Research Community Perspectives on “Intelligence” and Large Language Models
Bertram Højer, Terne Sasha Thorn Jakobsen, Anna Rogers, Stefan Heinrich
Abstract
Despite the widespread use of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) framing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, it is not clear what researchers mean by ”intelligence”. To that end, we present the results of a survey on the notion of ”intelligence” among researchers and its role in the research agenda. The survey elicited complete responses from 303 researchers from a variety of fields including NLP, Machine Learning (ML), Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience.We identify 3 criteria of intelligence that the community agrees on the most: generalization, adaptability, & reasoning.Our results suggests that the perception of the current NLP systems as ”intelligent” is a minority position (29%).Furthermore, only 16.2% of the respondents see developing intelligent systems as a research goal, and these respondents are more likely to consider the current systems intelligent.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{hojer-etal-2025-research,
title = "Research Community Perspectives on ``Intelligence'' and Large Language Models",
author = "H{\o}jer, Bertram and
Thorn Jakobsen, Terne Sasha and
Rogers, Anna and
Heinrich, Stefan",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.1324/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1324",
pages = "25796--25812",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}