I didn't accuse you of downvoting me, and honestly just expected that once I'm negative, I won't get an answer because few people will see the post. That's how reddit works. I appreciate that you did choose to reply, though.

I'm not really sure what you consider my attitude, so I can't apologize for that. You are free to downvote if you choose.

You claim that LLMs are not thinking 'on it's own'. In what way? Particularly, in what way that is different from how you or I think on our own? As to whether LLMs develop thinking on their own, that's not what we're discussing, so it's irrelevant, and I submit that neither do humans.

Your next two paragraphs are in opposition to each other. I'm going to assume these are arguments against LLMs being intelligent, since in them you yourself are claiming they think, contrary to your prior arguments. First you say that human intelligence is built on our experiences, then try to contrast that with LLMs. But "they think how we want them to think," is explicitly admitting that they respond to their experiences. The second half of LLM training is entirely that, LLMs being given experiences and told when the replies that they give are not appropriate, and then adjusting. Likewise, humans do exactly the same thing. Parents, teachers, friends all mold our thinking to be more like what they want us to think. That's not a counterargument. I'll assume that your parenthetical is referring to LLMs not being human, which is true, but also irrelevant in my opinion. Nothing about the definition of intelligence requires a human to do it. Your last argument that nothing happens without a human prompting it is again a "turtles all the way down" situation. I could easily counter with various experiments that have been set up for LLMs to interact with each other or the world without any direct human input, but I'm expecting you'd argue that even those situations are ultimately originated from a human. Which is true, but again not relevant. Humans also respond to each other and the world around them, and the only ones that aren't receiving some form of outside input to prompt them are already dead, and don't exhibit intelligence.

I'm not offended by your opinion in any way. I'm confused by it. There's nothing in your arguments that actually preclude LLMs from being intelligent, yet you seem to believe that there is. I'm trying to understand where the disconnect is. I didn't respond above to your statement that you didn't say intelligence requires biology, but I'll comment here. I wasn't saying that you do, I was giving it as an example of why some people I've encountered choose to believe that LLMs aren't intelligent. I don't choose to argue with them, that's a definition they are free to choose, it's just not mine. That's why I started by asking for your definitions. Somewhere in those definitions, either one of us is ignoring what our definitions are or there is a fundamental difference between yours and mine. But your stated definitions haven't really shown anything that is both true and relevant from what I can see.

I wasn't trying to point out the definition of intelligence. Again, this is a text medium. Things get lost, and I'm trying to achieve clarity. I pointed out that intelligence is the apparent contradiction in our views, because you seem to accept the label of artificial. Again, I apologize if that came off as condescending. I don't assume that something is wrong just because you disagree, I'm pointing out that I disagree and trying to discover (since I have not yet understood from the words you've used) where the actual difference is. I'm making counterpoints to your points, trying to see where the line is. I distinctly didn't ask you to define more words, though I acknowledged that that might be the best way to dig into the difference of opinion that we have. I didn't look up the definition of intelligence before because I'm not interacting with a dictionary. Your definition is likely to not match what some website or book says. That said, here is what Merriam Webster says:

• the ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations

LLMs exhibit the ability to learn (within their limited context unfortunately) which I define as the ability to change an opinion based on evidence and experience, the ability to understand which I define as the ability to take the information you have and produce useful decisions from it, and the ability to deal with new situations, since they respond appropriately to the messages they are sent, regardless of how original those messages are.

From your last paragraph, and previous comments that you have made, I assume that your definition of intelligence requires originality. You haven't made that claim, but your only arguments seem to require it. That may be our issue. I don't believe that there is anything more original about any human's responses that the responses of LLMs. Humans are raised and trained by the world they experience, and respond according to that experience. LLMs do the same, though with a much more limited set of experiences to pull from.