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AGI is far from inevitable

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Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#221

Post by oska »

smokedetector1 wrote: post #202
oska wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes with all the blindness and limitations of materialist thinking

For some reason materialism is so popular among tech people that it's almost considered foolish/primitive/superstitious to think any other way. Why is that? Is it the fact that programming is a god-like experience that gives one the illusion the mind is as comprehensible as the complex program I wrote in Java? Or is it a shared personality trait of people that get into tech, that they are disconnected from an experie…

Good questions

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#222

Post by dekhn »

Veedrac wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the press release that the story on HN currently links to, or the paper that press release is about? The paper (I'm not vouching for it; I just skimmed it) appears to reduce AGI to a theoretical computational model, and then supplies a proof that it's not solvable in polynomial time.

That paper is unserious. It is filled with unjustified assertions, adjectives and emotional appeals, M$-isms like ‘BigTech’, and basic misunderstandings of mathematical theory clearly being sold to a lay audience.

Yes, I place it roughly in the "Stochastic Parrots" cluster of articles.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#223

Post by joaogui1 »

jjk166 wrote: post #193

> ‘There will never be enough computing power to create AGI using machine learning that can do the same, because we’d run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close,’ I would say the counter-example that proves this statement false is in the author's skull, but perhaps that's overly presumptuous.

Are you implying that our brain learns through Machine Learning?

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#224

Post by hmcq6 »

somedude895 wrote: post #205
falcor84 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were exaggerating, but wow, they really did. > Among the more troublesome meanings of ‘AI’, perhaps, is as the ideology that it is desirable to replace humans (or, specifically women) by artificial systems (Erscoi et al., 2023) and, generally, ‘AI’ as a way to advance capitalist, kyriarchal, authoritarian and/or white supremacist goals (Birhane & Guest, 2021; Crawford, 2021; Erscoi et al., 2023; Gebru &…

> Kyriarchy I've honestly stopped looking up these modern terms when I come across them because lately any that I've looked up were made up to serve a political or social agenda (always the same one), and reading them always turns out to be a waste of time that has me roll my eyes.

I rolled my eyes when I first saw it but I know thats what people want so I looked into it.

> For example, in a context where gender is the primary privileged position (e.g. patriarchy, matriarchy), gender becomes the nodal point through which sexuality, race, and class are experienced. In a context where class is the primary privileged position (i.e. classism), gender and race are experienced through class dynamics.

It actually makes a lot of sense, I just don't know that we need a unique word for this phenomenon.

It's just saying that me as an Irish Catholic doesn't have to fear Anti-Catholic discrimination when surrounded by other Catholics, I'm more likely to face class discrimination or sexism or some other in-group/out-group based hierarchy in that particular situation than I am to face Anti-Catholic discrimination.

Edit: A better example is that you're more likely to face Patriarchal discrimination in say the gym where having XY chromosomes can actually effect the ceiling on your ability and you're more likely to face Anti-LGBT discrimination while you're visiting the Vatican.

Basically, the venue and the composition of participants in an activity or event determine which hierarchical structure will be more likely to present itself.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#225

Post by hmcq6 »

babyshake wrote: post #7
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.

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.

Ironic cuz it's actually exactly the opposite. In the same way 1,000,000 monkeys on typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare AI is plenty capable of creating "art".

It is however currently completely unable to "think". It can't make a novel scientific discovery because it can't even add 2 + 2. It can give you the most common answer to "what is 2 + 2" but it's not actually pulling up the calculator app and doing the computation, it's just giving the most probabilistic answer.

And even if it could pull up a predefined list of apps to double check it's work, that still isn't AGI.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#226

Post by hmcq6 »

staunton wrote: post #11
ngruhn wrote: post #8

> There will never be enough computing power to create AGI using machine learning that can do the same [as the human brain], because we’d run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close I don’t understand how people can so confidently make claims like this. We might underestimate how difficult AGI is, but come on?!

For some people, "never" means something like "I wouldn't know how, so surely not by next year, and probably not even in ten".

For other people "never" means "I know exactly how to do this but it will take longer than the heat death of the universe"

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#227

Post by perilunar »

oco101 wrote: post #165
scotty79 wrote: post #129

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…

> Before the Wright brothers, it was believed that powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight was impossible.

Not by the many people around the world working on the problem, and their supporters.

Also, “powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight” is exactly was birds, bats, and many insects do — it clearly wasn’t impossible. You need to add a couple more adjectives to qualify what the Wright’s achieved.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#228

Post by perilunar »

JackSlateur wrote: post #146
ramesh31 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can't simulate the brain of an ant or a mouse We can't build a functional ornithopter, yet our aircraft fly like no bird ever possibly could. You don't need the same processes to achieve the same result. Biological brains may not even be the best solution for intelligence; they are just a clunky approximation toward it that natural evolution has reached. See: all of human technology as an analogy.

Funny but actually nice methaphor, because our aircrafts works by eating loads of gas, while birds eat leaves

And the ‘gas’ comes from dead trees.

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#229

Post by perilunar »

ramesh31 wrote: post #119
jokoon wrote: post #116

Can't simulate the brain of an ant or a mouse. Really don't expect ai to reach anything interesting. If science doesn't understand intelligence, it means it cannot be made artificially.

>Can't simulate the brain of an ant or a mouse We can't build a functional ornithopter, yet our aircraft fly like no bird ever possibly could. You don't need the same processes to achieve the same result. Biological brains may not even be the best solution for intelligence; they are just a clunky approximation toward it that natural evolution has reached. See: all of human technology as an analogy.

People can and have built functional ornithopters, but they are nowhere near as functional as an actual bird.

Aircraft fly a lot worse than birds. Bigger and faster sure, but nowhere near as manoeuvrable or efficient. Or smart. Or self-sufficient, or …

Re: AGI is far from inevitable

#230

Post by drw85 »

jart wrote: post #192
jiggawatts wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can build a machine that thinks like us in 1500 lines of C. See llm.c

Except it doesn’t think like anything. It writes like us, if you feed it enough of our writing.
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