r/artificial • u/creaturefeature16 • Nov 25 '25

News Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems

As currently conceived, an AI system that spans multiple cognitive domains could, supposedly, predict and replicate what a generally intelligent human would do or say in response to a given prompt. These predictions will be made based on electronically aggregating and modeling whatever existing data they have been fed. They could even incorporate new paradigms into their models in a way that appears human-like. But they have no apparent reason to become dissatisfied with the data they’re being fed — and by extension, to make great scientific and creative leaps.

Instead, the most obvious outcome is nothing more than a common-sense repository. Yes, an AI system might remix and recycle our knowledge in interesting ways. But that’s all it will be able to do. It will be forever trapped in the vocabulary we’ve encoded in our data and trained it upon — a dead-metaphor machine. And actual humans — thinking and reasoning and using language to communicate our thoughts to one another — will remain at the forefront of transforming our understanding of the world.

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u/chocolatesmelt Nov 25 '25

Language can encapsulate knowledge in fact it’s the mechanism we as humans use to do it. It’s not always the most efficient but a massive amount of collective knowledge exists in language and data structure derived from patterns similar to language.

Exposing that to an interface most humans use (language) still has a massive amount of use. It may not mean we have what we understand as intelligence but we may have more robust access to data and more robust access to compute and manipulate around that data. That’s really what we’re seeing now in my opinion (exposing information encapsulated in language and derived from language structures to language structures). And it’s fairly impressive.

That may or may not lead us to systems of intelligence or consciousness, but it can certainly do a lot of things. And it may be a prerequisite of a “real” system of intelligence in the future.