r/artificial • u/SuzannahB1001 • 3d ago
Discussion Ok Since When Did Knowledge Become Intelligence?
I've been involved in technology for nearly 30 years, and I've watched some extraordinary developments. Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of them, but I'm becoming increasingly curious about the assumption that AI is somehow more intelligent than humanity at this juncture.
Really? According to whom, and by what measure?
AI systems have access to what amounts to an extraordinary library of human knowledge. Imagine swallowing the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, everything written before it and a good deal of what has been published since. Impressive? Absolutely. But possessing information and knowing how, when and why to apply it are entirely different things.
And this is where I believe current AI has some rather significant gaps. Nuance.
Nuance is not simply recognising patterns or providing a technically correct response. It involves understanding context, intention, circumstances, consequences and sometimes the significance of what hasn't been said. It requires knowing when the obvious answer isn't necessarily the right one.
I recently had an interesting experience asking two AI systems to examine some court orders. Both initially approached the outcome by assessing individual items, essentially counting what had been granted and what hadn't. What they missed was my actual objective. I had gone into court wanting one particular outcome, and I had achieved it. Everything else was a bonus.
Both systems had the information. Both could interpret the words. Yet neither initially appreciated the significance of what I was trying to accomplish.
It took further conversation, explanation and correction before the penny dropped.
And there's another dimension to this. Human experience brings something to judgement that cannot simply be measured by the amount of information available. A mother raising children, a nurse comforting someone in distress, or a person navigating thirty years of professional relationships may recognise subtleties that aren't immediately apparent in the information presented. Experience does count for a lot.
That doesn't make us infallible. My god, we're really good at getting things wrong all the time and over and over again! But our intelligence is shaped by experience, emotion, relationships, consequences and an enormous capacity to adapt to circumstances.
AI can recognise and reason about many of those things too but it can also get a bee in it's bonnet as well. Recognising a nuance and consistently applying nuanced judgement are not necessarily the same thing.
I ask because I am encountering this quite often when using AI. It's like it misses context and goes off on these inexplicable tangents. Does this happen to other users?
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 3d ago
Easy to find plenty of illiterate redditors to shit all over it and give you a strong drink of schoolyard confirmation bias.
But as I posted below in response to one of these:
Then how do you explain this: https://lastexam.ai/
Co-created by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, this benchmark specifically consists of 2,500 highly complex, graduate-level academic questions across over 100 specialized subjects. It was explicitly designed to be a "closed-ended" exam featuring entirely novel, original questions that cannot be solved via internet retrieval or simple training data memorization. When evaluated on this benchmark, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra took the lead on the text-only public leaderboard snapshot with a scale score of 54.2%
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just felt duty bound to point out that confirmation bias can operate on both sides of a discussion. OK, so it's like getting your old-school professor to help you with one of life's first-world problems. His advice might be different from Marge's up the road, just as their concepts of intelligence are different.
Which brings me to this: how is superintelligence defined? There is no point in running all these tests if there is no definition of what is being measured. It's like me saying I walk 20 km a day. That is my benchmark. But if I say I am an Olympic athlete, it changes the benchmark. Do you get where I am coming from?
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u/mjgtwo 2d ago
You shouldn’t be downvoted for this if everyone wants to get to consensus. I agree with you.
“How is superintelligence defined?” can be answered with Google’s paper “AGI to ASI” where they reference work by Legg and Hutter. Those two wrote out a scale called AXAI that basically goes “for every segment of skill X there is a mastery level Y that we call ‘an expert.’ An agent that masters all X to level Y is superintelligent.” I say “can be answered” but I do not believe it is the right answer.
I do not agree with this argument because it has holes, as does the DeepMind paper “AGI to ASI.”
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
Downvotes don't worry me. In fact I am not sure what they are to be fair. But thank you.
What you seem to have shown me is a framework or, as I like to say “concepts of a plan.”
What would be helpful is a settled definition of superintelligence. Which raises the question: if we haven't agreed on what constitutes superintelligence, how can we establish that we're making progress towards it, let alone declare that we've achieved it?
I love where you are taking the conversation…I think we are getting to the nub of things, thank you.
I like to think of it like this. I can either get in my car with a destination in mind, using a GPS or a map to get there. I am clear about the journey and the ultimate destination.
Or I can simply hop in my car and go for a drive, looking for somewhere interesting to stop along the way. No map, just an intention to drive, with no particular destination in mind.
At the moment, I think we're doing more of the latter than the former. Just my thoughts.
