Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Many respectable medical professionals were convinced this was true, and they viewed the entire world through this lens. They interpreted data in ways that aligned with a miasmatic view. Of course now we know this was delusional and it seems almost funny in retrospect. I feel the same way when…
> Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Whenever I see people think the model architecture matters much, I think they have a magical view of AI. Progress comes from high quality data, the models are good as they are now. Of course you can still improve the models, but you get much more upside from data, or even better - from inter…
I'm on the contrary believe that the hunt for better data is an attempt to climb the local hill and be stuck there without reaching the global maximum. Interactive environments are good, they can help, but it is just one of possible ways to learn about causality. Is it the best way? I don't think so, it is the easier way: just throw money at the problem and eventually you'll get something that you'll claim to be the goal you chased all this time. And yes, it will have something in it you will be able to call "causal inference" in your marketing.
But current models are notoriously difficult to teach. They eat enormous amount of training data, a human needs much less. They eat enormous amount of energy to train, a human needs much less. It means that the very approach is deficient. It should be possible to do the same with the tiny fraction of data and money.
> The fact is we are also not smart from the brain alone, we are smart from our experience. Interaction and environment are the scaffolds of intelligence, not the model.
Well, I learned English almost all the way to B2 by reading books. I was too lazy to use a dictionary most of the time, so it was not interactive: I didn't interact even with dictionary, I was just reading books. How many books I've read to get to B2? ~10 or so. Well, I read a lot of English in Internet too, and watched some movies. But lets multiply 10 books by 10. Strictly speaking it was not B2, I was almost completely unable to produce English and my pronunciation was not just bad, it was worse. Even now I stumble sometimes on words I cannot pronounce. Like I know the words and I mentally constructed a sentence with it, but I cannot say it, because I don't know how. So to pass B2 I spent some time practicing speech, listening and writing. And learning some stupid topic like "travel" to have a vocabulary to talk about them in length.
How many books does LLM need to consume to get to B2 in a language unknown to it? How many audio records it needs to consume? Life wouldn't be enough for me to read and/or listen so much.
If there was a human who needed to consume as much information as LLM to learn, they would be the stupidest person in all the history of the humanity.