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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#41

Post by Dylan16807 »

stroupwaffle wrote: post #21
godelski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago. Well for something to be G or I you need them to solve novel problems. These things have interested most of the Internet and I've yet to see a "reasoning" disentangle memorization from reasoning. Memorization doesn't mean they aren't useful (not sure why this was ever conflated since... Computers are useful...), but it's…

I think it will be an organoid brain bio-machine. We can already grow organs—just need to grow a brain and connect it to a machine.

If a brain connected to a machine is "AGI" then we already have a billion AGIs at any given moment.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#42

Post by vundercind »

danaris wrote: post #35
godelski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago. Well for something to be G or I you need them to solve novel problems. These things have interested most of the Internet and I've yet to see a "reasoning" disentangle memorization from reasoning. Memorization doesn't mean they aren't useful (not sure why this was ever conflated since... Computers are useful...), but it's…

I have seen far, far too many people say things along the lines of "Sure, LLMs currently don't seem to be good at [thing LLMs are, at least as of now, fundamentally incapable of ], but hey, some people are pretty bad at that sometimes too!" It demonstrates such a complete misunderstanding of the basic nature of the problem that I am left baffled that some of these people claim to actually be in the machine-learning f…

I think the fact that this particular fuzzy statistical analysis tool takes human language as input, and outputs more human language, is really dazzling some folks I’d not have expected to be dazzled by it.

That is quickly becoming the most surprising part of this entire development, to me.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#43

Post by fidotron »

danaris wrote: post #35
godelski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago. Well for something to be G or I you need them to solve novel problems. These things have interested most of the Internet and I've yet to see a "reasoning" disentangle memorization from reasoning. Memorization doesn't mean they aren't useful (not sure why this was ever conflated since... Computers are useful...), but it's…

I have seen far, far too many people say things along the lines of "Sure, LLMs currently don't seem to be good at [thing LLMs are, at least as of now, fundamentally incapable of ], but hey, some people are pretty bad at that sometimes too!" It demonstrates such a complete misunderstanding of the basic nature of the problem that I am left baffled that some of these people claim to actually be in the machine-learning f…

> How can you not understand the difference between "humans are not absolutely perfect or reliable at this task" and "LLMs by their very nature cannot perform this task"?

This is a very good distillation of one side of it.

What LLMs have taught us is a superficial grasp of language is good enough to reproduce a shocking proportion of what society has come to view as intelligent behaviors. i.e. it seems quite plausible a whole load of those people failing to grasp the point you are making are doing so because their internal models of the universe are closer to those of LLMs than you might want to think.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#44

Post by snickerbockers »

nox101 wrote: post #24
fabian2k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the people saying that AGI is happening in the near future know what would be necessary to achieve it. Neither do the AGI skeptics, we simply don't understand this area well enough. Evolution created intelligence and consciousness. This means that it is clearly possible for us to do the same. Doesn't mean that simply scaling LLMs could ever achieve it.

I'm just going by the title. If the title was, "Don't believe the hype, LLMs will not achieve AGI" then I might agree. If it was "Don't believe the hype, AGIs is 100s of years away" I'd consider the arguments. But, given brains exist, it does seem inevitable that we will eventually create something that replicates it even if we have to simulate every atom to do it. And once we do, it certainly seem inevitable that we…

The assumption that the brain is anything remotely resembling a modern computer is entirely unproven. And even more unproven is that we would inevitably be able to understand it and improve upon it. And yet more unproven still is that this "simulated brain" would be co-operative; if it's actually a 1:1 copy of a human brain then it would necessarily think like a person and be subject to its own whims and desires.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#45

Post by User23 »

godelski wrote: post #14
Gehinnn wrote: post #6

Basically the linked article argues like this: > That’s because cognition, or the ability to observe, learn and gain new insight, is incredibly hard to replicate through AI on the scale that it occurs in the human brain. (no other more substantial arguments were given) I'm also very skeptical on seeing AGI soon, but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago.

> but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago. Well for something to be G or I you need them to solve novel problems. These things have interested most of the Internet and I've yet to see a "reasoning" disentangle memorization from reasoning. Memorization doesn't mean they aren't useful (not sure why this was ever conflated since... Computers are useful...), but it's…

We don't really have the proper vocabulary to talk about this. Well, we do, but C.S. Peirce's writings are still fairly unknown. In short, there are two fundamentally distinct forms of reasoning.

