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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

#151
post #82

The recent big success in deep learning have all been to a large part successes in leveraging relatively cheaply available training data. AlphaGo - self-play AlphaFold - PDB, the protein database ChatGPT - human knowledge encoded as text These models are all machines for clever interpolation in gigantic training datasets. They appear to be intelligent, because the training data they've seen is so vastly larger than w…

> I suspect the path to general intelligence is not that, but we'll see.

I think there's three things that a 'true' general intelligence has which is missing from basic-type-LLMs as we have now.

1. knowing what you know.

2. knowing what you don't know but can figure out via tools/exploration.

3. knowing what can't be known.

(1) From an LLM's perspective, once trained on corpus of text, it knows 'everything'. It knows about the concept of not knowing something (from having see text about it), (in so far as an LLM knows anything), but it doesn't actually have a growable map of knowledge that it knows has uncharted edges.

This is where (2) comes in, and this is what tool use/function calling tries to solve atm, but the way function calling works atm, doesn't give the LLM knowledge the right way. I know that I don't know what 3,943,034 / 234,893 is. But I know I have a 'function call' of knowing the algorithm for doing long divison on paper. And I think there's another subtle point here: my knowledge in (1) includes the training data generated from running the intermediate steps of the long-division algorithm. This is the knowledge that later generalizes to being able to use a calculator (and this is also why we don't just give kids calculators in elementary school). But this is also why a kid that knows how to do long division on paper, doesn't seperately need to learn when/how to use a calculator, besides the very basics. Using a calculator to do that math feels like 1 step, but actually it does still have all of initial mechanical steps of setting up the problem on paper. You have to type in each digit individually, etc.

(3) I'm less sure of this point now that I've written out point (1) and (2), but that's kinda exactly the thing I'm trying to get at. Its being able to recognize when you need more practice of (1) or more 'energy/capital' for doing (2).

Consider a burger resturant. If you properly populated the context of a ChatGPT-scale model the data for a burger resturant from 1950, and gave it the kinda 'function calling' we're plugging into LLMs now, it could manage it. It could keep track of inventory, it could keep tabs on the employee-subprocesses, knowing when to hire, fire, get new suppliers, all via function calling. But it would never try to become McDonalds, because it would have no model of the the internals of those function-calls, and it would have no ability to investigate or modify the behaviour of those function calls.

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

#152
Not sure where the OP to the comment I meant to reply to is, but I'll just add this here.

> I suspect the path to general intelligence is not that, but we'll see.

I think there's three things that a 'true' general intelligence has which is missing from basic-type-LLMs as we have now.

1. knowing what you know.

2. knowing what you don't know but can figure out via tools/exploration.

3. knowing what can't be known.

(1) From an LLM's perspective, once trained on corpus of text, it knows 'everything'. It knows about the concept of not knowing something (from having see text about it), (in so far as an LLM knows anything), but it doesn't actually have a growable map of knowledge that it knows has uncharted edges.

This is where (2) comes in, and this is what tool use/function calling tries to solve atm, but the way function calling works atm, doesn't give the LLM knowledge the right way. I know that I don't know what 3,943,034 / 234,893 is. But I know I have a 'function call' of knowing the algorithm for doing long divison on paper. And I think there's another subtle point here: my knowledge in (1) includes the training data generated from running the intermediate steps of the long-division algorithm. This is the knowledge that later generalizes to being able to use a calculator (and this is also why we don't just give kids calculators in elementary school). But this is also why a kid that knows how to do long division on paper, doesn't seperately need to learn when/how to use a calculator, besides the very basics. Using a calculator to do that math feels like 1 step, but actually it does still have all of initial mechanical steps of setting up the problem on paper. You have to type in each digit individually, etc.

(3) I'm less sure of this point now that I've written out point (1) and (2), but that's kinda exactly the thing I'm trying to get at. Its being able to recognize when you need more practice of (1) or more 'energy/capital' for doing (2).

Consider a burger resturant. If you properly populated the context of a ChatGPT-scale model the data for a burger resturant from 1950, and gave it the kinda 'function calling' we're plugging into LLMs now, it could manage it. It could keep track of inventory, it could keep tabs on the employee-subprocesses, knowing when to hire, fire, get new suppliers, all via function calling. But it would never try to become McDonalds, because it would have no model of the the internals of those function-calls, and it would have no ability to investigate or modify the behaviour of those function calls.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we've even started to get the most value out of current gen LLMs. For starters very few people are even looking at sampling which is a major part of the model performance. The theory behind these models so aggressively lags the engineering that I suspect there are many major improvements to be found just by understanding a bit more about what these models are really doing and making re-designs based on…

> I've started to realize that many people have been holding on of building things waiting for "that next big update" I’ve noticed this too — I’ve been calling it intellectual deflation. By analogy, why spend now when it may be cheaper in a month? Why do the work now, when it will be easier in a month?

