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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#51

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

>In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.

>That's not what's happening here ...

On the contrary, it very much is.

I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting.

However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff immediately after arriving at the first.

Just, you know—potential mass unemployment on a scale never seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify as AGI is largely semantics.

That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#52

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

The amount of things LLMs can do is insane. It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.

What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can?

They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#54

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#55

As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness. Hear me out. I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determ…

This is an interesting perspective.

A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e. conciousness

Im imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#56
post #46

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#57

Friendly reminder: Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.

Who attuned your crystal ball?

LLMs are already pretty general. They've got the multimodal ones, and aren't they using some sort of language-action-model to drive cars now? Who is to say AGI doesn't already exist?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its complicated. It depends. A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable. The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices. There is also a ton o…

> A human being has the potential for intelligence. Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now? Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?

Of course they were. A human from 200,000 years ago would be almost genetically identical to one from today. That's what makes us homo sapiens. 200,000 years is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary timescale with generations as long as ours and reproduction rates as low as ours.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#59
post #39

Measuring something you can’t define or quantify seems somewhat dubious

Thus the vague and unfounded criteria/framework.

It's pretty easy for these people to pull something like this out of their collective asses, but it's much harder (maybe impossible) to rigorously define the how and why.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#60
post #57

Friendly reminder: Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.

Who attuned your crystal ball? LLMs are already pretty general. They've got the multimodal ones, and aren't they using some sort of language-action-model to drive cars now? Who is to say AGI doesn't already exist?

It doesn't already exist, pretty obviously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeRS4TbtZWA

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