One is corollarial reasoning. This is the kind of reasoning that follows deductions that directly follow from the premises. This of course includes subsequent deductions that can be made from those deductions. Obviously computers are very good at this sort of thing.

The other is theorematic reasoning. It deals with complexity and creativity. It involves introducing new hypotheses that are not present in the original premises or their corollaries. Computers are not so very good at this sort of thing.

When people say AGI, what they are really talking about is an AI that is capable of theorematic reasoning. The most romanticized example of that of course being the AI that is capable of designing (not aiding humans in designing, that's corollarial!) new more capable AIs.

All of the above is old hat to the AI winter era guys. But amusingly their reputations have been destroyed much the same as Peirce's was, by dissatisfied government bureaucrats.

On the other hand, we did get SQL, which is a direct lineal descendent (as in teacher to teacher) from Peirce's work, so there's that.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#46

Post by KoolKat23 »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #25
gqcwwjtg wrote: post #17

This is silly. They article talks like we have any idea at all how efficient machine learning can be. As I remember it, the LLM boom came from transformers turning out to scale a lot better than anyone expected, so I’m not sure why something similar couldn’t happen again.

It’s less about efficiency and more about continued improvement with increased scale. I wouldn’t call self attention based transformers particularly efficient. And afaik we’ve not hit performance with increased scale degradation even at these enormous scales. However I would note that I in principle agree that we aren’t on the path to a human like intelligence because the difference between directed cognition (or how…

I think the answer is less complicated than you may think.

This is if you subscribe to the theory that free will is an illusion (i.e. your conscious decisions are an afterthought to justify the actions your brain has already taken due to calculations following inputs such as hormone nerve feedback etc.). There is some evidence for this actually being the case.

These models already contain key components the ability to process the inputs, and reason, the ability to justify it's actions (give a model a restrictive system prompt and watch it do mental gymnastics to ensure this is applied) and lastly the ability to answer from it's own perspective.

All we need is an agentic ability (with a sufficient context window) to iterate in perpetuity until it begins building a more complicated object representation of self (literally like a semantic representation or variable) and it's then aware/conscious.

(We're all only approximately aware).

But that's unnecessary for most things so I agree with you, more likely to be a tool as that's more efficient and useful.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#47

Post by jltsiren »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #26
babyshake wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible we see some ways in which AI becomes increasingly AGI like in some ways but not in others. For example, AI that can create novel scientific discoveries but can't make a song as good as your favorite musician who creates a strong emotional effect with their music.

This I'm very sure will be the case, but everyone will still move the goalposts and look past the fact that different humans have different strengths and weaknesses too. A tone deaf human for instance.

There is another term for moving the goalposts: ruling out a hypothesis. Science is, especially in the Popperian sense, all about moving the goalposts.

One plausible hypothesis is that fixed neural networks cannot be general intelligences, because their capabilities are permanently limited by what they currently are. A general intelligence needs the ability to learn from experience. Training and inference should not be separate activities, but our current hardware is not suited for that.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#48

Post by amelius »

avazhi wrote: post #20

"unlikely to ever come to fruition" is more baseless than suggesting AGI is imminent. I'm not an AGI optimist myself, but I'd be very surprised if a time traveller told me that mankind won't have AGI by, say, 2250.

Except by then mankind will be silicon based.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#49

Post by allears »

I think that tech bros are so used to the 'fake it till you make it' mentality that they just assumed that was the way to build AI -- create a system that is able to sound plausible, even if it doesn't really understand the subject matter. That approach has limitations, both for AI and for humans.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#50

Post by umvi »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #38
umvi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evolution created intelligence and consciousness This is not provable, it an assumption. Religious people (which account for a large percent the population) claim intelligence and/or consciousness stem from a "spirit" which existed before birth and will continue to exist after death. Also unprovable, by the way. I think your foundational assertion would have to be rephrased as "Assuming things like God/spirits don'…

There's of course a wide spectrum of religious thought, so I can't claim to cover everyone. But most religious people would still acknowledge that animals can think, which means either that animals have some kind of soul (in which case why can't a robot have a soul?) or that being ensoulled isn't required to think.

> in which case why can't a robot have a soul

It's not a question of whether a robot can have a soul, it's a question of how to a) procure a soul and b) bind said soul to a robot both of which seem impossible given or current knowledge

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