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OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

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Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought maybe they were on the right track until I read Attention Is All You Need. Nah, at best we found a way to make one part of a collection of systems that will, together, do something like thinking. Thinking isn’t part of what this current approach does. What’s most surprising about modern LLMs is that it turns out there is so much information statistically encoded in the structure of our writing that we can u…

I see takes like this all the time and its so confusing. Why does knowing how things work under the hood make you think its not on the path towards AGI? What was lacking in the Attention paper that tells you AGI won't be built on LLMs? If its the supposed statistical nature of LLMs (itself a questionable claim), why does statistics seem so deflating to you?

> Why does knowing how things work under the hood make you think its not on the path towards AGI?

Because I had no idea how these were built until I read the paper, so couldn’t really tell what sort of tree they’re barking up. The failure-modes of LLMs and ways prompts affect output made a ton more sense after I updated my mental model with that information.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#132
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me modify that a little, because humans can't do things outside their training set either. A crucial element of AGI would be the ability to self-train on self-generated data, online. So it's not really AGI if there is a hard distinction between training and inference (though it may still be very capable), and it's not really AGI if it can't work its way through novel problems on its own. The ability to immediatel…

Are you arguing that writing, doing math, going to the moon etc. were all in the "original training set" of humans in some way?

Not in the original training set (GP is saying), but the necessary skills became part of the training set over time. In other words, human are fine with the training set being a changing moving target, whereas ML models are to a significant extent “stuck” with their original training set.

(That’s not to say that humans don’t tend to lose some of their flexibility over their individual lifetimes as well.)

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#133
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, AGI means many different things to many different people but OpenAI defines it as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in most economically valuable tasks"

This definition suits OpenAI because it lets them claim AGI after reaching an arbitrary goal. LLMs already outperform humans in a huge variety of tasks. ML in general outperform humans in a large variety of tasks. Are all of them AGI? Doubtful.

No, it's just a far more useful definition that is actionable and measurable. Not "consciousness" or "self-awareness" or similar philosophical things. The definition on Wikipedia doesn't talk about that either. People working on this by and large don't want to deal with vague, ill-defined concepts that just make people argue around in circles. It's not an Open AI exclusive thing.

If it acts like one, whether you call a machine conscious or not is pure semantics. Not like potential consequences are any less real.

>LLMs already outperform humans in a huge variety of tasks.

Yes, LLMs are General Intelligences and if that is your only requirement for AGI, they certainly already are[0]. But the definition above hinges on long-horizon planning and competence levels that todays models have generally not yet reached.

>ML in general outperform humans in a large variety of tasks.

This is what the G in AGI is for. Alphafold doesn't do anything but predict proteins. Stockfish doesn't do anything but play chess.

>Are all of them AGI? Doubtful.

Well no, because they're missing the G.

[0] https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#134
post #115

Question for the group here: do we honestly feel like we've exhausted the options for delivering value on top of the current generation of LLMs? I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go. GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential…

All of these hacks do sound like we are at that diminishing return point.

It all just sounds to me like we're back at expert systems. Doesn't bode well...

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#135

A few important things to remember here: The best engineering minds have been focused on scaling transformer pre and post training for the last three years because they had good reason to believe it would work, and it has up until now. Progress has been measured against benchmarks which are / were largely solvable with scale. There is another emerging paradigm which is still small(er) scale but showing remarkable res…

> that does not mean that there arn't giant shocking leaps forward coming from slightly different directions.

Nor does it mean that there are! We've gotten into this habit of assuming that we're owed giant shocking leaps forward every year or so, and this wave of AI startups raised money accordingly, but that's never how any innovation has worked. We've always followed the same pattern: there's a breakthrough which causes a major shift in what's possible, followed by a few years of rapid growth as engineers pick up where the scientists left off, followed by a plateau while we all get used to the new normal.

We ought to be expecting a plateau, but Sam Altman and company have done their work well and have convinced many of us that this time it's different. This time it's the singularity, and we're going to see exponential growth from here on out. People want to believe it, so they do, and Altman is milking that belief for all it's worth.

But make no mistake: Altman has been telegraphing that he's eyeing the exit, and you don't eye the exit when you own a company that's set to continue exponentially increasing in value.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty clear Pretty clear?

Not the parent, but in prediction markets such as Metaculus[0] and Manifold[1] the median prediction is of AGI within 5 years. [0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... [1] https://manifold.markets/ai

What is this supposed to be evidence of? People believing hype?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once we've scraped the internet of its data, we need more data. Robots can take in video/audio data 24/7 and can be placed in your house to record this data by offering services like cooking/cleaning/folding laundry. Yeah, I'll pay $20k to have you record everything that happens in my house if I can stop doing dishes for five years!

Why 5 years?

Because whatever org fills this space will be working on ARR.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once we've scraped the internet of its data, we need more data. Robots can take in video/audio data 24/7 and can be placed in your house to record this data by offering services like cooking/cleaning/folding laundry. Yeah, I'll pay $20k to have you record everything that happens in my house if I can stop doing dishes for five years!

Why 5 years?

that's when the robot takes his job and he can't afford the robot anymore.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once we've scraped the internet of its data, we need more data. Robots can take in video/audio data 24/7 and can be placed in your house to record this data by offering services like cooking/cleaning/folding laundry. Yeah, I'll pay $20k to have you record everything that happens in my house if I can stop doing dishes for five years!

Why 5 years?

Five years, that's all we've got.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Years_(David_Bowie_song...

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