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The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

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Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#151

Post by nradov »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #40
ozgung wrote: post #28

"Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." [Wikipedia] One can argue that they have already achieved this. At least for short termed tasks. Humans are still better at organization, collaboration and carrying out very long tasks like managing a project or a company.

> One can argue that they have already achieved this. No, because they're hugely reliant on their training data and can't really move beyond their training data. This is why you haven't seen an explosion of new LLM-aided scientific discoveries, why Suno can't write a song in a new genre (even if you explain it to Suno in detail and give it actual examples,) etc. This should tell you something enormous about (1) their…

Sam Altman keeps claiming that ChatGPT is going to cure cancer. So far its contribution to novel medical research has been approximately zero.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#152

Post by MadxX79 »

sulam wrote: post #131
fwipsy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how many "fundamental" limitations of AI have been resolved within the past few years, I'm skeptical. Even if you're right, I am not sure that the limitations you identified matter all that much in practice. I think very few human engineers are working on problems which are so novel and unique that AIs cannot grasp them without additional reinforcement learning. > it will delete all the files in "X/" How many "…

Sorry, but you're mistaking outputs with process. If you actually know what models are doing under the hood to product output that (admittedly) looks very convincing, you'll quickly realize that they are simply exceptionally good at statistically predicting the next token in a stream of tokens. The reason you are having to become an expert at context engineering, and the reason the labs still hire engineers, is becau…

I enjoyed playing mastermind with LLMs where they pick the code and I have to guess it.

It's not aware that it doesn't know what the code is (it isn't in the context because it's supposed to be secret), but it just keeps giving clues. Initially it works, because most clues are possible in the beginning, but very quickly it starts to give inconsistent clues and eventually has to give up.

At no point does it "realise" that it doesn't even know what the secret code is itself. It makes it very clear that the AI isn't playing mastermind with you, it's trying to predict what a mastermind player in it's training set would say, and that doesn't include "wait a second, I'm an AI, I don't know the secret code because I didn't really pick one!" so it just merilly goes on predicting tokens, without any sort of awareness what it's saying or what it is.

It works if you allow it to output the code so it's in context, but probably just because there is enough data in the training set to match two 4 letter strings and know how many of them matches (there's not that many possibilities).

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#153

Post by MadxX79 »

stratos123 wrote: post #144
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. You cannot get real, actual AGI (the same ability to perform tasks as a human) without a continuous cycle of learning and deep memory, which LLMs cannot do. The best LLM "memory" is a search engine and document summari…

> AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. The statements of what "actual researchers" are you relying upon for your "next 30 years" estimate? How do you reconcile them with the sub-10- or even sub-5-years timelines of other AI researchers, like Daniel Kokota…

I'm guessing they have a lot of shares in the AI companies they work(ed) for, and they would like to pump their value so they can buy an even nicer carribean island than they can already afford?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#154

Post by dang »

ambicapter wrote: post #129

Why the title change? previous title: Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race

Because it's linkbait. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

(The article itself strikes me as better than that)

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#155

Post by dang »

tokai wrote: post #134
ambicapter wrote: post #129

Why the title change? previous title: Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race

Because if mods feels like a title is flamebaiting it will get changed. It rarely makes much sense.

Interpretations will always differ, of course, but an equally potent factor is that people tend only to notice the cases they disagree with. The edits that are fine pass without notice because they don't stand out, which is kind of the point of debaiting titles in the first place.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#156

Post by sebastos »

logicchains wrote: post #145
djoldman wrote: post #116

Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." Or the long version: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness." Or the short versions: "Skippetyboop," "plipnikop," and "zingybang."

>Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." There are lots of meaningful definitions, the people saying we haven't reached AGI just don't use them. For most of the last half-century people would have agreed that machines that can pass the Turing test and win Math Olympiad gold are AGI.

