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Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

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Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#51

Post by paganel »

Udik wrote: post #50
paganel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been getting better but Google Translate still lacks context (obviously) which makes it fail in some subtle but important ways. For example, I've just run your comment through Google Translate from English to Romanian (my native language) and Italian (which I understand pretty well) and it does a pretty good job until your last sentence, which in Romanian it translates as: > Nici măcar nu voi începe pe chineză…

Ironically, I think the GP meant exactly what google translate translated, and that your interpretation is wrong. He says that it takes him a long time to translate French and he won't even start if the original text is Chinese or Japanese. :) Edit: check replies below

I'd guess we'll have to wait for him to explain :) Anyway, translations and what gets lost in translation can be fun pretty fun.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#52

Post by jerf »

mcv wrote: post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

"Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more intelligent."

I've come to the conclusion you can get a long ways by modeling humans as the minimally-intelligent species necessary to produce our current civilization. Whatever the space of "intelligent species" may look like, we almost by definition have to be at the simple end, rather than the intelligent one.

I think most people who might say that would mean it in a rather misanthropic or hopeless sense; I don't. I have more of an "it is what it is" attitude about it. I am, after all, one of the just-barely-intelligent-enough myself and hardly in a position to make sweeping declarations of what a higher intelligence might say is the obvious things we should be doing next. I'd also observe that the "minimal intelligence to produce our current civilization" is still non-trivial; don't underestimate the complexity of our current world.

But still, yes, on the one hand it is absolutely true that humans are quite amazing and we seem to be a rather long ways away from matching some of their feats, but, on the other hand, we are also a long ways from even how we fancy ourselves in our collective self-image, let alone close to what are the limits of what is possible even in our universe.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#53

Post by wj »

slacka wrote: post #49
wj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that with that line of reasoning you could also say that a 34-year-old isn't smarter than a 4-year-old. The 34-year-old just has a bigger dataset.

The changes I've seen in the past year go far beyond what could be explained by a "bigger dataset" alone. Her brain processing is changing on the most fundamental level. Her ability to focus on a task has improved massively. Far less random gibberish is coming out of her. She is now capable of thinking how others would feel in her shoes and now plans for the future. Her random output isn't a Markov chain with a bette…

I wasn't arguing that was the case but felt like the parent's logic would extend to that conclusion.

I have three young children and I have observed the same as you with your niece. However a lot of it is that as children learn cause and effect they are better able to optimize for their desired outcomes.

"smarter" is probably a poor choice of words. "more capable" at certain tasks then definitely. The sibling comment to this talks about identifying Legos. My four-year-old can do that because they now know Plato's form of the Lego because they observed me saying the word Lego while holding them to understand what that is. With enough observations I would think that a general purpose AI could identify the forms and then launch more specific AIs for the tasks.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#54

Post by Foobar8568 »

Udik wrote: post #50
paganel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been getting better but Google Translate still lacks context (obviously) which makes it fail in some subtle but important ways. For example, I've just run your comment through Google Translate from English to Romanian (my native language) and Italian (which I understand pretty well) and it does a pretty good job until your last sentence, which in Romanian it translates as: > Nici măcar nu voi începe pe chineză…

Ironically, I think the GP meant exactly what google translate translated, and that your interpretation is wrong. He says that it takes him a long time to translate French and he won't even start if the original text is Chinese or Japanese. :) Edit: check replies below

I am native French, I need concentration to understand the intent on any xyz to French Google translations. A good proof is to translate back and forth a text. I often use German to English or Japanese to English (amazon), I can guess the overall meaning but 60% is my own interpretation.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#55

Post by mcv »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #31
mcv wrote: post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can…

See? That line of reasoning is exactly what I mean when I say we're moving the goalposts on what it means to be intelligent.

Ultimately our brains also fuzzy statistics and arithmetic on the signals going to our brains, but we create intelligent results from that. Is it suddenly not intelligent anymore once you know how the sausage is made?

