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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

#111

Post by skydhash »

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…

I don’t think that I ever wanted to do an arithmetic operation with a computer and have a wrong answer as the result. One day, you’ll be happy with typing ls and have the system ‘rm -rf /‘ itself

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#112

Post by zeroonetwothree »

BobbyJo wrote: post #98
materielle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

As a young adult in 2007, what cliff were we close to? The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.

It felt like the entire global financial system had a chance of collapsing.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#113

Post by bamboozled »

helterskelter wrote: post #109

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 p…

I've used for similar things, I've had some good and disastrous results. In a way I feel like I'm basically where I was "before AI".

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#114

Post by hackyhacky »

materielle wrote: post #93
hackyhacky wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

I think corporations can definitely transform society in the near future. I don't think it will be a positive transformation, but it will be a transformation.

Most of all, AI will exacerbate the lack of trust in people and institutions that was kicked into high gear by the internet. It will be easy and cheap to convince large numbers of people about almost anything.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#115

Post by edmundsauto »

BobbyJo wrote: post #98
materielle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

As a young adult in 2007, what cliff were we close to? The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.

We were pretty close to a collapse of the existing financial system. Maybe we’d be better off now if it happened, but the interim devastation would have been costly.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#116

Post by bamboozled »

esafak wrote: post #55
9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.

From my experience, if you think AI is better than most workers, you're probably just generating a whole bunch of semi-working garbage, accepting that input as good enough and will likely learn the hardware your software is full of bugs and incorrect logic.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#117

Post by hackyhacky »

webdoodle wrote: post #97
hackyhacky wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It also took years for the Internet to be usable by most folks. It was hard, expensive and unpractical for decades. Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.

Allow me to clarify: I'm not wishing for change. I am an AI pessimist. I think our society is not prepared to deal with what's about to happen. You're right: AI is the key to the enshitification of everything, most of all trust.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#118

Post by tux1968 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #95
xutopia wrote: post #52

I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online. The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.

That's pre-training. Post training with RL can make models arbitrarily good at specific capabilities, and it's usually done via pooled human experts, so it's definitely not statistically mediocre. The issue is that we're not modelling the problem, but a proxy for the problem. RL doesn't generalize very well as is, when you apply it to a loose proxy measure you get the abysmal data efficiency we see with LLMs. We migh…

Maybe i'm misunderstanding your point, but human's have pretty abysmal data efficiency, too. We have to use tools for everything... ledgers, spreadsheets, data-bases, etc. It'll be the same for an AGI, there won't be any reason for it to remember every little detail, just be able to use the appropriate tool, as needed.
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