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The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

metaculus.com

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Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#41

Post by [deleted] »

sdwr wrote: post #17
davidmanheim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere do they define "AGI" Ummm, maybe you should have looked? At the top of the very first prediction, here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can…

I think we're reaching a point where the Turing test is no longer useful. If you get into the nitty-gritty of it (instead of just handwaving "computer should act like person"), it's about roleplaying a fake identity. Which is a specific skill, not a general test of competence.

[deleted]

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#42

Post by yunohn »

tersh wrote: post #40
yunohn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can signup and vote, so I assume it tends towards the majority option tbh. Seems like obviously noisy data.

The Metaculus prediction weights predictors by how accurate they've been.

Yes, but if voters are voting the majority (and probable) decision, that just continues the trend of predicting obvious outcomes.

It’s not something to do with understanding domain knowledge and voting based on scientific research.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#43

Post by sublinear »

ilaksh wrote: post #4

Nowhere do they define "AGI". I guarantee that is a big reason why the predictions have so much variance. For many people, what GPT-4 does qualified as AGI -- up until GPT-4 came out and then everyone seemed to decide that AGI meant ASI. I am guessing for many people answering this poll it means "a full emulation of a person". Or maybe it had to be "alive". The thing that irritates me so much is that there is this la…

> you will be able to do most human tasks with it. You don't need to invent a lot of other stuff to be general purpose.

I think this is where most people strongly disagree with you. A probabilistic language model is not good enough to do anything requiring context particularly well.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#44

Post by zgluck »

saulmunn wrote: post #30
zgluck wrote: post #26

"Forecaster" here means any rando who signs up to their service and answers a question. Sometimes a large polling number does not equal a more accurate answer.

this isn't quite true -- on metaculus, accounts that have a history of forecasting things well are weighted more heavily

SISO (Shit In, Shit Out) still applies. You guys need a high quality user base with domain knowledge, at least as a seed. There is no proof that you have that at the moment.

Edit:

Okay, that track record page avionical posted in a separate comment is actually a bit convincing now that I dig deeper into it. :-)

I suppose that for e.g. AI/AGI a weakness could be that the estimates for most of the users have been short term (a few years at most) but the AGI estimates are 8-17 years away. Those estimates are a lot harder to do make and hence surely a lot less accurate.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#45

Post by avionical »

usaar333 wrote: post #39
Imnimo wrote: post #24

Is there any already resolved question in which metaculus forecasters made a surprisingly accurate prediction about an AI advance?

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/ Only 13 resolved binary questions where you had longer prediction horizons (1+ year), the accuracy is zilch in AI category - Brier score of 0.25 which is akin to just guessing out 50% for all questions. Generally overconfident. (Other categories much better - Brier of 0.14 1 year out)

There are several AI categories on the track record page; make sure you're not just selecting the one or you'll miss a lot. There's a careful analysis of the overall track record on AI questions here: https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/16708/exploring-metaculu...

The short version is that the Brier score is much better than .25 for AI questions, and the weighted Metaculus Prediction is more accurate still.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#46

Post by letmevoteplease »

nologic01 wrote: post #33

Its depressing to go over all this ultra-shallow chit-chat that has short-circuited any intelligent discussion about the role and trajectory of information technology (let alone any more serious problem or opportunity of the current times). Talking about AI (and AGI) as if its some xenomorph lurking somewhere in silicon, waiting for its inevitable escape from its human prison. AI will not bootstrap itself with some e…

"We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning.

...

The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds, such as simple ways to think about space, objects, multiple agents, or symmetries. All these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically-complex, outside world. They are not what should be built in, as their complexity is endless; instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essential to these methods is that they can find good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us. We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered."

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#47

Post by dbspin »

famouswaffles wrote: post #36
jiggywiggy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatgpt 4 is amazing. Still cant comprehend they build this. However if you work with it a lot you realize it doesn't understand reality, it predicts language. It reminds me of YouTube videos of chess when human start to figure out chess bots and the tricks they use to draw out time. Understanding language is super impressive, but a far cry from general intelligence. Maybe from here open ai can build further. But I h…

This is the problem here. A Claim is made. "GPT isn't general" or "GPT isn't Intelligent" or whatever but a testable definition is not made. That is, what is generality to you and what bar need be passed ? Or What Intelligence is and what competence level need be surpassed ? Without clearly stating those things, Intelligence may well be anything or any goal and your posts could shift to anywhere. I'm just going to te…

> Any testable definition of AGI that GPT-4 fails would also be failed by a significant chunk of the human population.

GPT cannot function in any environment on its own. Except in response to a direct instruction it cannot plan, it cannot take action, it cannot learn, it cannot adjust to changing circumstance. It cannot acquire or process energy, it has no intentionality, it has no purpose beyond generating new text. It's not intelligent in any sense, let alone generally. It's an incredibly capable tool.

Here's a testable definition of AGI - any combination of software and hardware that can function independently of human supervision and maintenance, in response to circumstance that have not been preprogrammed.

That's it. Zero trial learning and function. All adult organisms can do it, no AI can. Artificial general intelligence that's actually useful would need a bunch of additional functionality of course, there I'll agree with you.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#48

Post by cwkoss »

sublinear wrote: post #43
ilaksh wrote: post #4

Nowhere do they define "AGI". I guarantee that is a big reason why the predictions have so much variance. For many people, what GPT-4 does qualified as AGI -- up until GPT-4 came out and then everyone seemed to decide that AGI meant ASI. I am guessing for many people answering this poll it means "a full emulation of a person". Or maybe it had to be "alive". The thing that irritates me so much is that there is this la…

> you will be able to do most human tasks with it. You don't need to invent a lot of other stuff to be general purpose. I think this is where most people strongly disagree with you. A probabilistic language model is not good enough to do anything requiring context particularly well.

Agentic uses of GPT can solve the context problem by breaking problems into steps and building prompts to solve those steps.

Can't do everything, but GPT+APIs can do a lot.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#49

Post by dbspin »

sdwr wrote: post #17
davidmanheim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere do they define "AGI" Ummm, maybe you should have looked? At the top of the very first prediction, here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can…

I think we're reaching a point where the Turing test is no longer useful. If you get into the nitty-gritty of it (instead of just handwaving "computer should act like person"), it's about roleplaying a fake identity. Which is a specific skill, not a general test of competence.

Thank you. It was arguably never useful beyond an intuition pump. It's a test of credulity, of susceptibility to pareidolia, not reasoning ability.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#50

Post by avionical »

zgluck wrote: post #44
saulmunn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this isn't quite true -- on metaculus, accounts that have a history of forecasting things well are weighted more heavily

SISO (Shit In, Shit Out) still applies. You guys need a high quality user base with domain knowledge, at least as a seed. There is no proof that you have that at the moment. Edit: Okay, that track record page avionical posted in a separate comment is actually a bit convincing now that I dig deeper into it. :-) I suppose that for e.g. AI/AGI a weakness could be that the estimates for most of the users have been short…

What would be good evidence of a high-quality user base with the relevant skills? A transparent, well-calibrated track record?
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