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AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

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251–260 of 394 posts

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#251

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either). It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated ci…

This is why I think philosophy has become another form of semi-religious kookery. You haven't provided any actual proof or logical reason for why a computer couldn't be intelligent. If randomness is required then sample randomness from the real world. It's clear that your argument is based on feels and you're using philosophy to make it sound more legitimate.

I tried to keep my long post short so I cut things. I gestured at it -- there is nothing in a computer we didn't put there.

Take the same model weights give it the same inputs, get the same outputs. Same with the pseudo-random number generator. And the "same inputs" is especially limited versus what humans are used to.

What's the machine code of an AGI gonna look like? It makes one illegal instruction and crashes? If if changes tboughts will it flush the TLB and CPU pipeline? ;) I jest but really think about the metal. The inside of modern computers is tightly controlled with no room for anything unpredictable. I really don't think a von Neumann (or Harvard ;) machine is going to cut it. Honestly I don't know what will, controlled but not controlled, artificially designed but not deterministic.

In fact, that we've made a computer as unreliable as a human at reproducing data (ala hallucinating/making s** up) is an achievement itself, as much of an anti-goal as it may be. If you want accuracy, you don't use a probabilistic system on such a wide problem space (identify a bad solder joint from an image, sure. Write my thesis, not so much)

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#252

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either). It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated ci…

Computers can't have unique experiences. I think it's going to replace search, but becoming sentient? Not in my lifetime, granted I'm getting up there.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#253

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either). It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated ci…

What you're mentioning is like the difference between digital vs analog music. For generic stuff you probably can't tell the difference, but once you move to the edges you start to hear the steps in digital vs the smooth transition of analog. In the same way, AI runs on bits and bytes, and there's only so much detail you can fit into that. You can approximate reality, but it'll never quite be reality. I'd be much mor…

Are you familiar with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem?

If so, what do you think about the concept of a human "hear[ing] the steps" in a digital playback system using a sampling rate of 192kHz, a rate at which many high-resolution files are available for purchase?

How about the same question but at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, or the way a normal "red book" music CD is encoded?

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#254
post #183

My pet peeve: talking about AGI without defining it. There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition. Without that, the discussion may be intellectually entertaining—but ultimately moot. And we run into the motte-and-bailey fallacy: at one moment, AGI refers to something known to be mathematically impossible (e.g., due to the No Free Lunch theorem); the next, it’s something we already have with GPT-4 (which, w…

I like chollet's definition: something that can quickly learn any skill without any innate prior knowledge or training.

That seems to rule out most humans. I still can’t cook despite being in the kitchen for thousands of hours.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#255
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Generalization ability and Common Sense Knowledge [1] If we go by this definition then there's no caring, or a noticing of drudgery? It's simply defined by its ability to generalize solving problems across domains. The narrow AI that…

“ability to understand” Isn’t just the ability to preform a task. One of the issues with current AI training is it’s really terrible at discovering which aspects of the training data are false and should be ignored. That requires all kinds of mental tasks to be constantly active including evaluating emotional context to figure out if someone is being deceptive etc.

> Isn’t just the ability to preform a task.

Right. In this case I'd say it's the ability to interpret data and use it to succeed at whatever goals it has

Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal

Rob miles has some really good videos on AI safety research which touches on how AGI would think. Thats shaped a lot of how I think about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#256
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any specific mental task that an average human is capable of that you believe computers will not be able to do? Also does this also mean that you believe that brain emulations (uploads) are not possible, even given an arbitrary amount of compute power?

Yes, they can't have understanding or intentionality.

Right now or you mean ever?

It's such a small leap to see how an artificial intelligence can/could become capable of understanding and have intentionality.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're mentioning is like the difference between digital vs analog music. For generic stuff you probably can't tell the difference, but once you move to the edges you start to hear the steps in digital vs the smooth transition of analog. In the same way, AI runs on bits and bytes, and there's only so much detail you can fit into that. You can approximate reality, but it'll never quite be reality. I'd be much mor…

Are you familiar with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem? If so, what do you think about the concept of a human "hear[ing] the steps" in a digital playback system using a sampling rate of 192kHz, a rate at which many high-resolution files are available for purchase? How about the same question but at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, or the way a normal "red book" music CD is encoded?

At least for listening purposes, there's no difference between 44.1 KHz/16-bit sampling and anything above that. It's all the same to the human ear.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I think philosophy has become another form of semi-religious kookery. You haven't provided any actual proof or logical reason for why a computer couldn't be intelligent. If randomness is required then sample randomness from the real world. It's clear that your argument is based on feels and you're using philosophy to make it sound more legitimate.

Brains are low-frequency, energy-efficient, organic, self-reproducing, asynchronous, self-repairing, and extremely highly connected (thousands of synapses). If AGI is defined as "approximate humans", I think its gonna be a while. That said, I don't think computers need to be human to have an emergent intelligence. It can be different in kind if not in degree.

Just to put some numbers on "extremely highly connected" - there are about 90 billion neurons in a human brain, but the connections between them number in the range of 100 trillion.

That is one hell of a network, and it can all operate fully in parallel while continuously training itself. Computers have gotten pretty good at doing things in parallel, but not that good.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#259

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either). It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated ci…

Computers can't have unique experiences. I think it's going to replace search, but becoming sentient? Not in my lifetime, granted I'm getting up there.

On the newly released iPhone: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

;-)

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#260
post #162

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you. To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI. No really. You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today. But, really, what else do you want out of the…

I think that's another issue with AGI is 30 years away, the definition of what is AGI is a bit subjective. Not sure how we can measure how long it'll take to get somewhere when we don't know exactly where that somewhere even is.
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