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DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

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Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#321

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

viksit wrote: post #182

(Former AI researcher / founder here) It always surprises me at the ease at which people jump on a) imminent AGI and b) human extinction in the face of AGI. Would love for someone to correct me / add information here to the contrary. Generalist here just refers to a "multi-faceted agent" vs "General" like AGI. For a) - I see 2 main blockers, 1) A way to build second/third order reasoning systems that rely on intuitio…

> A way to build second/third order reasoning systems...

I've been pondering about this problem for a while now[1], Could we build a collective intelligence through community submitted recipes for second-order decisions for various common activities via generalized schema?

I didn't think about addressing this for AI, But as an aid for us in multi-order thinking. But now that you mention it to be a barrier for AGI, It does make sense.

[1] 'Plan Second-Order, Third-Order consequences': https://needgap.com/problems/263

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#322

Post by Surgeus »

dekhn wrote: post #70
Surgeus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This points out something very related that I think about a lot - can you prove to me that you do any of those things? Can I prove to you that I do any of those things? That either of us have a will? When would you be able to believe a machine could have these things? In Computing the Mind by Shimon Edelman is a concept that I've come to agree with, which is at some point you need to take a leap of faith in matters s…

Not just consciousness- all of science requires a leap of faith- the idea that human brains can comprehend general universal causality. There is no scientific refutation for Descartes' Great Deceiver- it's taken as a given that humans could eventually overcome any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon through their use of senses and rationality on their own. I have long worked on the assumption that we can create…

Very good point.

Genuine note - if you remember me in 9 years, please shoot me a message! I'm sure even then I'd be very interested in what you've observed.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#323

Post by mdp2021 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #320
mdp2021 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> demonstrative of "intelligence" Nothing. Nothing that just looks like intelligence is intelligence - convincing appearances cannot make a nature. Either it is an judicial ontology refiner, or it is not intelligence.

If you cannot come up with evidence that would convince you that you are wrong, then you are not making a scientific claim.

Logic is sufficient, there is no scientific claim involved: it has to respect a definition. It has to /be/ something, not /look like/ something - which in the latter case and in this context would make it the opposite.

If it refines its ontology through critical productive analysis that makes it "see details" then it may be an intelligence, while if it outputs mockeries it is /the opposite/ of intelligence.

And in fact, many tentative toys nowadays are completely astray with regard to the concept of intelligence, because the secondary meaning of the term, as used traditionally in this technical context, is "able to provide solutions somehow replacing an engineer": the solutions are verified on effectiveness, not on "vero-pseudo-similarity".

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#324

Post by mdp2021 »

wildermuthn wrote: post #319
kaivi wrote: post #115

Before you visualize a straight path between "a bag of cool ML tricks" and "general AI", try to imagine superintelligence but without consciousness. You might then realize that there is no obvious mechanism which requires the two to appear or evolve together. It's a curious concept, well illustrated in the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. I won't spoil anything here but I'll highly recommend the book.

Consciousness is a pre-requisite for intelligence.

There is an issue with definitions there.

Intelligence is the system allowing the redefinition of ideas over the entities constituting an inner representation of a world: how a non-trivial system of "consciousness" (otherwise the use of the term would be a waste) could have to be employed for that?

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#325

Post by mdp2021 »

akomtu wrote: post #271
kaivi wrote: post #115

Before you visualize a straight path between "a bag of cool ML tricks" and "general AI", try to imagine superintelligence but without consciousness. You might then realize that there is no obvious mechanism which requires the two to appear or evolve together. It's a curious concept, well illustrated in the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. I won't spoil anything here but I'll highly recommend the book.

Not sure what you mean by consciosness here, but one definition of intelligence I've seen was "it's what establishes relationship between things" and the very first relationship it establishes is "me vs not-me".

