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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#101

Post by hi_hi »

hackyhacky wrote: post #90
hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life. The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

yeah, this is a good point, transition and transformation to new technologies takes time. I'm not sure I agree the current state is upending things though. It's forcing some adaption for sure, but the status quo remains.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#102

Post by elictronic »

beej71 wrote: post #60
hi_hi wrote: post #11

How will we know if its AGI/Not AGI? (I don't think a simple app is gonna cut it here haha) What is the benchmark now that the Turing test has been blown out of the water?

I like the line of thinking from an earlier commenter: when an AI company no longer has any humans working, we'll know we're there.

I don't think this is a beneficial line of reasoning. All you need to reach that is a moderate fall in AI stock prices.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#103

Post by CamperBob2 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #66
Lerc wrote: post #34

I don't really understand the argument that AGI cannot be achieved just by scaling current methods. I too believe that (for any sane level of scaling anyway), but this-year's LLMs are not using entirely last-year's methods. And they, in turn, are using methods that weren't used the year before. It seems like a prediction like "Bob won't become a formula one driver in a minivan". It's true, but not very interesting. I…

Then you don't understand Machine Learning in any real way. Literally the 3rd or 4th thing you learn about ML is that for any given problem, there is an ideal model size. Just making the model bigger doesn't work because of something called the curse of dimensionality. This is something we have discovered about every single problem and type of learning algorithm used in ML. For LLMs, we probably moved past the ideal…

From the POV of something who actually learned ML in school (from the person who coined the term)

Sounds like that was quite awhile ago.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#104

Post by lambdaphagy »

> For example, transformer-based language models can't reliably do multi-digit arithmetic because they have no number sense, only statistical patterns over digit tokens.

I asked Opus 4.6 to multiply 50,651 x 895,707. It immediately responded: 45,368,055,057. This was wrong, but very close (good to about 10^-5 relative error). I then asked it how it arrived at that answer, and whether it had used any tool calls. It said:

``` No, I didn't use any specialized tools — I just computed it directly. Though I should be honest: large multiplications done "in my head" like this are prone to error. Let me double-check by breaking it down: 50,651 × 895,707 = 50,651 × (900,000 - 4,293) = 50,651 × 900,000 - 50,651 × 4,293 First term: 50,651 × 900,000 = 45,585,900,000 Second term: 50,651 × 4,293

50,651 × 4,000 = 202,604,000 50,651 × 293 = 14,840,743 Total: 202,604,000 + 14,840,743 = 217,444,743

Result: 45,585,900,000 - 217,444,743 = 45,368,455,257 So my first answer was actually slightly off! The corrected answer is 45,368,455,257. I don't have a calculator tool available — I'm doing this arithmetically by decomposition. For mission-critical calculations, I'd recommend verifying with a calculator since I can make arithmetic errors on large numbers like this. ```

So I would rate OP's claim (which is supported by a paper from 2024) highly implausible. Opus 4.6 appears to be able to do multi-digit arithmetic formally, as well as give remarkably accurate estimates based on something like "number sense".

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#105

Post by CamperBob2 »

lostmsu wrote: post #48
hi_hi wrote: post #11

How will we know if its AGI/Not AGI? (I don't think a simple app is gonna cut it here haha) What is the benchmark now that the Turing test has been blown out of the water?

To my knowledge Turing test has not been blown out of the water. The forms I saw were time limited and participants were not pushed hard to interrogate.

You have no idea whether you're talking to an LLM right now, and neither do I. That's good enough for me.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#106

Post by atomicnumber3 »

lambdaphagy wrote: post #104

> For example, transformer-based language models can't reliably do multi-digit arithmetic because they have no number sense, only statistical patterns over digit tokens. I asked Opus 4.6 to multiply 50,651 x 895,707. It immediately responded: 45,368,055,057. This was wrong, but very close (good to about 10^-5 relative error). I then asked it how it arrived at that answer, and whether it had used any tool calls. It sa…

Except we know how these work. There's no number sense. It's predicting tokens. It is able to recount the mathematical foundations because in its training dataset, that often happens, both in instructional material and in proofs.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#107

Post by CuriouslyC »

jltsiren wrote: post #62
hi_hi wrote: post #11

How will we know if its AGI/Not AGI? (I don't think a simple app is gonna cut it here haha) What is the benchmark now that the Turing test has been blown out of the water?

Until recently, philosophy of artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly about arguments why the Turing test was not a useful benchmark for intelligence. Pretty much everyone who had ever thought about the problem seriously had come to the same conclusion. The fundamental issue was the assumption that general intelligence is an objective property that can be determined experimentally. It's better to consider intelli…

The Turing test isn't as bad as people make it out to be. The naive version, where people just try to vibe out whether something is a human or not, is obviously wrong. On the other hand, if you set a good scientist loose on the Turing test, give them as many interactions as they want to come to a conclusion, and you let them build tools to assist in the analysis, it suddenly becomes quite interesting again.

For example, looking at the statistical distribution of the chat over long time horizons, and looking at input/output correlations in a similar manner would out even the best current models in a "Pro Turing Test." Ironically, the biggest tell in such a scenario would be excess capabilities AI displays that a human would not be able to match.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#108

Post by jwilliams »

hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

> Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here.

A slightly different angle on this - perhaps AGI doesn't matter (or perhaps not in the ways that we think).

LLMs have changed a lot in software in the last 1-2 years (indeed, the last 1-2 months); I don't think it's a wild extrapolation to see that'll come to many domains very soon.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#109

Post by helterskelter »

I don't know about AGI but I got bored and ran my plans for a new garage by Opus 4.6 and it was giving me some really surprising responses that have changed my plans a little. At the same time, it was also making some nonsense suggestions that no person would realistically make. When I prompted it for something in another chat which required genuine creativity, it fell flat on its face.

I dunno, mixed bag. Value is positive if you can sort the wheat from the chaff for the use cases I've ran by it. I expect the main place it'll shine for the near and medium term is going over huge data sets or big projects and flagging things for review by humans.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#110

Post by tayo42 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

Can llms manipulate spread sheets?
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