”‘AGI is x years away’ is a proposition that is both true and false at the same time. Like all such propositions, it is therefore meaningless.”
AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
71–80 of 394 posts
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#72Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.
There's a test for this: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi
Basically a captcha. If there's something that humans can easily do that a machine cannot, full AGI has not been achieved.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#73And in 30 years it will be another 30 years away. LLMs are so incredibly useful and powerful but they will NEVER be AGI. I actually wonder if the success of (and subsequent obsession with) LLMs is putting true AGI further out of reach. All that these AI companies see are the $$$. When the biggest "AI Research Labs" like OpenAI shifted to product-izing their LLM offerings I think the writing was on the wall that they…
People will keep improving LLMs, and by the time they are AGI (less than 30 years), you will say, "Well, these are no longer LLMs."
Will LLMs approach something that appears to be AGI? Maybe. Probably. They're already "better" than humans in many use cases.
LLMs/GPTs are essentially "just" statistical models. At this point the argument becomes more about philosophy than science. What is "intelligence?"
If an LLM can do something truly novel with no human prompting, with no directive other than something it has created for itself - then I guess we can call that intelligence.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#74Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
People will keep improving LLMs, and by the time they are AGI (less than 30 years), you will say, "Well, these are no longer LLMs."
Will LLMs approach something that appears to be AGI? Maybe. Probably. They're already "better" than humans in many use cases. LLMs/GPTs are essentially "just" statistical models. At this point the argument becomes more about philosophy than science. What is "intelligence?" If an LLM can do something truly novel with no human prompting, with no directive other than something it has created for itself - then I guess we…
How many people do you know who are capable of doing something truly novel? Definitely not me, I'm just an average phd doing average research.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
People will keep improving LLMs, and by the time they are AGI (less than 30 years), you will say, "Well, these are no longer LLMs."
What the hell is general intelligence anyway? People seem to think it means human-like intelligence, but I can't imagine we have any good reason to believe that our kinds of intelligence constitute all possible kinds of intelligence--which, from the words, must be what "general" intelligence means. It seems like even if it's possible to achieve GI, artificial or otherwise, you'd never be able to know for sure that th…
>you'd never be able to know for sure that thats what you've done.
Words mean what they're defined to mean. Talking about "general intelligence" without a clear definition is just woo, muddy thinking that achieves nothing. A fundamental tenet of the scientific method is that only testable claims are meaningful claims.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t match what I hear from teachers, academics, or the librarians complaining that they are regularly getting requests for things which don’t exist. Everyone I know who’s been hiring has mentioned spammy applications with telltale LLM droppings, too.
I can see how students would be first users of this kinda of tech but am not on those spheres, but I believe you. As per spammy applications, hasn't always been this the case and now made worse due to the cheapness of -generating- plausible data? I think ghost-applicants where existent already before AI where consultant companies would pool people to try and get a position on a high paying job and just do consultancy…
Yes, AI is effectively a very strong catalyst because it drives down the cost so much. Kids cheated before but it was more work and higher risk, people faked images before but most were too lazy to make high quality fakes, etc.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#78You cannot have AGI without a physical manifestation that can generate its own training data based on inputs from the external outside world with e.g. sensors and constantly refine its model.
Pure language or pure image-models are just one aspect of intelligence - just very refined pattern recognition.
You will also probably need some aspect of self-awareness in order or the system to set auxiliary goals and directives related to self-maintenance.
But you don't need AGI in order to have something useful (which I think a lot of readers are confused about). No one is making the argument that you need AGI to bring tons of value.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will LLMs approach something that appears to be AGI? Maybe. Probably. They're already "better" than humans in many use cases. LLMs/GPTs are essentially "just" statistical models. At this point the argument becomes more about philosophy than science. What is "intelligence?" If an LLM can do something truly novel with no human prompting, with no directive other than something it has created for itself - then I guess we…
How many people do you know who are capable of doing something truly novel? Definitely not me, I'm just an average phd doing average research.
Literally every single person I know that is capable of holding a pen or typing on a keyboard can create something new.
Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
#80LLMs are basically a library that can talk. That’s not artificial intelligence.
Grammar engines. Or value matrix engines. Everytime I try to work with them I lose more time than I gain. Net loss every time. Immensely frustrating. If i focus it on a small subtask I can gain some time (rough draft of a test). Anything more advanced and its a monumental waste of time. They are not even good librarians. They fail miserably at cross referencing and contextualizing without constant leading.
I've only really been experimenting with them for a few days, but I'm kind of torn on it. On the one hand, I can see a lot of things it could be useful for, like indexing all the cluttered files I've saved over the years and looking things up for me faster than I could find|grep. Heck, yesterday I asked one a relationship question, and it gave me pretty good advice. Nothing I couldn't have gotten out of a thousand books and magazines, but it was a lot faster and more focused than doing that.
On the other hand, the prompt/answer interface really limits what you can do with it. I can't just say, like I could with a human assistant, "Here's my calendar. Send me a summary of my appointments each morning, and when I tell you about a new one, record it in here." I can script something like that, and even have the LLM help me write the scripts, but since I can already write scripts, that's only a speed-up at best, not anything revolutionary.
I asked Grok what benefit there would be in having a script fetch the weather forecast data, pass it to Grok in a prompt, and then send the output to my phone. The answer was basically, "So I can say it nicer and remind you to take an umbrella if it sounds rainy." Again, that's kind of neat, but not a big deal.
Maybe I just need to experiment more to see a big advance I can make with it, but right now it's still at the "cool toy" stage.