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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#141

Post by thinkling »

orangebread wrote: post #93
torben-friis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are mixing up consciousness and will. I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday is the same as you, since you-today could be another consciousness that just happens to share the same memories. All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a spirit/soul... but getti…

You bring up an interesting point, but I would pose the following: where does will come from? To me, consciousness is the seat, or root, of where will comes from. Let's say you get expert level surgeon or politician training, what then? There is nothing that specifically silos a surgeon or politician's knowledge-set. Meaning a politician's skillset isn't purely in a domain that doesn't cross into a surgeon's and vice…

Do you think bacteria have will? Or plants?

When their actions are sped up to match the speed at which we move, movies of their behavior will start to look like there's intent and will. Plants move towards the light, tendrils "reach" for supports, etc.

Clearly this is humans projecting our mental model onto plants, but... are you sure we're not also projecting it onto ourselves?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#142

Post by seiferteric »

adrian_b wrote: post #72
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolutionary brain development. We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so. What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago? ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago c…

The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached its peak long before 200k years ago. Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of big animals.

How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#143

Post by fluoridation »

snowwrestler wrote: post #113
tyleo wrote: post #8

It still seems like something is missing from all these frameworks. I feel like an average human wouldn't pass some of these metrics yet they are "generally intelligent". On the other hand they also wouldn't pass a lot of the expert questions that AI is good at. We're measuring something, and I think optimizing it is useful, I'd even say it is "intelligent" in some ways, but it doesn't seem "intelligent" in the same…

If a human cares about the work, they can often outperform an LLM because they will keep at it until the work meets their standard of quality. Whereas the LLM will guess and then wait to be corrected. As a recent tweet I saw said: it’s amazing how fast the software bottleneck went from writing code, to reviewing code. I think we’ll need to split the concept of intelligence into the capacity to accomplish a task and t…

>I think we’ll need to split the concept of intelligence into the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to conceive and prompt a task. If the former is called “intelligence” then LLMs are intelligent.

Huh? No. "The capacity to accomplish a task" is not intelligence. By that definition, a washing machine is intelligent.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#144

Post by darkwater »

mhl47 wrote: post #46
pocketarc wrote: post #20

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…

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#145

Post by orangebread »

torben-friis wrote: post #139
orangebread wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tricky topic to navigate because from a materialist perspective consciousness is the side effect of biochemical mechanisms. And many will point to the brain as the obvious container of our consciousness as a bullet to the head versus the arm would demonstrate. But if a brain/intelligence is all you need to prove consciousness, then would an effectively complex set of neural networks that contained the same…

Do you have any reason to introduce that whole extra invisible, unprovable complex system? Is there anything the materialist model can not explain that you feel your model does, or is it just a case of "I don't like the alternative"?

Depends on what you qualify as proof. Much of what I said was experiential and corroborated with other people who have had similar experiences as I've had. I know that in the scientific world it would be dismissed without as much a glance. But I'm not here to convince everyone of my perspective, I'm just adding one that the engineering world has not examined or introduced given the current pursuit.

And it's not a matter of not liking the alternative. Like I said, I used to believe that consciousness was an emergent trait of complex systems, but I had what some call a "spiritual awakening" and I saw what was on the other side.

It's kind of like describing pizza to someone who's never eaten pizza. You could try and describe it by asking if they'd eaten cheese or bread or tomato sauce before and then go "imagine all of those combined". It's not the same as actually having eaten it. But this is heading into a different, albeit related territory.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#146

Post by stevenhuang »

cess11 wrote: post #138
pingou wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's called functionalism. To me, it's actually the opposite, assuming there is a fundamental difference between simulated neurons and real ones seems almost religious. While it's true that we aren't there yet, and simulated neurons are currently quite different from real ones (so I agree there is a big difference at the moment), it's unclear why you presumably think it will always stay that way.

If you actually have a way to fully, without reductions, simulate matter, that's probably a Nobel prize coming your way. The common scientific understanding is that this is not possible, at least not without extreme amounts of energy and time. The dimensionality, or complexity if you'd prefer, of your logic gates is quite different from the cosmos. You might not agree but in my parlance a linear and a fractal curve a…

We may not need to go down that level.

For the qualities we care about, it may turn out to be the case we don't need to simulate matter perfectly. We may not need to concern ourselves with the fractal complexity of reality if we identify the right higher level abstractions with which to operate on. This phenomenon is known as causal emergence.

> That is, a macroscale description of a system (a map) can be more informative than a fully detailed microscale description of the system (the territory). This has been called “causal emergence.”

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188

From a HN discussion a while ago:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-sca...

> A highly compressed description of the system then emerges at the macro level that captures those dynamics of the micro level that matter to the macroscale behavior — filtered, as it were, through the nested web of intermediate ε-machines. In that case, the behavior of the macro level can be predicted as fully as possible using only macroscale information — there is no need to refer to finer-scale information. It is, in other words, fully emergent. The key characteristic of this emergence, the researchers say, is this hierarchical structure of “strongly lumpable causal states.”

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#147

Post by skeeter2020 »

mlmonkey wrote: post #120
imtringued wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop. They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.

It looks like the company (Cognition) is actively hiring (20+ job openings last I checked). That doesn't sound like a "flop" to me...

Think about: why would they be hiring actual human beings if Devin actually works? Seems like the purest example of "dogfooding"...

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#148

Post by naasking »

komali2 wrote: post #31
raincole wrote: post #25

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?

200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.

Reich's lab actually found evidence of meaningful genetic changes that improved intelligence over the past 10,000 years, but not so much prior to that:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1

The advent of agriculture and civilization had many powerful selection effects.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#149

Post by LastMuel »

orangebread wrote: post #50

As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness. Hear me out. I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determ…

Are you saying that consciousness is unique to meat and no other matter can produce the same result? That seems very short sighted.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#150

Post by snaking0776 »

Jensson wrote: post #88
mhl47 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.

But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.

There’s a lot of research out there about the general flexibility of the brain to adapt to whatever stimulus you pump into it. For example taxi cab drivers have larger areas in their hippocampus dedicated to place cells relative to the general population [1]. There’s also all kinds of work studying general flexibility of the brain in response to novel stimulus like the visual cortex of blind people being dedicated to auditory processing [2 is a broad review]. I guess you could argue that the ability to be flexible is intelligence but the timescales over which a brain functionally changes is longer than a general day to day flexibility. Maybe some brains come into an initial state that’s more predisposed to the set of properties that we deem as “intelligence” but development is so stimulus dependent that I think this definition of a fixed intelligence is functionally meaningless. There are definitely differences in what you can learn as you age but anyone stating we have any causal measure of innate intelligence is claiming far more than we actually have evidence for. We have far more evidence to suggest that we can train at least the appearance and usage of “intelligence”. After all no one is born capable of formal logical reasoning and it must be taught [3,4 kind of weak citations foe this claim but there’s a lot to suggest this that I don’t feel like digging up]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... [3] https://psychologyfor.com/wason-selection-task-what-it-is-an... [4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794802.2021.1...

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