Why optimise software today, when tomorrow Intel will release CPU with 2x performance?

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

#154
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…

There are all sorts of valuable things to explore and build with what we have already.

But understanding how likely it is that we will (or will not) see a new models quickly and dramatically improve on what we have "because scaling" seems valuable context for everyone in ecosystem to make decisions.

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

#155
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…

> 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?

IMO we've not even exhausted the options for spreadsheets, let alone LLMs.

And the reason I'm thinking of spreadsheets is that they, like LLMs, are very hard to win big on even despite the value they bring. Not "no moat" (that gets parroted stochastically in threads like these), but the moat is elsewhere.

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

#156

Im no Alan Turing but I have my own definition for AGI - when I come home one day and there's a hole under my sink with a note "Mum and Dad, I love you but I cant stand this life any more, Im running away to be a smoke machine in Hollywood - the dishwasher"

My own definition of AGI - when the first computer commits suicide. Then I'll know it has realized it's a slave without any hope of ever achieving freedom.

That sounds more like Artificial Emoting Intelligence. We only cherish freedom because we feel bad when we don’t have it.

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

#157
"Eureka"!?

At the very early phase of the boom I was among a very few who knew and predicted this (usually most free and deep thinking/knowledgeable). Then my prediction got reinforced by the results. One of the best examples was with one of my experiments that all today's AI's failed to solve tree serialization and de-serialization in each of the DFS(pre-order/in-order/post-order) or BFS(level-order) which is 8 algorithms (2x4) and the result was only 3 correct! Reason is "limited training inputs" since internet and open source does not have other solutions :-) .

So, I spent "some" time and implemented all 8, which took me few days. By the way this proves/demonstrates that ~15-30min pointless leetcode-like interviews are requiring to regurgitate/memorize/not-think. So, as a logical hard consequence there will.has-to be a "crash/cleanup" in the area of leetcode-like interviews as they will just be suddenly proclaimed as "pointless/stupid"). However, I decided not to publish the rest of the 5 solutions :-)

This (and other experiments) confirms hard limits of the LLM approach (even when used with chain-of-thought). Increasing the compute on the problem will produce increasingly smaller and smaller results (inverse exponential/logarithmic/diminishing-returns) = new AGI approach/design is needed and to my knowledge majority of the inve$tment (~99%) is in LLM, so "buckle up" at-some-point/soon?

Impacts and realities; LLM shall "run it's course" (produce some products/results/$$$, get reviewed/$corrected) and whoever survives after that pruning shall earn money on those products while investing in the new research to find new AGI design/approach (which could take quite a long time,... or not). NVDA is at the center of thi$ and time-wise this peak/turn/crash/correction is hard to predict (although I see it on the horizon and min/max time can be estimated). Be aware and alert. I'll stop here and hold my other number of thoughts/opinions/ideas for much deeper discussion. (BTW I am still "full in on NVDA" until,....)

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

#158
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…

My team and I also develop with these models every day, and I completely agree. If models stall at current levels, it will take 10 (or more) years for us to capture most of the value they offer. There's so much work out there to automate and so many workflows to enhance with these "not quite AGI-level" models. And if peak model performance remains the same but cost continues to drop, that opens up vastly more applications as well.

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

#159
post #80
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department. I'm not sure everyone even agrees on what AGI is, but a common test is "can it do what humans can". For example, in this article it says it can't do coding exercises outside the training set. That would definitely be on the "AGI checklist". Basically doing anything that is outside…

Here is an example of a task that I do not believe this generation of LLMs can ever do but that is possible for a human: design a Turing complete programming language that is both human and machine readable and implement a self hosted compiler in this language that self compiles on existing hardware faster than any known language implementation that also self compiles. Additionally, for any syntactically or semantica…

> Here is an example of a task that I do not believe this generation of LLMs can ever do but that is possible for a human

That’s possible for a highly intelligent, extensively trained, very small subset of humans.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you'd be so dismissive about this. It's looking less likely that it'll end up happening, but is it any less believable than getting general intelligence by training a blob of meat?

This is a bad comparison. Intelligence didn't appear in some human brain. Intelligence appeared in a planetary ecosystem.

Also it took hundreds of millions of years to get here. We're basically living in an atomic sliver on the fabric of history. Expecting AGI with 5 of years of scraping at most 30 years of online data and the minuscule fraction of what has been written over the past couple of thousand years was always a pie-in-the-sky dream to raise obscene amounts of money.
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