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How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

nature.com

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Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#41

Post by MrMcCall »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #2

From the article: > “Bad things could happen because of either the misuse of AI or because we lose control of it,” says Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada. God, I hate phrases like this. We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. AI will evolve in the rich medium of capitalism and be used by anyone due to its ease of use and even laws will be unable to re…

Thank you for this. I'm glad someone has their head on straight.

I think it's like some rich guys said, "Lets roll this tiny snowball down this mountain towards that village."

Of course, we are also heating an already overheating Earth with these mostly useless things "just to see" (line from Gibson's Neuromancer, spoken by the psychopath).

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#42

Post by synarchefriend »

Dah00n wrote: post #5

I have yet to speak to any actual expert who believes we will see any of the "I" in "AI" anytime soon, if ever.

You must be using a peculiar definition of expert because even generally conservative AI experts like LeCun now expect we could have human-level intelligence within 5 to 10 years.

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#43

Post by otikik »

MrMcCall wrote: post #30
mjburgess wrote: post #21

General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprintin…

Human nature is to have a moral compass (conscience), with a mind to contemplate whether our planned behavior is positive or negative for the happiness of those around us, and a free will to then choose which paths to take. What you describe is all present in the animals, to more or less advanced degree, where chimps and crows can use tools and even pass that knowledge on to others. Yes, our bodies follow the mammali…

I would say that consciousness is a necessary requirement in order to have moral compass. But I would not equate the two.

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#44

Post by PittleyDunkin »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #29

I continue to be dismayed by AI's quixotic focus on "human" intelligence. AI is very far from pigeon-level intelligence or dog-level intelligence. I strongly suspect transformers are dumber than spiders.[1] This focus on human intelligence via formal human knowledge is putting the cart before the horse. If your "human-level" AI architecture cannot conceivably be modified for chimp intelligence, and requires bootstrap…

I think we should discard the entire concept of intelligence at this point. If it is a thing, humans are too dumb to even agree on what it looks like.

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#45

Post by anonyfox »

There is zero reasoning in it so far, everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP. Its large _language_ models after all, no matter the hype.

Still I find it excellent when exploring new knowledge domains or cross-comparing cross knowledge domains, since LLMs by design (and training corpus) will spill out highly probable terms/concepts matching my questions and phrase it nicely. Search on steroids when you will, where also real-time doesn't matter for me at all.

This is not intelligence, yet hugely valuable if used right. And I am sure because of this, a lot of scientific discoveries will be made with todays LLMs used in creative ways, since most of scientific discoveries is ultimately looking at X within a setting at Y, and there are a lot of potential X and Y combinations.

I am exaggerating a bit, but at some point (niels bohr?) had the thought of thinking about atoms like we do about planets, with stuff circling each other. Its an X but in Y situation. First come up with such a scenario (or: an automated way to combine lots of X and Y cleverly) and then filter the results for something that actually would make sense, and then dig deeper in a semi-automatic way with actual human in the loop at least.

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#46

Post by MrMcCall »

Filligree wrote: post #39
MrMcCall wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not reasoning , it's just wordplay, just a gargantuanly complex level of auto-generated ELIZA.

It definitely feels like reasoning. Problems get solved. They may be simple problems, but it's still far beyond what a calculator can do. Does it really matter if it's "just wordplay"? I'm not convinced humans are any different, beyond the sheer scale. I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'.

You don't know the history of ELIZA, do you?

That story goes way deeper than some wordplay fooling people. The entire intent was to get people to realize that it was worthless, but, even after people learned that and what it was, they clamoured for more!

"Just imagine how stupid the average person is, and them remember that half of them are even stupider than that!" --George Carlin

And, yes, we humans are very different, but you'll have to traverse my recent comment history to get the extensive explanation. It's worth it, though, I promise, but I doubt you'll like it or agree with it. Good luck!

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#47

Post by pera »

frklem wrote: post #33
pera wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably thinking of Nature Communications. This article was posted on their more pop-science publishing site. You aren't the first one mislead by the Nature brand btw - if you look into past submissions you will find similar comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com

I know it is an article, and not a scientific publication, but that does not change the fact that the article is not serious at all regarding the ongoing discussion on AI. If this gets published in Nature, even as an opinion article, is because there is a general ideology that can actually produce this kind of content.

I agree and I think it's good that you pointed that out. Unfortunately the quality of nature.com articles is often quite bad.

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#49

Post by bondarchuk »

mjburgess wrote: post #21

General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprintin…

Maybe that would be a suitable working definition of general intelligence, and props to you for even giving a definition at all (in contrast to TFA). However your definition seems almost tailor-made to exclude present and near-future AI (and, I suspect, motivated thereby) . Current AI works by being trained on large amounts of existing data. If current AI would be real intelligence, we would be sad, therefore real intelligence is the opposite of intelligence trained on large amounts of data.

Having said that, one can also make the case that LLMs start from a limited set of capabilities and, via exploration, acquire a rich competence. Only these are linguistic abilities and the exploration is exploration of a linguistic environment. Maybe the real intelligence is the friends we made along the way i.e. the general class of algorithms roughly called "backpropagation and gradient descent on a very high-dimensional neural network".

Re: How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

#50

Post by otikik »

genericspammer wrote: post #6

Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect? I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he considers GPT to be a reasoning machine. I suppose that if you consider what GPT does to be resoning, then calling it AI is not so far fetched. I feel it’s more like pattern recognition though rather than reasoning, since there’s no black box ”reasoning” component in a…

It was a marketing trick. LLMs are not AI, the same way that a picture of a man is not a man.
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