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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#101

Post by fragmede »

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…

> "LLMs by their very nature cannot perform this task"

The issue is that it's not LLMs that can't perform a given task, but that computers already can. Counting the number of Rs in strawberry or comparing 9.11 to 9.7 is trivial for a regular computer program, but hard for an LLM due to the tokenization process. Where LLMs are a pile of matrixes and some math and some look up tables, it's easy to see that as the essential nature of LLMs, which is to say theres no thinking or reasoning happening because it's just a pile of math happening and it's just glorified auto-complete. Artificial things look a lot like the thing they resemble, but they also are artificial, and as such, are markedly different from the thing they resemble. is the very nature of an LLMs being a pile of math mean that it can not perform said task if given more math and more compute and more data? given enough compute, can we change that nature?

I make no prognostication as to whether or not AGI will come from transformers, and this is getting very philosophical, but I see it as irrelevant because I don't believe that AGI is the right measure.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#102

Post by stroupwaffle »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #41
stroupwaffle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I mean to say, not exactly human brains. Consider an extremely large brain modified to add/remove sections to increase its capabilities.

They already model neural networks on the human brain, even though they currently use orders of magnitude more energy.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#103

Post by stroupwaffle »

godelski wrote: post #39
stroupwaffle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe that'll be the first way, but there's nothing special about biology. Remember, we don't have a rigorous definition of things like life, intelligence, and consciousness. We are narrowing it down and making progress, but we aren't there (some people confuse this with a "moving goalpost" but of course "it moves", because when we get closer we have better resolution as to what we're trying to figure out. It'd be a…

The something special about biology is it uses much less energy than a network of power-hungry graphics cards!

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#104

Post by stroupwaffle »

Moosdijk wrote: post #22
stroupwaffle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The keyword being “just”.

You “just” need a more vivid imagination if that’s as far as your comment stretches.

I mean seriously, people on here. I’m just spitballing ideas not intended to write some kind of dissertation on brain-machine interaction.

That’s Elon musks department.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#105

Post by Yizahi »

fidotron wrote: post #43
danaris wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plausibl…

Scary thought

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#106

Post by avazhi »

oska wrote: post #99
avazhi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that ironic? Time travel doesn’t exist and - as far as we understand physics currently - isn’t possible. I don’t think any serious man would suggest that AGI is impossible; the debate really centres around the time horizon for AGI and what it will look like (that is, how will we know when we’re finally there). In this care it was merely a rhetorical device.

> I don’t think any serious man would suggest that AGI is impossible Plenty of ppl would suggest that AGI is impossible, and furthermore, that taking the idea seriously (outside fiction) is laughable. To do so is a function of what I call 'science fiction brain', which is why I found it ironic that you'd used another device from science fiction to opine about its inevitability.

Happy for you to cite some thinkers who are on record as saying it’s impossible.

I’ll wait.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#107

Post by avazhi »

oska wrote: post #99
avazhi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that ironic? Time travel doesn’t exist and - as far as we understand physics currently - isn’t possible. I don’t think any serious man would suggest that AGI is impossible; the debate really centres around the time horizon for AGI and what it will look like (that is, how will we know when we’re finally there). In this care it was merely a rhetorical device.

> I don’t think any serious man would suggest that AGI is impossible Plenty of ppl would suggest that AGI is impossible, and furthermore, that taking the idea seriously (outside fiction) is laughable. To do so is a function of what I call 'science fiction brain', which is why I found it ironic that you'd used another device from science fiction to opine about its inevitability.

Also in a less snarky vein:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/14scx6y/to_all...

I’m not a singularity truther and personally I think we are more likely to be centuries rather than decades away from AGI, but I quite literally know of nobody who thinks it’s impossible in the same way that, say, time travel is impossible. Even hardcore sceptics just say we are going down the wrong rabbit hole with neural nets, or that we don’t have the compute to deal with the number calculations we’d need to simulate proper intelligence - none of them claim AGI is impossible as a matter of principle. Those mentioned are tractable problems.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#108

Post by r721 »

snickerbockers wrote: post #44
nox101 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The assumption that the brain is anything remotely resembling a modern computer is entirely unproven.

Related discussion (from 2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#109

Post by anon84873628 »

gls2ro wrote: post #88
nox101 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 main problem I see here is similar with the main problem in science: Can we being inside our brain fully understand our own brain? Similar with can we being inside our Universe fully understand it?

How is that "the main problem in science"?

We can study brains just as closely as we can study anything else on earth.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#110

Post by anon84873628 »

oska wrote: post #92
Gehinnn wrote: post #12

I skimmed through the paper and couldn't make much sense of it. In particular, I don't understand how their results don't imply that human-level intelligence can't exist. After all, earth could be understood as solar powered super computer, that took a couple of million years to produce humanity.

> After all, earth could be understood as solar powered super computer, that took a couple of million years to produce humanity. This is similar to a line I've seen Elon Musk trot out on a few occassions. It's a product of a materialistic philosophy (that the universe is only matter).

Yes, and?
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