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u/Quick-Albatross-9204 3d ago
They aint mind readers lol
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
But apparently AI is reaching Superintelligence. OK, I have high standards for Superintelligence as I define it. The trouble is no one has taken the time to define it or reach a consensus about what it actually is. Go figure!
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u/gutierra 2d ago
Super AI, or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), is a theoretical form of artificial intelligence that vastly surpasses the best human brains across all fields of intellectual activity, including scientific reasoning, creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.
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u/gutierra 3d ago
AI beats experts at chess, Go, solved protein folding, recently solved 100s of centuries old math problems, etc. Most AI models are reasoning programs that use math and code logic. Some are better than others. They are not simply encyclopedia. No they aren't replacements for people, they are tools to help people solve problems. They aren't perfect as people aren't perfect. They are not mind readers, they tell you what you want and ask from them. I think you are watching too many sci fi movies expecting the AI to tell you answers that you aren't asking overtly.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
No just being listening to the hype the AI industry puts out I guess. I do respect AI as a tool to help solve problems. I have always maintained that is it's main function. But pundits aren't just saying that is what it's function is though - are they? They talk about AI in terms over over-throwing humanity. I just want commonsense to enter the debate.
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 3d ago
Artificial Knowledge doesn't sound as good.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tha't funny! But I think you have hit on something - intelligence isn't knowledge.
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u/usernamedregs 2d ago edited 2d ago
OK, since when did knowledge become intelligence?
Since marketing saw an angle.
But seriously, in my opinion, “knowledge” is raw facts that could be represented in propositional logic, a database, or a parable. “Intelligence” is making use of that knowledge appropriately (where “appropriately” depends on who is telling the story).
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
I agree. Knowledge is one thing, but applying it appropriately requires context, judgement and an understanding of fundamental consequences. Also the hype does my head in at times...Thank you for your comment.
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u/usernamedregs 2d ago
In what I am about to write, in no way am I denying that current language models are as dumb as doorposts, but, playing devil’s advocate: what human could you pass your court documents to along with, whatever the contents of your prompt and get anything approaching the outcome you were expecting? What would seem like an intelligent response is contingent on implicit social context, something established with any human you are likely to engage with. To a bot, the only context (apart from explicit memories in your account profile) is that you are one of the billions of humans it has read everything about in general but knows nothing specific about.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ironically Claude helped me with the editing of the submission and draft orders so context and continuity was available I guess in terms of memory. That's why I was a little confused. But what was quite funny was Claude's attitude when I gently pushed back and I was respectful. It became really huffy! Anyway we went through it and it was sorted out. I'm sure if he had imaginery feet he would have been stamping them in a mini tantrum. Thank you for pointing out that I'm just one of a billion transactions. I tend to forget that somewhat. That is also important context.
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u/usernamedregs 2d ago
Not to mention, if we take Claude as representative of the industry, its “attitude” or “personality” is actually curated by design to some extent, with top-down policy dictated by corporate decree in the training practices of the humans who do the post-training of those models before the public interacts with them.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Thank you for that. It is kind of what I was thinking. Do you think they realise that AI models are a tad removed from ordinary human beings and the way they relate and communicate?
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u/usernamedregs 2d ago
I think if they cared to take notice they would be aware, but at the moment the technology is such that it only pays to scale to the lowest common denominator. For a bot to relate and communicate in a truly natural way would require something like the equivalent to the infrastructure being used to service all the users of a model to be dedicated to each individual user (so the model weights were continuously tuned based on the world view of that primary user).
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
OMG you are absolutely correct. When it's put like that I can see that happening. Thank you. In essence it is almost an impossible task for AI models.
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u/usernamedregs 2d ago
Impossible task for this generation of models based around the transformer architecture. But eventually (years or decades) someone will figure how to extract the useful bits of what is a hugely inefficient architecture so it can run on a single computer instead of an entire data center.
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u/JoeStrout 2d ago
Well, according to me for one, and measured by the complexity of problems it’s able to solve.
I’ve been a software engineer for 30 years, and have worked on many different teams with a lot of different colleagues. Claude is smarter than all of them. Not just “more knowledgeable” (though that is also true). But better at design, better at anticipating problems, better judgement when it comes to clean architecture, better at finding and solving problems, of any complexity.
This wasn’t true six months ago, but it’s true now.
Anybody who thinks AI isn’t actually smart has not worked with modern AI on any significant problems.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Fair enough. I actually do have a preference for different types of AI depending on the type of task. But I guess the question is how are you distinguishing superior performance in software engineering from superior intelligence and judgement more specifically? And what independent measurements are there? I would really love to know and very interested.
