Artificial Intelligence is the new buzzword in the tech world. Big tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others are all hyping it up for reasons, some of which are real and some more of promises. They have launched their own large language models (LLMs) and are now powering their existing products with generative AI. 

In middle of all this AI buzz, Meta's AI chief said the large language models that power generative AI products such as ChatGPT would never achieve the ability to reason and plan like humans, as he focused instead on a radical alternative approach to create "superintelligence" in machines. From a report:

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, said LLMs had "very limited understanding of logicâ... do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot planâ...âhierarchically."

In an interview with the Financial Times, he argued against relying on advancing LLMs in the quest to make human-level intelligence, as these models can only answer prompts accurately if they have been fed the right training data and are, therefore, "intrinsically unsafe." Instead, he is working to develop an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, although he said this vision could take 10 years to achieve. 

Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into developing its own LLMs as generative AI has exploded, aiming to catch up with rival tech groups, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google

Also Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella believes that the term itself is a sort of misnomer, which doesn’t accurately reflect whatever LLMs offer. He says instead of AI, the world should call these language models “different intelligence.”

Reason? In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday, Nadella provided a fresh perspective on the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI). Nadella emphasised that everyone should start seeing AI as a tool rather than comparing it with human intelligence, as it is nowhere near it.

“I don’t like anthropomorphizing AI,” Nadella asserted, criticising the practice of attributing human characteristics to AI systems. “I sort of believe it’s a toolâ€æ It has got intelligence, if you want to give it that moniker, but it’s not the same intelligence that I have.”

Interestingly, Nadella comments on the intelligence or AI came shortly after Microsoft partner OpenAI introduced a new personal assistant capable of expressing a range of emotions and mimicking different voices. This assistant’s human-like qualities stirred discussions about the boundaries of AI and its resemblance to human behaviour.

During its Spring Update event, OpenAI demonstrated its new GPT 4o featuring an AI voice assistant that not only understood emotions but also expressed them, leading to comparisons with film “Her.” Social media buzzed, with users noting the assistant’s voice resemblance to Scarlett Johansson, who starred in the movie. So much so that Johansson decided to put a foot down and she now seems to be in middle of a legal tangle with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.

With all these "smart" features, Artificial Intelligence has been compared with human intelligence. In fact, Tesla and X boss Elon Musk predicted that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could surpass human intelligence by next year or 2026. "AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI will probably be smarter than all humans combined," Musk wrote in his post on X in response to a recent podcast hosted by Joe Rogan.

The comparison is also due to the fact that companies with large language models use terms like "learning" or "understanding" to describe how AI processes information.

However, in the interview, Nadella asks users to take caution. "It has got intelligence, if you want to give it that moniker, but it's not the same intelligence that I have," he explained.

The Microsoft boss believes that the current nomenclature of "artificial intelligence," coined in the 1950s, is misleading. "I think one of the most unfortunate names is 'artificial intelligence' - I wish we had called it 'different intelligence,'" Nadella told Bloomberg. "Because I have my intelligence. I don't need any artificial intelligence.