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#56

Post by short_sells_poo »

crusso wrote: post #16
flavor8 wrote: post #9

"Ever" is not a useful word here. It's like saying "Will four year olds ever be grown in pods?" A better headline might be "Can AI learn as flexibly as a four year old with today's known techniques?", to which the answer is of course "No".

Right, the title of the article is inane. Brains just process information. Computers process information and we continue to make them better at it. Eventually, computers will process information at least as well as brains do for various definitions of "well". https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without...

That seems like a very reductionist way to look at it.

There is absolutely no guarantee that consciousness and general intelligence is an emergent property of any sufficiently capable information processing system. It feels intuitive that it would be, but so far we only have biological examples and no artificial ones.

Even the most sophisticated artificial neural networks we can build today are nothing more than curve fitting with lots of parameters. Perhaps that's all it takes, and with enough parameters, curve fitting can give rise to general AI, but I'm seeing very bold predictions on HN every time this comes up and none of them are actually backed by anything tangible.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#57

Post by mcv »

paganel wrote: post #47
Foobar8568 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to translate what you are going to say, e.g. your thoughts are not in your targeted language, then you are not exactly a speaker. And I can assure you, Google translate is fairly awful. Sometimes my wife is showing me the translation from English to French, and it would take me a while to understand the French meaning. I won't even start on Chinese/Japanese to English (and to French ) or the reverse.

It has been getting better but Google Translate still lacks context (obviously) which makes it fail in some subtle but important ways. For example, I've just run your comment through Google Translate from English to Romanian (my native language) and Italian (which I understand pretty well) and it does a pretty good job until your last sentence, which in Romanian it translates as: > Nici măcar nu voi începe pe chineză…

We're comparing to a 4 year old, though. 4 year olds don't know many idioms yet, and don't know quite a lot of the words you used.

In fact, many adults are laughably bad at translating idioms. There are even books translated by professional translators that mess them up.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#58

Post by MAXPOOL »

ballenf wrote: post #43

The question is really whether an AI will ever be able to process all the sensory data that a 4-year-old has (including time in the womb), plus the input from epigenetic data resulting from the parent's environment. Plus data from the particular gut flora inherited from the mother and influenced by the environment. We can see no roadblock preventing advances from getting to that point. But the volume of data is admit…

The human retina communicates to brain with 10 Mbps. The 4-year old's brain has experienced 9 months in a womb and 4 years outside the womb. That's less than 150 million seconds. More than third of that while sleeping.

Assuming the full sensory data rate is 50 Mbps total (probably less), 4-year old has received 100×10^6 × 50Mbps = 625 TB sensory information while in a waking state.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#59

Post by TaupeRanger »

mcv wrote: post #55
TaupeRanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can…

See? That line of reasoning is exactly what I mean when I say we're moving the goalposts on what it means to be intelligent. Ultimately our brains also fuzzy statistics and arithmetic on the signals going to our brains, but we create intelligent results from that. Is it suddenly not intelligent anymore once you know how the sausage is made?

Not at all. The goalposts are the same as they always were. If we want intelligent machines (the kind capable of creativity, that is, the ability to create new explanatory knowledge about reality), then we will need to see evidence of this creativity. So far no AI has even remotely approached this, because, among other things, no AI is capable of explaining anything at all.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#60

Post by laumars »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #45
laumars wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP's point was that adding "ever" in the title means the question isn't just relevant to our current understanding of what is theoretically plausible but it also doesn't exclude some currently unknown theory that might be derived at a distant point in the future. While I do see - and to an extent agree with - their point, I there is a lot more wrong with that heading than just the lack of a contextual end date.

> The OP's point was that adding "ever" in the title means the question isn't just relevant to our current understanding of what is theoretically plausible but it also doesn't exclude some currently unknown theory that might be derived at a distant point in the future. Or, somewhat more plausibly, some theory or technique that constitutes a minor subfield right now but could be the next big thing in another 20-30 yea…

I still personally think would be the former context (current tech) rather than the latter context ("ever") because you're discussing something that is already working theory - even if it is just a subfield. So the question doesn't become "Will we ever have..." but rather "When will it become...".

Ever applies more for something with an indeterminate future imo.

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