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Why AGI Will Not Happen

timdettmers.com

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Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#11

Post by seanw265 »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

TLDR; No amount of fantastical thinking is going to coax AGI out of a box of inanimate binary switches --- aka, a computer as we know it. Even with billions and billions of microscopic switches operating at extremely high speed consuming an enormous share of the world's energy, a computer will still be nothing more than a binary logic playback device. Expecting anything more is to defy logic and physics and just assu…

This is not what the article says at all.

The article is about the constraints of computation, scaling of current inference architecture, and economics.

It is completely unrelated to your claim that cognition is entirely separate from computation.

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#12

Post by antonvs »

NuclearPM wrote: post #3
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

TLDR; No amount of fantastical thinking is going to coax AGI out of a box of inanimate binary switches --- aka, a computer as we know it. Even with billions and billions of microscopic switches operating at extremely high speed consuming an enormous share of the world's energy, a computer will still be nothing more than a binary logic playback device. Expecting anything more is to defy logic and physics and just assu…

Do you agree with that wild claim?

I tend to wonder whether people who make claims like that are confusing intelligence with consciousness. The claim as stated above could be a summary of a certain aspect of the hard problem of consciousness: that it's not clear how one could "coax consciousness out of a box of inanimate binary switches" - but the connection to "intelligence" is dubious. Unless of course one believes that "true" intelligence requires consciousness.

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#13

Post by chrsw »

Real machine learning research has promise, especially over long time scales.

Imminent AGI/ASI/God-like AI/end of humanity hawks are part of a growing AI cult. The cult leaders are driven by insatiable greed and the gullible cult followers are blinded by hope.

And I say this as a developer who is quite pleased with the progress of coding assistant tools recently.

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#14

Post by KHRZ »

General Intelligence has already been demonstrated to be possible by the human brain, so I don't really get how physicality is an argument against AGI. Who is to say biological computers won't be built?

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#15

Post by biophysboy »

I will be more tempted to call something AGI when it can perform experimental interventions and imagine counterfactuals, a la Judea Pearl. I want it to be able to ask questions, design theoretical models, set up an experiment, and analyze what happened - all with no human intervention.

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#16

Post by AnotherGoodName »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

TLDR; No amount of fantastical thinking is going to coax AGI out of a box of inanimate binary switches --- aka, a computer as we know it. Even with billions and billions of microscopic switches operating at extremely high speed consuming an enormous share of the world's energy, a computer will still be nothing more than a binary logic playback device. Expecting anything more is to defy logic and physics and just assu…

Your criteria is the lack of randomness and determinism by the sound of that.

What if i had an external source of trye randomness? Very easy to add. In fact current ai algorithms have a temperature parameter that can easily utilise true randomness if you want it to.

Would you suddenly change your mind and say ok ‘now it can be AGI!’ because i added a nuclear decay based random number generator to my ai model?

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#18

Post by antonvs »

IshKebab wrote: post #6

I was willing to give this a chance because maybe he meant it won't happen soon , but no he's actually saying it will never happen. Crazy.

Especially when you consider that the author is apparently an "Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2)".

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#19

Post by echelon »

soulofmischief wrote: post #4
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

TLDR; No amount of fantastical thinking is going to coax AGI out of a box of inanimate binary switches --- aka, a computer as we know it. Even with billions and billions of microscopic switches operating at extremely high speed consuming an enormous share of the world's energy, a computer will still be nothing more than a binary logic playback device. Expecting anything more is to defy logic and physics and just assu…

> Expecting anything more is to defy logic and physics. What logic and physics are being defied by the assumption that intelligence doesn't require the specific biological machinery we are accustomed to? This is a ridiculous comment to make, you do nothing to actually prove the claims you're making, which are even stronger than the claims most people will make about the potential of AGI.

I'll take the other side of the bet.

Human intelligence seems likely to be a few tricks we just haven't figured out yet. Once we figure it out, we'll probably remark on how simple a model it is.

We don't have the necessary foundation to get there yet. (Background context, software/hardware ecosystem, understanding, clues from other domains, enough people spending time on it, etc.) But one day we will.

At some point people will try to run human-level AGI intelligences on their Raspberry Pi. I'd almost bet that will be a game played in the future - run human-level AGI intelligences on as low a spec machine as possible.

I also wonder what it would be like if the AGI / ASI timeline coincide with our ability to do human brain scans at higher fidelity. And that if they do line up, that we might try replicating our actual human thoughts and dreams on our future architectures as we make progress on AGI.

If those timelines have anything to do with one another, then when we crack AGI, we might also be close to "human brain uploads". I wouldn't say it's a necessary precondition, but I'd bet it would help if the timelines aligned.

And I know the limits of detection right now and in the foreseeable future are abysmal. So AGI and even ASI probably come first. But it'd be neat if they were close to parallel.

Re: Why AGI Will Not Happen

#20

Post by bunderbunder »

Maybe I’m showing my roots in the symbolic AI era here, but for me it’s even simpler: the current tech hasn’t put us significantly closer to AGI because it’s still missing some key elements.

Hofstadter was on to something with his “strange loops” idea. He never really defined it well enough to operationalize, but I have a hard time faulting him for that because it’s not like anyone else has managed to articulate a less wooly theory. And it’s true that we’ve managed to incorporate plenty of loops into LLMs, but they are still pretty light on strangeness.

For example, something brains do that I suspect is essential to biological intelligence is self-optimization: they can implement processes using inefficient-but-flexible conscious control, and then store information about that process in fast but volatile chemical storage, and then later consolidate that learning and transfer it to physically encoded neural circuits, and even continue to optimize those physical circuits over time if they get signals to indicate that doing so would be worth the space and energy cost.

Comparing that kind of thing to how LLMs work, I come away with the impression that the technology is still pretty primitive and we’re just making up for it with brute force. Kind of the equivalent of getting to an output of 10,000 horsepower by using a team of 25,000 horses.

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