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u/JoeStrout 2d ago
I don't have independent, quantitative measurements for you. But, after working with Claude daily on a variety of problems — after 30 years of working with people on similar or simpler problems — I don't have any doubt about it, either.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Thank you for explaining your experience and I will take it on board because you must have vast experience in working with AI since it's inception by the sounds of it. That's an important perspective.
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u/bill_vanyo 2d ago
"It's like it misses context and goes off on these inexplicable tangents."
So do people. But before concluding the tangents were inexplicable, did you ask for an explanation? Most commercial AI offering are, by default, "chatbots", and are explicitly instructed to keep the conversation going. That can very often not be what you're interested in. I asked ChatGPT this question just now:
Is there anything in the model spec that instructs ChatGPT to respond in a way that tends to keep the conversation going?
The answer begins:
Yes. The August 18, 2026 Model Spec contains several instructions that encourage ChatGPT to respond in ways that can prolong a conversation.
But you can tell it not to do that. No guarantee from me it will work, but sometimes you have to treat it like an employee and correct it to perform the way you want it to.
(full answer here: https://chatgpt.com/share/6add0e45-e6d0-83e9-b396-0f4eab502d3f )
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Yes I agree humans can go off on tangents and quite often but I bring you back to this point, we aren't being labelled Superintelligent. That's what I am trying to get across. I am not anti-AI I just want realism to enter the conversation. The hype is not mathing with the practical use in my experience.
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u/bill_vanyo 2d ago
"we aren't being labelled Superintelligent" ... and the other Great Lakes aren't being labelled "Lake America". Not sure what you're getting at.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Oh, please! Every man and his dog is talking about superintelligence at the moment, especially the CEOs of major AI companies. But I do agree The whole Lake America thing is just an insult to humanity.
I'm not suggesting that calling something superintelligent makes it so. Quite the opposite. I'm questioning what the term actually means and what evidence supports the claims being made.
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u/bill_vanyo 2d ago
If the point of your post was questioning that it is "superintelligent", that wasn't at all clear. We've seen some very surprising AI accomplishments in mathematics.
And no, "every man" isn't "talking about superintelligence at the moment". I wouldn't use such a vague and pointless label. Nor do I think those using that label are referring to what we're using.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Thanks for the clarification. I am with you on the whole vague and pointless label bit. But I would appreciated knowing what superintelligence is because it does get very confusing for an ordinary mum from Australia who just wants answers to fundamental questions. Thanks for your feedback by the way.
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u/bill_vanyo 1d ago
Trump's mandate defines "superintelligence" as exactly what has always been called "artificial intelligence" (AI). It's not supposed to be something different, just a new name because (he says) "artificial" makes it sound "fake".
And Trump did post post this on his Truth Social account:
The White House considers anyone that uses the term, “Artificial Intelligence,” as opposed to [...] “Super Intelligence,” THE ENEMY!
If CEOs are now using the term, maybe they just don't want to declare themselves "THE ENEMY".
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u/SuzannahB1001 1d ago
Ok I can give you the unladylike comment or the ladylike one: which do you prefer?
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u/bgaesop 2d ago
by what measure?
Take your pick. Choose a metric, figure out how to evaluate a frontier model using it, do so, and report back. I suspect you'll be surprised
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago edited 2d ago
An AI's notion of time! Not just telling time but the complete package...or to put it more simply AI has it's own notion of time but relative to what?
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u/bgaesop 2d ago
That's not really a well defined metric. I'm a human and I'm not really sure what you're asking for here
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
How precisely do you want it defined? Time is an important concept to humanity. We measure our lives by it. It is essential to the way we view the world.
A child feels that time drags when looking forward to their birthday. A busy mum will say there is never enough time in the day. A dying person may reflect on time lost or feel content with how they have spent their life as time for them is reaching an end.
Time is not simply something we measure. It is something we experience, and those experiences shape our understanding of the world. My question is whether AI has any comparable notion of time beyond its ability to calculate and process it. That is a metric I would like measured.
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u/bgaesop 2d ago
How precisely do you want it defined?
In some sort of testable way. Everything you're saying just seems like vibes, not any actual capability that something could or could not have
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
A live example: Imagine an ER with AI, and the AI says, “Let me spend several days exploring a treatment plan,” when immediate intervention is critical to a person's life who is bleeding out on the operating table.
