Last year I became a dog owner for the first time, and I’ve thrown myself into training Minnie, our beautiful Springer Spaniel.
Having never owned or trained a dog before, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process. She learns so fast, is so eager to please and loves her training so much. She’s now one of the Alphero office pooches, with many fans amongst the team.
At the same time, like many of us I’ve been training AIs like NotebookLM. So I thought, how are these training experiences similar, how are they different, and who is smarter - Minnie or NotebookLM?
- Both Minnie and AIs are eager to please. We’ve bred dogs to want to please humans, and built AIs to serve humans, and they both “want” to help us. Of course when Minnie doesn’t understand something she looks at me quizzically with those beautiful loving eyes, whereas NotebookLM just gives me an apologetic explanation of what it doesn’t understand, so I never get frustrated when training Minnie, whereas training an AI can be very frustrating.
- Both are very good at what we humans have designed them to do. Minnie was bred to walk all day, spring game, find and retrieve it without destroying it and stay close to her human(s). She excels at these tasks (or similar ones - she’s very good at hunting for sticks, not dead ducks!). NotebookLM has been designed to take in loads of information and help us understand and make sense of it and again, it does a great job at this.
- They are both amazing companions. Springer Spaniels are also known as Clinger Spaniels - they are bred to love their humans and she’s a wonderful with the entire family, including the kids (maybe not the cat). NotebookLM is a fantastic companion when you’re trying to figure something out - it’s great for bouncing ideas off of, getting suggestions, and helping you evolve your thinking.
- Both are great at what they know but struggle with what they haven’t been trained on. We have worked hard to expose Minnie to lots of different environments and people from a young age, and give her lots of positive reinforcement when she exhibits the behaviour we want. That makes her pretty flexible and confident - but she can still get nervous or confused when put in a new situation or environment. Similarly, NotebookLM only knows about the information it’s been trained on, and that’s a huge strength, as it means it’s much, much less likely to hallucinate than a general LLM. But it also means you’ll be exploring something and when you reach the limits of what it knows, it too gets stuck.
- NotebookLM is much, much better when bombarded with information. Minnie is still young (ten months) and if we take her to an environment with lots of stimulation, especially when she hasn’t had her needs to hunt and work met, she can get overwhelmed. She was bred to be super responsive to her environment and so it can all get too much. Whereas NotebookLM just takes everything you throw at it until you reach its limits, and never seems to get lost or confused by it all.
- Minnie has an incredibly agile, versatile and flexible body that means she can do things no AI could do, even if placed in the most advanced robot dog body. Even though in theory an AI dog could be much, much smarter than a real dog, in practice its intelligence is limited by its body. As a result, an actual dog is very often going to be better for the job we want it to do. Robotics has come a long way, but it’s still nowhere close to what biology and evolution are capable of doing.
- Minnie has a form of intelligence that AIs are a long way from exhibiting - emotional intelligence. AIs can seem to exhibit emotional behaviours, but at the end of the day they are just exhibiting emotional reactions based on probabilistic calculations of how they see humans respond in their training data. So an AI might be able to guess that I am a bit sad or frustrated through the words I say, but Minnie just knows through my body language, tone, scent and tens of thousands of years of being bred to understand humans.
So are AIs smarter than dogs? Well, obviously for certain tasks yes, and probably smarter than humans too. But the comparison with dogs shows that even a mammal that is less smart than the average human is still way smarter and more useful, helpful and just WONDERFUL than an AI when you take a physical and emotional perspective.
