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AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

vincirufus.com

31–40 of 442 posts

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#31
Am I the only one who feels that Claude Code is what they would have imagined basic AGI to be like 10 years ago?

It can plan and take actions towards arbitrary goals in a wide variety of mostly text-based domains. It can maintain basic "memory" in text files. It's not smart enough to work on a long time horizon yet, it's not embodied, and it has big gaps in understanding.

But this is basically what I would have expected v1 to look like.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#32
post #10

We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. Can we land on AGI without some clear indication of possibility (aka Chappie style)? Possibly, but the likelihood is low. Quite low. It's essentially groping in the dark. A good contrast is quantum computing. We know that's possible, even feasible, and now are trying to overcome the engineering hurdles. And people still think th…

> We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. A discovery that AGI is impossible in principle to implement in an electronic computer would require a major fundamental discovery in physics that answers the question “what is the brain doing in order to implement general intelligence?”

A question which will be trivial to answer once you properly define what you mean by "brain"

Presumably "brains" do not do many of the things that you will measure AGI by, and your brain is having trouble understanding the idea that "brain" is not well understood by brains.

Does it make it any easier if we simplify the problem to: what is the human doing that makes (him) intelligent ? If you know your historical context, no. This is not a solved problem.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#33

Way out of touch. AGI is poorly defined and thus is a science "problem", and a very low priority one at that. No amount of engineering or model training is going to get us AGI until someone defines what properties are required and then researches what can be done to achieve them within our existing theories of computation which all computers being manufactured today are built upon.

This is the funniest "I'm a hammer thus AGI is a nail" post I've ever read.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that, but do you have any examples of software engineering that weren't already thoroughly explained by computer science long before?

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#36

This article seems to me like a lot of "if you solve all the hard problems, then you'll have a solution". Which is like... yes, and...?

It's relevant given the apparent conservativeness about LLMs, the non-revolutionary architectural improvements that seemed to place too much of the bets on scaling.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#37
post #10

We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. Can we land on AGI without some clear indication of possibility (aka Chappie style)? Possibly, but the likelihood is low. Quite low. It's essentially groping in the dark. A good contrast is quantum computing. We know that's possible, even feasible, and now are trying to overcome the engineering hurdles. And people still think th…

This makes no sense.

If you believe in eg a mind or soul then maybe it's possible we cannot make AGI.

But if we are purely biological then obviously it's possible to replicate that in principle.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. A discovery that AGI is impossible in principle to implement in an electronic computer would require a major fundamental discovery in physics that answers the question “what is the brain doing in order to implement general intelligence?”

Would that really be a physics discovery? I mean I guess everything ultimately is. But it seems like maybe consciousness could be understood in terms of "higher level" sciences - somewhere on the chain of neurology->biology->chemistry->physics.

Consciousness (subjective experience) is possibly orthogonal to intelligence (ability to achieve complex goals). We definitely have a better handle on what intelligence is than consciousness.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#39
post #10

We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet. This is key. Can we land on AGI without some clear indication of possibility (aka Chappie style)? Possibly, but the likelihood is low. Quite low. It's essentially groping in the dark. A good contrast is quantum computing. We know that's possible, even feasible, and now are trying to overcome the engineering hurdles. And people still think th…

The practical feasibility of quantum computing is definitely still an open research question.
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