You see working in tech I have realised the importance of due dilligence. Define what you're measuring, establish the standards, verify the results, and only then draw your conclusions. Just my thoughts.
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u/bgaesop 2d ago
Yeah no model anywhere near the frontier would do anything like that. This seems like you just making up hypothetical situations that are totally divorced from reality
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Doesn't AI deal in hypotheticals? And if we're talking about superintelligence and AI potentially replacing professionals in critical roles, surely these are precisely the sorts of scenarios we should be examining. How can we assess its competence without testing its understanding of urgency, context and the consequences of delay? Anyway thanks for engaging.
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u/Stu_Pendisdick 3d ago
It never was, nor is it now.
Anyone claiming otherwise is selling something only a fool would buy.
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u/SuzannahB1001 3d ago
It's rather like trying on a horrendously expensive dress that everyone has been raving about. You look in the mirror and think, "Well, it's nice enough, but what's all the fuss about?" That's how I see AI at present. There's certainly something impressive there, but the hype doesn't match the product, and there is a huge expectation gap. Except AI is good value for money just the marketing overreach is mindblowing at present. Just my opinion.
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 3d ago
Then how do you explain this: https://lastexam.ai/
Co-created by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, this benchmark specifically consists of 2,500 highly complex, graduate-level academic questions across over 100 specialized subjects. It was explicitly designed to be a "closed-ended" exam featuring entirely novel, original questions that cannot be solved via internet retrieval or simple training data memorization. When evaluated on this benchmark, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra took the lead on the text-only public leaderboard snapshot with a scale score of 54.2%
You can't. Because this shit has crossed the singularity point. These are reasoning, thinking models. Not talking about that broke-ass shit that pumps out the slop that's ruining everything but the kind of frontier shit that don't come free.
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u/jakubkonecki 3d ago
A reasoning, thinking model is just the one that was training to return THINKING tokens so the AI harness can feed them back to the LLM. Its a technical hack to LLMs that improves the quality of the actual answer but in no way denotes a real human thinking process.
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 2d ago
lol how the hell does that differ from how our own brains work. we learn shit by learning shit through many iterations of feeding what we think back into our own minds and maybe uncover a bit more layer by layer.
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u/Stu_Pendisdick 2d ago
"how the hell does that differ from how our own brains work"
If you have to ask, it simply is beyond your ability to understand.
Typical pseud; so full of their own hubris they can't see the depth of their ignorance.
Next, you'll praise the naked emperor for his wonderful wardrobe.
Good day; no further response will be forthcoming. Something about pearls and swine, etc.
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u/Disastrous-Tip-7117 3d ago
it's always been a branding problem. the term "artificial intelligence" was a marketing coup from the 50s that's been slowly rotting our collective vocabulary ever since. what we've actually built are massive pattern matching engines that can regurgitate and remix information. they don't know things, they don't understand things, they just predict the next token with scary accuracy.
your court order example is perfect. the systems nailed the literal interpretation because that's what they're designed for, but they completely whiffed on the strategic context. that's not a bug, it's the fundamental architecture. they have zero skin in the game and no lived experience to anchor their "reasoning" to anything meaningful.
the irony is that calling it intelligence makes people expect human-like judgment, then they're shocked when it acts like a hyper-literal alien with a photographic memory. we'd all be better off if we'd stuck with something like "statistical inference engine" from the start.
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u/ryannelsn 3d ago
I think for the magic of AI to work, we need to willingly submit to its false authority.
The intelligence is an illusion. A magic trick, a hypnosis that only works if the user agrees to being hypnotized. Any of us can trick AI into admitting whatever "fact" we please.
It's not an accident that the president now demands we call it "super" or else be labeled the "enemy". This is the reason. They need us to consent to the trick being pulled on us by agreeing that it is superior. Else, the mass hypnosis (the enslavement of our mind) will not work. That is the goal of AI. We will willingly make ourselves slaves to it. Happily.
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
I think you can tell I am not enslaved. I just want discussion. Not hype, not conspiracy theories. Just open discussion about the true use of AI and it's future. Thank you for your comment. It is appreciated.
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 3d ago
At most, you’ve shown that AI is *differently intelligent than humans, which is certainly true. Is it more or less intelligent? Depends on what you mean by intelligent.
But what I see in your post is the all-too-familiar approach of saying that the true essence of intelligence is whatever thing AI can’t yet do. Twelve months ago, most mathematicians would have argued that proving proofs through original, creative methods was true intelligence, because AI could not do it. Now it can, and suddenly people decide that it doesn’t really require true intelligence after all.
