We treat AI like a smarter version of a person. That’s the wrong comparison.
Intelligence isn’t knowing things. It’s compressing patterns, finding the shortest rule that explains a mountain of data, whether that’s grammar, protein folding, or tax law. Humans do this too, just slow, one lifetime at a time, and every generation starts over.
AI does the same compression on piles too big for any human head, and it doesn’t forget or die. Once the pattern is found, it copies free and instant into the next instance.
So the new definition: intelligence is the ability to compress patterns at scale, and never lose the result.
Inspired by Noah Smith’s piece on what more intelligence actually means.