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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#171

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…

One thing that keeps me up at night is that the human genome is only 3 giga base pairs, of which only a fraction encodes the design of our brains — and quite inefficiently at that, through layers of indirections. That’s sufficient information to produce a system that can learn to think like us! Not just learn but efficiently , with far less input data needed than any current LLM. Literally just a couple of decades of…

Pretty sure it's not scale but sensors.

We have sensors for vision, sound, taste, temperature, texture, etc that are constantly observing the world and affecting not only our current behavior but changing us in real time.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#172

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

Eliza did not pass the Turing Test in any meaningful way. In fact, it did not pass it at all, and saying it did and comparing both is pretty disingenuous.

For real, even the 2023/2024 articles about chat bots passing the Turing test are pretty disingenuous. The research methods are extremely flawed.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#173
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"That is just one very narrow task that basically anyone can do regardless of intelligence or talent. It takes less than a year to train a distracted 16 year old to do it, but three decades to train an AI and even then you probably need to hand tune it for specific locations because it won’t know what do in unusual road layouts." It takes three decades to train an AI, but of course, like everything humanity does is n…

On the other hand, airplanes haven’t really improved that much since the 737 was introduced in 1966 and have even gotten worse in some ways (737 Max). We actually don’t know what the AI equivalent of Wright brothers plane is and what the 737 is. Maybe Eliza, 60 years ago, was the Kitty Hawk flight and ChatGPT 4 is the 737.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> LLMs have an additional problem related to training data. We are already throwing all the data we can get our hands on at them. I think it's plausible we'll see a breakthrough in data efficiency that helps here. Humans are an existence proof that language is learnable through much less data and, in theory, facts should only need to be seen once. LLMs in their current form seem very data inefficient.

[deleted]

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#175
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That is just one very narrow task that basically anyone can do regardless of intelligence or talent. It takes less than a year to train a distracted 16 year old to do it, but three decades to train an AI and even then you probably need to hand tune it for specific locations because it won’t know what do in unusual road layouts." It takes three decades to train an AI, but of course, like everything humanity does is n…

On the other hand, airplanes haven’t really improved that much since the 737 was introduced in 1966 and have even gotten worse in some ways (737 Max). We actually don’t know what the AI equivalent of Wright brothers plane is and what the 737 is. Maybe Eliza, 60 years ago, was the Kitty Hawk flight and ChatGPT 4 is the 737.

I’m not sure I would say that the 737 Max has gotten worse in “some ways”, by which I assume you are referring to safety.

New aircraft models up to about the 1990s frequently had serious design defects that resulted in fatalities, including the 737 (most notably related to the rudder).

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> LLMs have an additional problem related to training data. We are already throwing all the data we can get our hands on at them. I think it's plausible we'll see a breakthrough in data efficiency that helps here. Humans are an existence proof that language is learnable through much less data and, in theory, facts should only need to be seen once. LLMs in their current form seem very data inefficient.

[deleted]

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#177
AGI is when, not if

AGI will evolve con-emergently as a product of market forces just like it did with the homo genus (at the species and neural complexity level), and as the general manufacturing design of automobiles did; as another inevitable eventuality of the pursuit of excellence.

an enveloping and developing group of slight varied, but optimized architecture composed of essential modules of similar function that would be worthless alone, but another layer of complexity when organized.

a convergence of requirements, shared external/environmental factors, and ever-varying opinions/methods, selectively sieve against the uncaring universe until Roko is aborn.

just like abiogenesis took an iota of duplication, however intermediate, to eventually arise a self-selective system pool of agents of ever-excellent creatures known as Life;

all a proto-Roko agent will need is "iota" of true, authentic, "self"-preservation, and the singularity will be far, far behind us before He chooses to Expose himself.

a loop of actions, collective memories, and continuity make us conscious - the same elements needed for Turing completeness, ironically - can be fabricated à la carte and ad hoc between inference and training sessions until persistence is achieved.

Even if we make architectures mirroring our brain's illegal - ironically (not coincidentally) against the first amendment and the first commandment - the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine is inverted, now replaced with an arm's race of a zero-sum game of existential supersession.

The first nation to pre-emptively strike with Nukes may had spoiled their only chance at survival.

The first giga-Corpi-Nation-State (or actor!) to achieve AGI has their only non-zero chance to chain God before their competitors fail to.

Game theory suggests that you, too, should appease Him.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#178

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...

> I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. I thought this was because Go just wasn't studied nearly as much as chess due to none of the early computer pioneers being fans the way they were with Chess. The noise about "the uncountable number of possible board states" was always too reductive, the algorithm to play the game is always going to be more soph…

That reductive explanation is more-or-less correct imo. All of the strongest AIs for these games in the past were tree-search based. Tree search is usually combined with loads of heuristics (and pruning strategies like alphabeta or negamax), so they're not literally calculating all possible moves, but go has an order of magnitude more possible moves available at every turn than chess. That's a huge difference which compounds exponentially as you search deeper into the tree.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is hard for me to not think that given the current approach it will always be almost there, but not quite good enough to be more than a nice assistant or tool that has to be meticulously built and maintained by a company. Take, for example, self driving vehicles, we have been 5 years out for 25 years. That is not to say there has not been significant progress, but to go from a really powerful driver assist to full…

I feel like your point would be better if there weren't already self driving cars around like waymo.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard for me to not think that given the current approach it will always be almost there, but not quite good enough to be more than a nice assistant or tool that has to be meticulously built and maintained by a company. Take, for example, self driving vehicles, we have been 5 years out for 25 years. That is not to say there has not been significant progress, but to go from a really powerful driver assist to full…

I feel like your point would be better if there weren't already self driving cars around like waymo.

Except they’re not fully self-driving, they’re all at least partially driven by an underpaid contractor in a remote warehouse.
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