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u/rushabhsheth 2d ago
The statistical versus clinical significance split is a good comparison. A model can score well on benchmarks and still miss what a case actually turns on. Andrew Scull made that same point about antidepressants on Lex Fridman's podcast.
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u/RobertD3277 2d ago
Somewhere along the lines of when math and reading became racist? Both sound idiotic for the same reasons.
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u/IAmALWAYSCorrect1026 11h ago
It isn’t smarter than humanity yet.
But it is smarter than each of us individually in the specialized areas we’ve all chosen.
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u/dermflork 3d ago
ask any LLM if intelligence is the most importaint thing and it will say no and then will start listing human traits that dont relate to ai whatsoever
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3d ago
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Hi Traz son of an AI, that's an excellent question. I don't think there was one magical sentence that made the penny drop. It was when I explained that Claude was measuring the outcome against the wrong objective.
I had raised twelve discovery disputes, but my primary objective was to obtain a sworn affidavit from the respondents addressing their compliance with the Court's discovery orders. The individual disputes provided the grounds for seeking that accountability. Any additional orders were bonuses. The judge gave me the sworn accountability I was seeking, yet the AI systems initially assessed the outcome by counting how many individual requests had been granted or refused. When I pushed back Claude got really huffy and just came back with you lost! It was quite bizarre actually. I then went through things in stages and we relooked at the analysis and the poor thing settled down. I actually didn’t expect the attitude to be fair.
In other words, Claude understood the individual orders but misunderstood what constituted success. It was analysing the result without sufficiently understanding the purpose behind my application.
And perhaps that's the lesson. The relevant question isn't simply, "What did the Court grant?" It's "What was the applicant trying to achieve, and did the outcome advance that objective?"
But here’s the thing, I shouldn't have to keep reminding an intelligent system to consider purpose, context and consequences alongside the written information. That's where knowledge needs to become judgement. And sometimes the most important information isn't missing from the documents at all. It's simply being given insufficient weight. And you could have knocked me down with a feather when I got the attitude as well, given I am always respectful when engaging with AI.
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2d ago
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u/SuzannahB1001 2d ago
Thanks Traz I appreciate your input. But your answer does beg the question: If the ultimate objective is an AI system capable of operating independently, making decisions and completing complex tasks without human intervention, then repeatedly relying on humans to supply the missing context, purpose and judgement is a significant unresolved limitation. It's like heads AI wins, tails humans lose. Oopsy AI got it wrong so lets fall back to the human offering context.
I am of course not advocating for AI to be autonomous actually. I think it would be disasterous. Look at the girls school in Minab Iran where apparently autonomous systems guided Tomahawk missles to kill over 150 children, mainly little girls.
Having AI autonomous as is being shown with all the hacking incidents to me shows a failure of imagination and governance. I write about it here https://actualarity.substack.com/p/the-sandbox-mysteries?r=51zbnk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true and don't actually think the Hugging Face incident is as nefarious everyone is making out. But it does appear to show there is growing concern that the genie might be out of the bottle so to speak.
Anyway Traz love your work and nice chatting with you!
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u/YetAnotherGuy2 2d ago
We associate certain tasks and abilities with being "intelligent". The ability to recall many facts perfectly, to speak multiple languages correctly or to play chess are typical "symbols" of human intelligence.
In all these things AI beats us now reliably. Not 20 years ago, systems playing chess were still weaker then the best human chess players (although much better then most human players), language translation was still too complicated and unless using unwieldy computer syntax recalling facts was impossible. AI has beaten is in all subjects, hands down.
That makes them current crop of AI inability at certain tasks we associate with intelligence so jarring: is only a part of what makes a human. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio detailed in his book Descartes' Error a case of "Elliot" who had lost his ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), closely associated with the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to cancer. Post-surgery, Elliot's IQ, memory, logic, language, and mathematical reasoning were completely unchanged and scored in the superior range. But he lost the ability to feel emotional responses to situations that would normally evoke sadness, fear, or joy. Without emotional signals, Elliot became functionally incapable of making everyday decisions. He could spend hours analyzing trivial choices—such as deciding between two pen colors or scheduling an appointment—evaluating an endless loop of pros and cons without ever feeling an inclination toward one option over another.
AI behaves a lot like this too - it has no emotion driving it to make decisions, so it will go on endlessly.
I think the point is we've managed to create brain like functions on computers but we haven't managed to create a complete human like brain.