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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#121
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It comes with all the blindness and limitations of materialist thinking

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#122

I'm in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then. AGI is absolutely possible with current technology - even if it's only capable of running for a single user per-server-farm. ASI on the other hand... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Of course not. You'd have no first person experience of any of the physical experiences that arise from being an embodied agent. Until those (multitude of) lessons can be learned by LLMs, they will remain mere echos of what it is to be human, much less superhuman.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we already knew this though. Because the Turing test was passed by Eliza in the 1960's. PARRY was even better and not even a decade later. For some reason people still talk about Chess performance as if Deep Blue didn't demonstrate this. Hell, here's even Feynman talking about many of the same things we're discussing today, but this was in the 80's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

Ten years ago I was explaining to halls of appalled academic administrators that AI would be replacing them before a robot succeeds in sorting out their socks.

The field of AI needs to be constantly retaught the lesson that being able to replace important and powerful people doesn't mean your AI is actually intelligent. It means that important and powerful people were doing bullshit jobs.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#124
Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc.

The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. This is a social sciences paper dressed up with numbers. Honestly - Computer Science has given us more clues about how the human mind might work than cognitive science ever did.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#125
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…

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck it's probably worth dissecting its internal organs to see if it might be related to a duck.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we already knew this though. Because the Turing test was passed by Eliza in the 1960's. PARRY was even better and not even a decade later. For some reason people still talk about Chess performance as if Deep Blue didn't demonstrate this. Hell, here's even Feynman talking about many of the same things we're discussing today, but this was in the 80's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

ELIZA passed the Turing test in the same way a spooky halloween decoration can convince people that ghosts are real.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#128

Whatever you think about AGI, this is a dumb paper. So many words and references to say - what. If you can't articulate your point in a few sentences you probably don't have a point. There are all kinds of assumptions being made in the study about how AI systems work, about what people "mean" then they talk about AGI etc. The article starts out talking about white supremacy and replacing women. This isn't a proof. Th…

+1 no notes.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but LLMs do solve problems that people thought were extremely difficult to solve ten years ago Agreed. I would have laughed you out of the room 5 years ago if you told me AI's would be writing code or carrying on coherent discussions on pretty complex topics in 2024. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are off after the collective jaw drop that the entire software engineering industry did when we saw GPT4 released. W…

> It turns out that the larger these models get, the more unexpected emergent capabilities they have, so I'm mostly in the camp of thinking AGI is just a matter of time and resources. AI research has a long history of people saying this. Whenever there is a new fundamental improvement, it looks like you can just keep getting better results by throwing more resources at it. However, eventually we end up reaching a poi…

Currently we are throwing everything at LLMs and hope good things stick. At one point we might use AI to select best training data from what's available to best train the next AI.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#130

AGI is already here for most definitions of general.

Not even close. LLMs can spew word salad. Images can be classified or dreamt. Physical movements can be iterated and refined. Speech can be processed as text. These are components of intelligence but these are all things that most animals can do, apart from the language.

Intelligence generally requires something more. Intelligence needs to be factual, curious, and self-improving. If you told me ChatGPT rewrote itself, or suggested new hardware to improve efficiency, that’s intelligence. You’ll know we have AGI when the algorithm is the one asking the questions about physics, mathematics, finding knowledge gaps, and developing original hypothesis and experiments. Not even close.

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