Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

cis.temple.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 201 posts

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#131

Post by mdp2021 »

cubefox wrote: post #115
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…

There seems to be only one broad paradigm which achieved basically all the AI big impact we see today: Deep learning. That is, machine learning with multi-layer neural networks with backpropagation and ReLU activation functions. Everything else seems to be mostly irrelevant or very small scale.

> seems to be mostly irrelevant

From a perspective that could be too local in time. But:

> ReLU activation functions

Why did you pick ReLU, of all? The sigmoid makes sense because of the aesthetic (with reference to the derivative), but ReLU in that perspective is an information cutoff. And in the perspective of the goal, I am not aware of a theory that defends it as "the activation function that makes sense" (beyond effectiveness). Are you saying that working applications overwhelmingly use ReLU? If so, which ones?

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#133

Post by mdp2021 »

cubefox wrote: post #122
mdp2021 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considered Artificial Intelligence anymore That is just the confusion between AI and AGI - which may seem to be peaking for some reason (in the past few days it seemed like a zombie apocalypse). The so-called "AI effect" is said by some to originate from some "Ah but this is not intelligent" - but there where we wanted to solve a problem of replacing intelligent action, not of implementing it. Be contented with the…

AGI us not a very useful term, because people use it often synonymous with "human level or higher ability". But the opposite of "general AI" is not "less intelligent than a human" but "narrow AI". The narrow/general distinction is orthogonal to the low/high ability ("intelligence") distinction. All animals are very general, as their domain of operation is the real world, not some narrow modality like strings of text…

> people use it

Do you volunteer to inform them that we use it as "general" as opposed to "narrow"? (I mean, it is even in the very name of 'AGI', literal...)

For the rest: yes, of course. AGI: we implement intelligence itself. How much, that is part of the challenge. I wrote nearby (in other terms) that the challenge is to find a procedure for Intelligence that will actually scale.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#134

Post by nobody9999 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #15
weego wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a concern for any current living generations, so any answers are moot because the landscape of the entire friction between corporations, governments and the people will likely have shifted dramatically to where our opinions today have no relevance to their issues.

> It's not a concern for any current living generations How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low.

>How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in our lifetimes seems excessively low.

Not GP, but how much you got?

AGI (or hard AI, or whatever you want to call it) strongly implies not just reasoning and interaction with the environment, but self awareness. Something which is conveniently ignored by folks who claim that AGI is just around the corner, and welcome their new 'grey goo' overlords.

As Heinlein (it's fiction of course, but the principle that self awareness is necessary for AGI -- not (just) numbers of neurons/data points -- holds IMHO) put it[0]:

"Am not going to argue whether a machine can 'really' be alive, 'really' be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum. ('Soul?' Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)"

As we've seen[1], a variety of meat machines (i.e., animals like us) have varying levels of self awareness. Without that trait, AGI won't be achievable.

Without the ability to recognize and incorporate the concept that one is an entity with existence separate from the rest of the world, there is no real awareness or consciousness.

I'd even go so far to posit that until human children are able to understand object permanence and that their mental states aren't globally available to everyone, they don't meet the standard of "self-awareness."

That's a hard problem, and while we have some conceptual ideas about how that might arise, we have no mechanism or even a foundation for inculcating such a trait into the algorithms folks call "AI".

Until that problem is solved, there will be no AGI. Full stop. And I find it unlikely in the extreme that we will gain the scientific/engineering know how to make that happen in our lifetimes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

Edit: Finished my thought.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#135

Post by dron57 »

cubefox wrote: post #122
mdp2021 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considered Artificial Intelligence anymore That is just the confusion between AI and AGI - which may seem to be peaking for some reason (in the past few days it seemed like a zombie apocalypse). The so-called "AI effect" is said by some to originate from some "Ah but this is not intelligent" - but there where we wanted to solve a problem of replacing intelligent action, not of implementing it. Be contented with the…

AGI us not a very useful term, because people use it often synonymous with "human level or higher ability". But the opposite of "general AI" is not "less intelligent than a human" but "narrow AI". The narrow/general distinction is orthogonal to the low/high ability ("intelligence") distinction. All animals are very general, as their domain of operation is the real world, not some narrow modality like strings of text…

That's a great way of looking at it in theory. But in practice how would we even know if we're looking at a cat-level AGI? For a human level AGI it's obvious, we would question and evaluate it.

Is there a reasonable way of distinguishing narrow-AI ChatGPT from a hypothetical cat-level AGI? We can't even measure the intelligence level of real world cats.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#136

Post by [deleted] »

307th wrote: post #71
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…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#137

Post by nonameiguess »

Joeri wrote: post #103

I find it telling that the section on ethics has nothing on the rights of AGI. If we create true AGI it will likely be a digital person, and digital people should have rights. All talk of ethics seems to be focused on alignment of AI rules to human needs, not alignment of human rules to AI needs. This makes me think the first true AGI systems will end up as digital slaves. And yes, I know the very idea of AI rights o…

It doesn't matter if it's a "person" or not. Rights imply you have some desire to not be harmed and it's possible to harm you. How do you harm software? Shutting down whatever servers it happens to currently be running on won't do shit. Software is just data and code. As long as a processor and runtime environment still exists somewhere that can interpret and execute it, it isn't dead. It's only dormant. The basic way multiprocessing works, you're already having state saved off and the process shut down millions of times per second, then restored and restarted. Extending that gap from a millionth of a second to six centuries makes no material difference to the "experience" of the software, if it ever becomes capable of experiencing, any more than sleeping for 10 hours harms a human more than sleeping for 10 minutes.

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#138

Post by chongli »

famouswaffles wrote: post #128
chongli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses for those in the Old Dart)? Currently GPT-4 is terrible at it! Sure, you could trivially program a game-specific AI to be capable of winning or forcing a draw every time. The trick is to have a general AI which has not seen the game before (in its training set) be able to pick up and learn the game after a couple of tries. This is a task any 5 year old can easily do!

>Currently GPT-4 is terrible at it! GPT-4 plays tic tac toe and even chess just fine. https://pastebin.com/BSUGtxfb https://pastebin.com/83iZjHuc https://twitter.com/kenshinsamurai9/status/16625105325852917...

I’m talking about playing the game well. It can play the game but it’s bad at it. Tic-tac-toe is an excellent example game because even small children can figure out an optimal strategy to win or draw every time.

https://poe.com/s/KxQMDTGMzBITGIUWDurz

Re: Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction

#139

Post by worrycue »

ben_w wrote: post #102
worrycue wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of "glitch tokens"? To my knowledge, all these are hand patched. There are probably more lurking somewhere in its data. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054241 has quite a few examples of GPT-4 being broken.

Plenty of humans glitch out on random words (and concepts) we just can't get right. Famously the way R/L sound the same to many asians (and equivalently but less famously the way that "four" and "stone" and "lion" when translated into Chinese sound almost indistinguishable to native English speakers). But there's also plenty of people who act like they think "Democrat" is a synonym for "Communist", or that "Wicca" an…

> Plenty of humans glitch out on random words (and concepts) we just can't get right.

We don't lose our marbles the way GPT does when it encounters those words. It's like it read the Necronomicon or something and gone mad.

Post reply on HN