mental space or awareness. You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I mention this because I notice in AI discourse a gulf where it seems that, for some people, LLMs are obviously intelligent, and the idea of denying that they are is ridiculous; and that for other people LLMs are obviously not intelligent, and the idea of affirming that they are is ridiculous. I'm in the latter camp personally, and the way I make sense of this is just to guess that people are using the word 'intelligent' in very different ways.
I am agnostic on LLMs being conscious or having qualia. More importantly, I think it's largely irrelevant. What difference to me does it make if an unaligned ASI turns me into a paperclip but doesn't really dislike me?
Is a horse happy about the fact that the tractor replacing it isn't conscious? It's destined for the glue factory nonetheless.
We have no principled or rigorous way to interrogate consciousness in humans. We have no way of saying with any certainty that LLMs aren't conscious, even if I am inclined to think that, if they are, it's a very alien form of consciousness.
I'm talking about whoever is doing the assessment of consciousness being "aware" of the fundamental limitations of the entity they're testing. I could, in theory, administer a med school final exam to Terence Tao, and he'd fail miserably. I would be a bigger idiot if I went on to then declare that Tao is thus proven to not be as smart as he seems. That meme about subjecting a monkey, fish and elephant to the same objective test of ability in the form of climbing trees, while usually misapplied, isn't entirely wrong.
I also don't mean to make any implications about "interiority" here. I would happily say that an LLM is "cognizant" of fact X, if say, that information was in its training data or within the context window. No qualia or introspection required.
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