Firstly, the models that pass the Math Olympiad aren’t the same models as the ones you’re saying “pass the Turing test”. Secondly, nothing actually passes the Turing test. They pass a vibes check of “hey that’s pretty good!” but if your life depended on it, you could easily find ways to sniff out an LLM agent. Thirdly, none of these models learn in real time, which is an obviously essential feature.

We’ll know AGI when we see it, and this ain’t it. This complaining about changing goalposts is so transparently sour grapes from people over-invested in hyping the current LLM paradigm.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#157

Post by namrog84 »

tokai wrote: post #150
logicchains wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." There are lots of meaningful definitions, the people saying we haven't reached AGI just don't use them. For most of the last half-century people would have agreed that machines that can pass the Turing test and win Math Olympiad gold are AGI.

Turing test is generally misunderstood, much like Schrodinger's cat, it has devolved in to a pop cultural meme. The test is to evaluate if a machine can think . Not if it is intelligent, not if it is human-like. Its dismissed as a useful by most experts in philosophy of mind, AI, language, etc.. Thinking cool and all but not that extraordinary. Even plants does it.

I thought that was part of the issue, is the poor understanding of is the test to evaluate if it can think or only if we think it can think. And even that is generalizable since there are different categories of thinking or concepts of the mind.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#158

Post by dwohnitmok »

dang wrote: post #154
ambicapter wrote: post #129

Why the title change? previous title: Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race

Because it's linkbait. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. " (The article itself strikes me as better than that)

Really? I view the original title as a very good summary of the overall point of the article and this new title as fairly misleading.

> It can be debated whether arena.ai is a suitable metric for AGI, a strong case can probably be made for why it’s not. However, that’s irrelevant, as the spirit of the self-sacrifice clause is to avoid an arms race, and we are clearly in one.

> Therefore, one can only conclude, that we currently meet the stated example triggering condition of “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years”. As per its charter, OpenAI should stop competing with the likes of Anthropic and Gemini, and join forces, however that might look like.

The new title is a single, almost throwaway, line from the article.

> While this will never happen, I think it’s illustrative of some great points for pondering:

> The impotence of naive idealism in the face of economic incentives. The discrepancy between marketing points and practical actions. The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines. Notably, it’s common to now talk about ASI instead, implying we may have already achieved AGI, almost without noticing.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#159

Post by dwohnitmok »

MadxX79 wrote: post #153
stratos123 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. The statements of what "actual researchers" are you relying upon for your "next 30 years" estimate? How do you reconcile them with the sub-10- or even sub-5-years timelines of other AI researchers, like Daniel Kokota…

I'm guessing they have a lot of shares in the AI companies they work(ed) for, and they would like to pump their value so they can buy an even nicer carribean island than they can already afford?

Kokotajlo gave up all his shares in OpenAI as part of his refusal to sign a nondisparagement agreement with OpenAI.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#160

Post by Spivak »

stratos123 wrote: post #144
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. You cannot get real, actual AGI (the same ability to perform tasks as a human) without a continuous cycle of learning and deep memory, which LLMs cannot do. The best LLM "memory" is a search engine and document summari…

> AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. The statements of what "actual researchers" are you relying upon for your "next 30 years" estimate? How do you reconcile them with the sub-10- or even sub-5-years timelines of other AI researchers, like Daniel Kokota…

See this is a fun game because when you're fishing for a breakthrough you can predict tomorrow or 100 years. Nobody, even experts have any idea until it happens and they're holding it in their hands. To have any kind of accurate prediction you would have to have already observed other civilizations discover AGI to say how close the environment is to even be capable of making the leap. We could be missing something huge, we could need multiple seemingly unrelated breakthroughs to get there. We're for sure closer, but we could still be miles away, GPTs might even barking up the wrong tree.

Why this discussion is already annoying and poised to get so much worse is because now hundred billion dollar companies have a direct financial incentive to say they did it so I expect the definition will get softened to near meaninglessness so some marketing department can slap AGI on their thing.

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