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Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

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Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#71

Post by 307th »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #48

>> In the past, there were some ambitious projects aiming at this goal, though they all failed. So some people like to repeat. Yet, outside of the hand-picked examples in the article (the 5th generation computer project? Blast from the past!) there are a whole bunch of classic AI domains where real progress has been achieved in the last few decades. Here's a few: * Game-playing and adversarial search: from Deep Blue…

I think the sentence in the article is fair. They're right that projects aimed at AGI failed; everything you mention are used for narrow AIs that tackle particular tasks.

Also, regarding search in gameplaying, I would argue the opposite: the trend is that breaking into bigger and more difficult domains has required abandoning search. Tree search is limited to small games like board games or Atari. In more open-ended games we see model-free (i.e. no search) approaches; e.g. AlphaStar and OpenAI Five, the AIs for Starcraft 2 and Dota 2, were both model free. So was VPT (https://openai.com/research/vpt) by OpenAI, which tackled Minecraft. Even in board games, DeepNash (https://www.deepmind.com/blog/mastering-stratego-the-classic...), a 2022 project by DeepMind similar in scale to MuZero/AlphaGo, had to abandon tree search because of the size of the game and the challenges of applying tree search to hidden information domains.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#72

Post by layer8 »

stuckinhell wrote: post #60
amelius wrote: post #55

Better title: "Artificial General Intelligence – We don't know the heck where this is going but here are some thoughts"

I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.

Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#73

Post by mdp2021 »

tpoacher wrote: post #49

AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition". Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze.

> Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a breeze

We have a few, but the difficulty is getting to a model that is portable to higher functions. ("Here is a feedback over the details of a world model ... Now understand that book")

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#74

Post by AnimalMuppet »

suby wrote: post #68
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an AGI is possible at all, it's not going to be something that you control . The issue isn't whether someone trustworthy creates it. The issue is, no matter who creates it, it will decide what it's going to do. Its creator will not have real control. So having it "work for the majority" isn't so much a pipe dream, it's more of a roll of the dice, with completely unknown odds.

It's hard to talk about this and clearly convey all meaning. If you're saying that it will decide because neural nets are black boxes which we don't have a complete understanding of, and we're without a clear way to analyze their behavior, I can see where you're coming from. But these things will not be beyond our influence. They're going to be slaves to the computations encoded in the neural net connections / weight…

Will an AGI have the ability to decide for itself? If so, then how can you make it what you want it to be (with any certainty)? And if not, then how is it "general"?

To me, it's kind of like raising kids. You try to train their neural nets to bias them toward doing what you think is good and right. And that sometimes works. Yes, I think it's fair to think of it as biasing the dice. But it's sure not 100%. They'll still decide which of your values they keep, and which ones they throw away as being stupid. And you can't stop them from doing that.

I guess, to try to respond to your direct point, that if it's an AGI, then it's less deterministically driven by the training data than we might wish.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#75

Post by layer8 »

justanotherjoe wrote: post #63
stuckinhell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.

It is true and it's worth reminding. Science is progressed by interpretation of data. And we have easy access to a behemoth that needs interpreting. AI winter shouldn't come anytime soon.

…assuming we make significant progress in explaining the data. Science means coming up with theories based on observations, and then testing the theory by verifying the further predictions made by those theories by experiment. It remains to be seen how much success there will be in that regard for LLMs.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#76

Post by skepticATX »

danbruc wrote: post #41

Build and train something to the point that it can read books, watch lectures and gain new knowledge by itself. When it has never heard about calculus and you give some calculus books and lectures to it and after that it can solve calculus problems, declare victory.

Right. I think one reason that the definition of AGI is so contentious is that we're not that close to it. All of the current benchmarks are interesting but I don't see how we ever use those to declare that AGI has been reached. And quite frankly, I don't think we'd even care about most of them if we had a truly intelligent system.

For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios, I'd consider it to be AGI. It seems obvious to me that we're not very close to this.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#77

Post by Sharlin »

layer8 wrote: post #72
stuckinhell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds from ivy league universities to help put together an explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me, the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding. Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one knows how the pieces work together.

Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.

Definitely engineering. It’s not entirely wrong to say that the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative AI – it took a corpus of a couple billion images to train a Stable Diffusion model.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#78

Post by ballenf »

mdp2021 wrote: post #70
stanfordkid wrote: post #61

It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI. Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less. Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some random chance on the board game of life human bei…

> goal post ... define it But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want. Just looking at the remarkably intelligent and spectacularly unintelligent should give a definite picture to work on. (When the spectacularly unintelligent is responsible for important resources a sense of urgency can easily be added.) > integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms There you reveal you may not be speaking about…

> But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want.

The bellwether for me personally is waiting for a system that can generate something conceptually novel. Something like the move from the real to the complex number systems. Or the move from Newtonian motion to relativistic understanding. Maybe systems already have such insights but don't have the vocabulary to explain it.

A system that when presented with a problem we don't even know how to tackle, can "invent" the tools/approach needed to solve the problem.

In terms of the Langland problem in math, a system that can define a new landmass there or a new bridge between existing domains.

Is that too high or too low a bar?

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#79

Post by amelius »

Sharlin wrote: post #77
layer8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a “scientific advance” of the past year. While it’s certainly some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.

Definitely engineering. It’s not entirely wrong to say that the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative AI – it took a corpus of a couple billion images to train a Stable Diffusion model.

You may argue that it took a leap of insight to get to transformer models, though.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#80

Post by vajrabum »

ilaksh wrote: post #38
SanderNL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want be too human-centric, but to be completely honest we haven't seen the slightest proof that human intelligence is not something special. I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical sense. While it looks like an evolutionairy fluke that can be approached or even exceeded by other species - either on this or another planet - in the blink of an eye, I think that's actually mor…

There is a limit to compression of human-relevant information which is largely what intelligence is. The main thing I am talking about is speed of output. You can already see huge increases in say old GPT-3.5 versus GPT-3.5-turbo or old GPT-4 to new. We know for a fact that the hardware inference speed can be increased by using faster (currently prohibitively expensive) memory or by packing more onto a chip. There ar…

What do you mean by exchange information with other agents? Can you give a concrete example or two?
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