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How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

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

#51

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…

"moral compass"

Right from the start, so many assumptions.

It is going a little under the radar, but AI is really throwing the religions into a tizzy now that they are being forced to think about these things. In the good old days, you could just trust the bible to say how we were created.

Now people are being forced to think about it for the first time. Where do morals come from? Do they even exist? Who am I? What am I doing here?

Like whole new generation having an existential crisis.

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

#52

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 also find it quite weird, I think the fact that the current cycle is focused on chat bots fools a lot of people into anthropomorphising LLMs and perceiving them as better than they actually are. It's very comforting in a world with increasingly less meaningful social interaction

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

#53

> You can’t say everybody’s a crackpot. Sure can. Whole world’s done this every time there’s a major advance in algorithms. We do this with other major advances, too, like how the industrial revolution was going to usher in utopia and GMO was going to end world hunger. Whenever we can’t see the end of something, only half the world figures it’s a vision problem, while the other half figures the end must not exist.

Present-day developed world must look a lot like utopia for a medieval serf. And we're now feeding 8 billion as opposed to, what, 2 billion before the green revolution. The exaggerations are only slight.

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

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but our consciousness comes with an integral moral compass that we are completely free to utterly ignore or even act in opposition to. It's our gift and our responsibility, and our absolute choice, for good or ill.

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

#55

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. S…

> everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP

Is there some concrete task or behavior that, if demonstrated, you believe wouldn't be explainable by advanced statistics and NLP?

In my mind even human/animal behavior is in theory explainable with advanced statistics.

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

#56

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 tend to agree, what is being lost in most recent discussions on Human Level AI, is the focus on Language and LLM's.

There are plenty of other researchers and companies working on non-LLM models. And there you start getting a little more 'human' like reasoning.

Maybe eventually the LLM will just be the 'human interface' to a different AI model underneath, that does have a model of the world, and goals that it is charting through the real-world complexity and not just a game simulation.

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"moral compass" Right from the start, so many assumptions. It is going a little under the radar, but AI is really throwing the religions into a tizzy now that they are being forced to think about these things. In the good old days, you could just trust the bible to say how we were created. Now people are being forced to think about it for the first time. Where do morals come from? Do they even exist? Who am I? What a…

If you dare, you can read my recent comment history for the explanation, but I doubt you're going to like it. And it is the explanation. Someone had to do it!

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

#58

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 in…

It's tailor made to describe the phenomenon of animal intelligence that we're trying to model.

The only tailoring which goes on is by those who say, "we can only do X, therefore Y must be defined in terms of X". It's deeply pseudoscientific approach to investigation, as it completely abandons a scientific theory of empirical phenomenon over a purely circumstantial account given in terms of what tools we have to hand.

I can think of no other area where such an approach to investigation is permitted.

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see no difference today between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War and the recent news from the middle east, ukraine, and even, korea. We fight to establish hierarchies of dominance called, "monopolies of violence", that we have social allegiance to. If a competing "dominance regime" is in our neighbourhood, we draw territorial boundaries -- and if these fail, riot, and if that fails, kill. The stra…

Yes, my recent comment history contains the explanation for why we have the potential for all of that but also to be true humanitarians. The short of it is that we can choose to learn how to be better by actually changing ourself, and then being a positive force in the world.

It is the Way, but we must choose it, after first seeking to escape our natural ignorance to the possibility.

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

#60

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…

I've been annoyed by the redefinition of artificial intelligence since the LLM boom started. The term AI has no place being used to describe LLMs as far as I can tell, unless what goes on inside the black box of an LLM is drastically different than how they are described to function. Predicting the next token based on a compressed dataset of human generated content isn't intelligence in any meaningful definition of t…

But I also only write one word at a time.

How am I predicting the next word?

The latest neuroscience isn't as clear cut that humans aren't similar.

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