"Subligence" – proposed coinage for LLM "intelligence"

4 points by akiarie 46 days ago | 6 comments

Call me a snowflake, but I propose that those of us who don't believe that AI is actually intelligence look for a term to refer to its "thinking" that isn't "intelligence", because this helps our weak minds keep things straight.

subligence /sʌbˈlɪdʒəns/ n.

A lesser or rudimentary form of intelligence; the capacity to respond, select, or adapt without full understanding. The semblance of mind in animals, machines, systems, or inanimate things. Discernment beneath reason; inferior intelligence.

Example: "Since December, the coding models have gotten noticeably more subligent, so much so that the undiscerning eye has trouble distinguishing their output from human intelligence."

hootz 46 days ago |

Yeah, fine, but I feel like this fight was already lost before generative AI/LLMs became a thing. My university called a topic about rudimentary state machines "Intelligent Systems", and those didn't even use machine learning.

AI is already a "word" for it, artificial intelligence. It is not intelligence, but it sure does perform some tasks usually associated with human intelligence.

akiarie 46 days ago | |

True, but thing is that "artificial intelligence" is meant in the opposite sense. It's meant as something that is / will be equivalent to human intelligence, not as something useful but vastly inferior.

sometimelurker 46 days ago | | |

i think its okay if "AI" is context dependant. but if you want a machine thats ~equal to human intelligence you can call it "AGI" and if its smarter, "ASI"

sometimelurker 46 days ago |

I think just "semblance" would be easier.

anyways, I'm pretty sure there's nothing stopping the development of an intelligent system. I do also think that pure "dumb" scaling of today's LLMs can bring that. They can develop "understanding" of simple things (multiplication), and just by making them larger they can "understand" other things (but only if the training process incentive this)

dankwizard 43 days ago |

No thanks.

What an unaesthetic word. If you made it catchy, sure, but "subligence"? Try again

yepyoukno 46 days ago |

I think you are addressing the wrong problem, with a dash of cleverness, sure.

It is a matter of “how intelligent” not “whether intelligent.” Is there a special word for the intellect of a child? Or animal? Or imbecile? Or average person? Or genius?

Even without quibbling for the ultimate definition of intelligence, we may consider intelligence is scalar with boundary conditions relating to competence or completion.

How many of you got things right the first time? I know I’m intelligent because I don’t give up until I have a satisfying solution, not that I got it right on the first go. And those of us of ”inferior” intelligence huffed and puffed that they couldn’t do it because it was impossible or accepted the fist plausibility without regard to thoroughness.

I would like to point out that most of society accepts “reasons” rather than demonstrating “reasoning” of that thing. One might relegate the old argument of inference vs deduction. Are you intelligent because you found the agreeable conclusion, or identified and correlated all signifying factors?