If an entity can abstract from itself when assessing A and B, then the relation with I is in a way optional for intelligence.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#326

Post by tim333 »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #111
hans1729 wrote: post #5

I’m not sure how to word my excitement about the progress we see in AI research in the last years. If you haven’t read it, give Tim Urbans classic piece a slice of your attention: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol... It’s a very entertaining read from a couple of years ago (I think I’ve read it in 2017), and man, have things happened in the field since then. If feels like things truly start…

Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention all the smaller-scale risks from weaponized AI. Have we made any progress on preventing this? Or is HN mostly happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops? Even t…

>happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops?

For me immortality a bigger thing than the teraflops. Also I don't think regular humanity would be got rid of but continue in parallel.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#327

Post by VikingCoder »

mdp2021 wrote: post #323
VikingCoder wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cannot come up with evidence that would convince you that you are wrong, then you are not making a scientific claim.

Logic is sufficient, there is no scientific claim involved: it has to respect a definition. It has to /be/ something, not /look like/ something - which in the latter case and in this context would make it the opposite. If it refines its ontology through critical productive analysis that makes it "see details" then it may be an intelligence, while if it outputs mockeries it is /the opposite/ of intelligence. And in fa…

> If it refines its ontology through critical productive analysis that makes it "see details" then it may be an intelligence, while if it outputs mockeries it is /the opposite/ of intelligence.

To help me understand your definition well enough, how could I prove to you whether my Cousin Sarah is intelligent?

I have some experience in this field, and even I have no idea what you mean by "refining your ontology through critical productive analysis."

In practice, what's an example of that? What could someone (an actual person) do, to demonstrate that to you?

The Turing Test is a well-understood example.

How could we formalize your test?

I also don't understand what evidence I could possibly give you that something /is/ something, rather than something /looks like/ something. What's the measurable difference between /looking like/ and /being/?

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#328

Post by stefs »

JohnPrine wrote: post #169
gurkendoktor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention all the smaller-scale risks from weaponized AI. Have we made any progress on preventing this? Or is HN mostly happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops? Even t…

Agreed. People think of the best case scenario without seriously considering everything that can go wrong. If we stay on this path the most likely outcome is human extinction. Full stop

this path will indeed lead to human extinction, but the path is climate change. AI is one of the biggest last hopes for reversing it. from my perspective, if it does kill us all, well, it's most likely still a less painful death.

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#329

Post by igorkraw »

zarzavat wrote: post #308
igorkraw wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this AGI risk stuff always hinges on the idea of us building an AGI, while nobody has any idea of how to get there. I need to finish my PhD first, but writing a proper takedown of the "arguments" bubbling out of the Hype machine is the first thing on my bucket list afterwards, with the TL;DR; being "just because you can imagine it, doesn't mean you can get there"

Google just released a paper that shows a language model beating the average human on >50% of tasks. I’d say we have a pretty good idea of how to get there.

Okay, so how do we go from "better than the average human in 50% of specific benchmarks" to "AGI that might lead to human extinction" then? Keeping in mind the logarithmic improvement observed with the current approaches

Re: DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

#330

Post by joe_the_user »

atleta wrote: post #261
joe_the_user wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should think more about the Human alignment problem. Absolutely this The possibility of a thing being intentionally engineered by some humans to do things considered highly malevolent by other humans seems extremely likely and has actually been common through history. The possibility of a thing just randomly acquiring an intention humans don't like and then doing things humans don't like is pretty hypothetical and…

I wouldn't say the latter is hypothetical, or at least unlikely. We know from experience that complex systems tend to behave in unexpected ways. In other words, the complex systems we build usually end up having surprising failure modes, we don't get them right the first time. It's enough to think about basically any software written by anyone. But it's not just software. I've just watched a video on YT about nuclear…

"In other words, the complex systems we build usually end up having surprising failure modes

But those are "failure modes", not "suddenly become something completely different" modes. And the key thing my parent pointed out is that modern AIs may be very impressive and stepping towards what we'd see as intelligence but they're actually further from the approach of "just give a goal and it will find it" schemes - they need laborious, large scale training to learn goals and goal-sets and even then they're far from reliable.

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