Column: These Apple researchers just showed that AI bots can't think, and possibly never will — Apple’s AI researchers gave these AI systems a simple arithmetic problem that schoolkids can solve. The bots flunked.

LeCun points to four essential characteristics of human intelligence that current AI systems, including LLMs, can’t replicate: reasoning, planning, persistent memory, and understanding the physical world. He stresses that LLMs’ reliance on textual data severely limits their understanding of reality: “We’re easily fooled into thinking they are intel... See more

“People need to understand that current AI—and the AI that we can foresee in the reasonable future—does not, and will not, have a moral sense or moral understanding of what is right and what is wrong,” Bengio said. “It’s crazy to put those decisions into the hands of machines.”

It’s possible that algorithms will one day be superior to humans at both of these functions, but I’m skeptical: the critical recognition of context and creativity are the two arenas where computers consistently underperform humans.