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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

for example?

Claiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1]

Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice. [2]

Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-o...

[3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer...

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#62
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's a trick statement, because AGI is undefined.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#63

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…

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were actually greater than today, even if this does not necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have reduced may have been related with things like fine motor skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important today for most people.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?

It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.

Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter.

With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#65

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?

Yes. Some important parts of the software, like complex tools, art, or the use of symbols only appeared between 100.000 and 50.000 years ago, however.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#66

It's good to have some kind of benchmark at least to structure the ongoing, fruitless discussion around "are we there already?". However I must admit that including the last point that is partially hinting at the emotional or rather social intelligence surprised me. It makes this list go beyond usual understanding of AGI and moves it toward something like AGI-we-actually-want. But for that purpose this last point isn…

Capability and alignment are orthogonal. Stalin was AGI-level.

"Stalin was AGI-level" perfectly catches the core of my concerns. Thanks!

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#67
post #2

Cool that we are at a stage where it is meaningful to start measuring progress toward AGI. Something I am wondering on the philosophical side: are we ever going to be able to tell if the system really "understands" and "perceives" the world?

I think the accomplishment of difficult real-world tasks requires that it does so. But I hope that we're able to reach a level of introspection to produce a satisfactory answer (and avoid doomsday), but I think that requires a more educated question. The premise of conciousness as we understand it now could be misleading.

In the same way that studying alien life would reveal more about how life in general canonicially forms and exists. Studying this artificial intellegence could unlock a new understanding of our own minds.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.

Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter. With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.

You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.

In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#69
post #6

Those are crowdsourced benchmarks. We're calling them "cognitive" and "AGI" now, though. It's similar to when they made a benchmark and called it "GDP". To be clear, I think we've seen very fast progress, certainly faster than I would have expected, I'm not trying to peddle some "wall" rhetoric here, but I struggle to see how this isn't just the SWE-bench du jour.

[dead]

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#70

It's good to have some kind of benchmark at least to structure the ongoing, fruitless discussion around "are we there already?". However I must admit that including the last point that is partially hinting at the emotional or rather social intelligence surprised me. It makes this list go beyond usual understanding of AGI and moves it toward something like AGI-we-actually-want. But for that purpose this last point isn…

Unwanted behavior or what? Like why does a rose need so many petals eh? What about a peacock and all those feathers? Why should anyone dance in the shower? Or dance at all? The rabbit hole is deep Alice.
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