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

dwarkesh.com

291–300 of 394 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I'm mentioning isn't about the fidelity of the sample, but of the samples themselves. There are an infinite number of frequencies between two points - point 'a' and point 'b'. What I'm talking about are the "steps" you hear as you move across the frequency range.

Of course there is a limit to the frequency resolution of a sampling method. I'm skeptical you can hear the steps though, at 44.1 kHz or better sampling rates. Let's say that the shortest interval at which our hearing has good frequency acuity (say, as good as it can be) is 1 second. In this interval, we have 44100 samples. Let's imagine the samples graphically: a "44K" pixel wide image. We have some waveform across…

Here is a way we could hear a 0.0023 difference in pitch: via beats.

Suppoise we sample a precise 10,000.00 kHz analog signal (sinusoid) and speed up the sampled signal by 0.0023 percent. It will have a frequency of 10,000.23 Hz.

The f2 - f2 difference between them is 0.23 Hz, which means if they are mixed together, we will hear beats at 0.46 Hz: a little slower than once in every two seconds.

So in this contrived way, where we have the original source and the digitized one side by side, we can obtain an audible effect correlating to the steps in resolution of the sampling method.

I'm guessing Deadmau5 might have set up an experiment along these lines.

Musicians tend to be oblivious to something like 5 cent errors in the intonations of their instruments, in the lower registers. E.g. world renowned guitarists play on axes that have no nut compensation, without which you can't even get close to accurate intontation.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that path lies skill atrophy. AI research has a thing called "the bitter lesson" - which is that the only thing that works is search and learning. Domain-specific knowledge inserted by the researcher tends to look good in benchmarks but compromise the performance of the system[0]. The bitter- er lesson is that this also applies to humans. The reason why humans still outperform AI on lots of intelligence tasks…

> Because that path lies skill atrophy. Maybe, but I'm not completely convinced by this. Prior to ChatGPT, there would be times where I would like to build a project (e.g. implement Raft or Paxos), I write a bit, find a point where I get stuck, decide that this project isn't that interesting and I give up and don't learn anything. What ChatGPT gives me, if nothing else, is a slightly competent rubber duck. It can giv…

true and with AI I can look into far more subjects more quickly because the skill that was necessary was mostly just endless amounts of sifting through documentation and trying to find out why some error happens or how to configure something correctly. But this goes even further, it also applies to subjects where I couldn't intellectually understand something but there was noone to really ask for help. So I'm learning knowledge now that I simply couldn't have figured out on my own. It's a pure multiplier and humans have failed to solve the issue of documentation and support for one another. Until now of course.

I also think that once robots are around it will be yet another huge multiplier but this time in the real world. Sure the robot won't be as perfect as the human initially but so what. You can utilize it to do so much more. Maybe I'll bother actually buying a rundown house and renovating myself. If I know that I can just tell the robot to paint all the walls and possibly even do it 3 times with different paint then I feel far more confident that it won't be an untenable risk and bother.

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

#293
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To be fair to your parents, I've been an engineer in high-tech for decades and the latest AI advancements feel pretty magical.

They feel magical to me as well, but I can enjoy that feeling while understanding that it’s just a prediction machine.

I don’t think the latter part can be explained to someone who doesn’t care all that much.

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

#294
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.

Exactly, what does the general in Artificial General Intelligence mean to these people?

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

#295
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.

[deleted]

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

#296
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 Ro…

> 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

If it’s limited to achieving goals it’s not AGI. Real time personal goal setting based on human equivalent emotions is an “intellectual task.” One of many requirements for AGI therefore is to A understand the world in real time and B emotionally respond to it. Aka AGI would by definition “necessitate having feelings.”

There’s philosophical arguments that there’s something inherently unique about humans here, but without some testable definition you could make the same argument that some arbitrary group of humans don’t have those qualities “gingers have no souls.” Or perhaps “dancing people have no consciousness” which seems like gibberish not because it’s a less defensible argument, but because you haven’t been exposed to it before.

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

#297
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why does AGI necessitate having feelings or consciousness No one knows if it does or not. We don't know why we are conscious and we have no test whatsoever to measure consciousness. In fact the only reason we know that current AI has no consciousness is because "obviously it's not conscious."

Excel and Powerpoint are not conscious and so there is not reason to expect any other computation inside a digital computer to be different. You may say something similar for matter and human minds, but we have a very limited and incomplete understanding of the brain and possibly even of the universe. Furthermore we do have a subjective experience of consciousness. On the other hand we have a complete understanding o…

I know I have a subjective experience of consciousness.

I’m less sure about you. Simply claiming you do isn’t hard evidence of the fact; after all, LLMs do the same.

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

#298

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…

> Ask yourself, why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number?

I mean, humans aren't exactly good at generating random numbers either.

And of course, every Intel and AMD CPU these days has a hardware random number generator in it.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Maybe I'm misreading it but I think the OP understands that. If you feed that true randomness into a computer, what use is it? Will it impair the computer at the very tasks in which it excels? > That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible.

Chemical reactions are "predictable and reproducible", as well as quantum interactions, so does that make you a computer?

This comment thread is dull. I'm bailing out.

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