141–150 of 258 posts
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The keyword being “just”.
You “just” need a more vivid imagination if that’s as far as your comment stretches. I mean seriously, people on here. I’m just spitballing ideas not intended to write some kind of dissertation on brain-machine interaction. That’s Elon musks department.
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Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Of course not. You'd have no first person experience of any of the physical experiences that arise from being an embodied agent. Until those (multitude of) lessons can be learned by LLMs, they will remain mere echos of what it is to be human, much less superhuman.
> Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Does this mean our books and audio recordings are simply insufficient? Or is there some "soul" component that can't be recorded?
A typical argument for that is that humans process 1-3 orders of magnitude more multimodal data (in multiple streams being processed in parallel) in their first 4 years of life than the biggest LLMs we have right now do using a fraction of the energy (in a longer timeframe though), and a lot more in the next forming years. For example that accumulated "intelligence" eventually allows a teenager to learn how to drive in 18-24 hours of first-hand training. An LLM won't be able to do with that little training even if it has every other piece of human knowledge, and even if you get to train it with driving images-action pairs I wish you good luck if it is presented with an out-of-distribution situation when it is driving a car.
Humans learn to model the world, LLMs learn to model language (even when processing images or audio, it process them as a language: sequences of patches). That is very useful and valuable, and you can even model a lot of things in the world just using language, but is not the same thing.
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> Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Does this mean our books and audio recordings are simply insufficient? Or is there some "soul" component that can't be recorded?
It isn't some "soul", but I think parent is making the same point as Yann Lecun usually makes: You can't have "true intelligence" (i.e. akin to human intelligence, whatever that is as we don't really know how it works) based on just next token prediction + bandaids. A typical argument for that is that humans process 1-3 orders of magnitude more multimodal data (in multiple streams being processed in parallel) in thei…
For the last two years I've studied French every day, but only using language apps. Recently, I hired a one-on-one tutor. During lessons I find myself responding to what I think I heard with the most plausible response I can generate. Many times each session, my tutor asks me, "Do you really understand or not?" I have to stop and actually think if I do.
I don't have much multi-modal input and increasing it is challenging, but it's the best way I have to actually connect the utterances I make with reality.
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> Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Does this mean our books and audio recordings are simply insufficient? Or is there some "soul" component that can't be recorded?
It isn't some "soul", but I think parent is making the same point as Yann Lecun usually makes: You can't have "true intelligence" (i.e. akin to human intelligence, whatever that is as we don't really know how it works) based on just next token prediction + bandaids. A typical argument for that is that humans process 1-3 orders of magnitude more multimodal data (in multiple streams being processed in parallel) in thei…
Obviously not. Language is just a medium. A model of language is enough to describe how to combine words in legal sentences, not in meaningful sentences. Clearly LLMs learn much more than just the rules that allow to construct grammatically correct language, otherwise they would just babble grammatically correct nonsense such as "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine". That knowledge was acquired via training on language, but is extra-linguistic. It's a model of the world.
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It isn't some "soul", but I think parent is making the same point as Yann Lecun usually makes: You can't have "true intelligence" (i.e. akin to human intelligence, whatever that is as we don't really know how it works) based on just next token prediction + bandaids. A typical argument for that is that humans process 1-3 orders of magnitude more multimodal data (in multiple streams being processed in parallel) in thei…
> LLMs learn to model language Obviously not. Language is just a medium. A model of language is enough to describe how to combine words in legal sentences, not in meaningful sentences. Clearly LLMs learn much more than just the rules that allow to construct grammatically correct language, otherwise they would just babble grammatically correct nonsense such as "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine". That kno…
PS: Plus, most reasoning/planning examples coming from LLM based systems rely in bandaids that work around said LLMs (rlhf'd CoT, LLM-Modulo, Logic-of-Thought, etc) to the point they're being differentiated by the name LRMs: Large Reasoning Models. So much for modelling the world via language just using LLMs.
Can't simulate the brain of an ant or a mouse. Really don't expect ai to reach anything interesting. If science doesn't understand intelligence, it means it cannot be made artificially.
>Can't simulate the brain of an ant or a mouse We can't build a functional ornithopter, yet our aircraft fly like no bird ever possibly could. You don't need the same processes to achieve the same result. Biological brains may not even be the best solution for intelligence; they are just a clunky approximation toward it that natural evolution has reached. See: all of human technology as an analogy.
If you define AGI as something that can do 100% of what a human brain can do, then surely we have to understood exactly how brains work? otherwise you have have a long string of 9s as best.
To me true AGI is achieved when it gets agency, becomes truly autonomous and could do real things best of us, humans, do — start and run successful businesses, contribute to science, to culture, to politics. It still could follow human "prompts" and be aligned to some set of objectives, but it would act autonomously, using every available interface to the human realm to achieve them.
And it absolutely does not matter if it "uses the same principles as human brain" or not. Could be dumb matrix multiplications and "next token prediction" all the way down.
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I have seen far, far too many people say things along the lines of "Sure, LLMs currently don't seem to be good at [thing LLMs are, at least as of now, fundamentally incapable of ], but hey, some people are pretty bad at that sometimes too!" It demonstrates such a complete misunderstanding of the basic nature of the problem that I am left baffled that some of these people claim to actually be in the machine-learning f…
>How can you not understand the difference between "humans are not absolutely perfect or reliable at this task" and "LLMs by their very nature cannot perform this task"? Because anyone who has said nonsense like "LLMs by their very nature cannot do x" and waited a few years has been wrong. That's why GPT-3 and 4 shocked the research world in the first place. People just have their pre-conceptions about how they think…
there are some benchmarks which show fundamental inability of LLM perform certain tasks which human can, for example add 100 digits numbers.
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> Evolution created intelligence and consciousness This is not provable, it an assumption. Religious people (which account for a large percent the population) claim intelligence and/or consciousness stem from a "spirit" which existed before birth and will continue to exist after death. Also unprovable, by the way. I think your foundational assertion would have to be rephrased as "Assuming things like God/spirits don'…
What relevance is the percentage of religious individuals? Religion is evidently not relevant in any case. What ChatGPT already does today religious individuals 50 years ago would have near unanimously declared behavior only a "soul" can do.
Only that OP asserted as fact something that is disputed as fact by a large percentage of the population.
> Religion is evidently not relevant in any case.
I think it's relevant. I would venture to say proving AGI is possible is tantamount to proving God doesn't exist (or rather, proving God is not needed in the formation of an intelligent being)
> What ChatGPT already does today religious individuals 50 years ago would have near unanimously declared behavior only a "soul" can do
Some religious people, maybe. But that sort of blanket statement is made all the time "[Religious people] claimed X was impossible, but science proved them wrong!"
I'm in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then. AGI is absolutely possible with current technology - even if it's only capable of running for a single user per-server-farm. ASI on the other hand... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...
Could you learn everything needed to become fully human simply by reading books and listening to conversations? Of course not. You'd have no first person experience of any of the physical experiences that arise from being an embodied agent. Until those (multitude of) lessons can be learned by LLMs, they will remain mere echos of what it is to be human, much less superhuman.
In fact, if we plan to use them as a tool, then that's definitely not what we want, since it would imply many of the same flaws and limitations as humans.