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

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

#271

Post by leptons »

Balgair wrote: post #203
yibg wrote: 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…

By your measure, Eliza was AGI, back in the 1960s.

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

#272

Post by stego-tech »

Balgair wrote: post #203
yibg wrote: 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…

> You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so.

He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif

Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic. They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for basic technology troubleshooting stuff, so I know that most of this stuff is magic to their eyes.

That's the problem, as you point out. We're debating a nebulous concept ("intelligence") that's been co-opted by marketers to pump and dump the latest fad tech that's yet to really display significant ROI to anyone except the hypesters and boosters, and isn't rooted in medical, psychological, or societal understanding of the term anymore. A plurality of people are ascribing "intelligence" to spicy autocorrect, worshiping stochastic parrots vomiting markov chains but now with larger context windows and GPUs to crunch larger matrices, powered by fossil fuels and cooled by dwindling freshwater supplies, and trained on the sum total output of humanity but without compensation to anyone who actually made the shit in the first place.

So yeah. You're dead-on. It's just about bilking folks out of more money they already don't have.

And Ashley Madison could already to that for pennies on the dollar compared to LLMs. They just couldn't "write code" well enough to "replace" software devs.

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

#273

Post by leptons »

dmwilcox wrote: post #261
preommr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism Then you've missed the part of software. Software isn't computer science, it's not always about code. It's about solving problems in a way we can control and manufacture. If we needed random numbers, we could easily use a hardware that uses some physics property, or we could pull in an observation…

It's not about the random numbers it's about the tree of possibilities having to be defined up front (in software or hardware). That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible. This makes computers incredibly good at what people are not good at -- predictably doing math correctly, following a procedure, etc. But because all of the possibilities of the…

No, you're missing what they said. True randomness can be delivered to a computer via a peripheral - an integrated circuit or some such device that can deliver true randomness is not that difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...

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

#274

Post by Krssst »

dmwilcox wrote: post #213

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…

If the physics underlying the brain's behavior are deterministic, they can be simulated by software and so does the brain.

(and if we assume that non-determinism is randomness, non-deterministic brain could be simulated by software plus an entropy source)

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

#275

Post by abletonlive »

burnte wrote: post #217
dicroce wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. Software can now understand human language... this is going to mean computers can be a lot more places than they ever could. Furthermore, software can now understand the content of images... eventually this will have a wild impact on nearly everything.

It doesn't understand anything, there is no understanding going on in these models. It takes input and generates output based on the statistical math created from its training set. It's Bayesian statistics and vector/matrix math. There is no cogitation or actual understanding.

This is insanely reductionist and mindless regurgitation of what we already know about how the models work. Understanding is a spectrum, it's not binary. We can measurably show that that there is in fact, some kind of understanding.

If you explain a concept to a child you check for understanding by seeing if the output they produce checks out with your understanding of the concept. You don't peer into their brain and see if there are neurons and consciousness happening

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

#276

Post by LouisSayers »

Borealid wrote: post #253
LouisSayers wrote: post #247

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?

I have no doubt that if you sample a sound at high enough fidelity that you won't hear a difference.

My comment around digital vs analog is more of an analogy around producing sounds rather than playing back samples though.

There's a Masterclass with Joel Zimmerman (DeadMau5) where he explains the stepping effect when it comes to his music production. Perhaps he just needs a software upgrade, but there was a lesson where he showed the stepping effect which was audibly noticeable when comparing digital vs analog equipment.

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

#278

Post by cmsj »

lupusreal wrote: post #123
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way some people confidently assert that we will never create AGI, I am convinced the term essentially means "machine with a soul" to them. It reeks of religiosity. I guess if we exclude those, then it just means the computer is really good at doing the kind of things which humans do by thinking. Or maybe it's when the computer is better at it than humans and merely being as good as the average human isn't enough…

When we say "the kind of things which humans do by thinking", we should really consider that in the long arc of history. We've bootstrapped ourselves from figuring out that flint is sharp when it breaks, to being able to do all of the things we do today. There was no external help, no pre-existing dataset trained into our brains, we just observed, experimented, learned and communicated.

That's general intelligence - the ability to explore a system you know nothing about (in our case, physics, chemistry and biology) and then interrogate and exploit it for your own purposes.

LLMs are an incredible human invention, but they aren't anything like what we are. They are born as the most knowledgeable things ever, but they die no smarter.

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

#279

Post by jes5199 »

ksec wrote: post #24

Is AGI even important? I believe the next 10 to 15 years will be Assisted Intelligence. There are things that current LLM are so poor I dont believe a 100x increase in pref / watt is going to make much difference. But it is going to be good enough there wont be an AI Winter. Since current AI has already reached escape velocity and actually increase productivity in many areas. The most intriguing part is if Humanoid f…

I think you’re saying that you want a faster horse

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

#280

Post by [deleted] »

cmsj wrote: post #268
ben_w wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point holding copyright on a new technical solution, to a problem that can be solved by anyone asking an existing AI, trained on last year's internet, independently of your new copyright?

There is one very specific risk worth mentioning: AI code is a potentially existential crisis for Open Source. An ecosystem that depends on copyright can't exist if its codebase is overrun by un-copyrightable code.

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