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The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

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Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#191

Post by irishcoffee »

mattlondon wrote: post #177
kovek wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models need pre-training and fine tuning. Humans can do online learning.

How much of our brain's innate wiring is "pre-training"? We're born pre-wired to breath, to swallow, to blink, sleep, cry etc. Fine tuned over many many many epochs and baked into our model weights/DNA. Is a newborn baby without learnt-knowledge not an intelligent being to you? Or is an empty vessel such as a newborn baby intelligent merely because it has the ability to learn? It gets pretty philosophical pretty quic…

> Is a newborn baby without learnt-knowledge not an intelligent being to you?

A newborn baby without learnt knowledge is a phenomenal comparison to an LLM: reactionary, incapable of communicating a novel thought, extremely inconsistent reactions to similar stimuli, costs a lot of money, and the best part is they almost never turn out to be an income-bearing investment.

Despite all this, people vehemently defend their ugly, obnoxious, screaming, drooling babies with the fierceness of a lion, because they’re so blinded by emotion they’re incapable of logical thought.

I have three kids, I’ve earned the right to say this.

What a great comparison!

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#192

Post by runarberg »

ufmace wrote: post #169
sebastos wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> nothing actually passes the Turing test Says who? I had already found this study, published almost a year ago, saying that they do: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelli…

First of. The Turing test has a rigorous definition. Secondly, it has been debunked for almost half a century at this point by Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment. Thirdly, intelligence it self is a scientifically fraught term with ever changing meaning as we discover more and more “intelligent” behavior in nature (by animals and plants, and more). And to make matters worse, general intelligence is even worse, as the term was used almost exclusively for racist pseudo-science, as a way to operationally define a metric which would prove white supremacy.

Artificial General Intelligence will exist when the grifters who profit from it claim it exists. The meaning of it will shift to benefit certain entrepreneurs. It will never actually be a useful term in science nor philosophy.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#193

Post by aerhardt »

matricks wrote: post #44
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.

It depends. SoTA models are at least very close to AGI when it comes to textual and still image inputs for most domains. In many domains, SoTA AI is superhuman both in time and speed. (Not wrt energy efficiency.*) AI SoTA for video is not at AGI level, clearly. Many people distinguish intelligence from memory. With this in mind, I think one can argue we’ve reached AGI in terms of “intelligence”; we just haven’t paire…

LLMS are terrible at writing in terms of style, and in terms of content or creativity they couldn’t come up with a short story any better than what you’d find at an amateur writer workshop. To declare we have reached AGI in textual media seems premature at best.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#194

Post by MadxX79 »

Balinares wrote: post #174
MadxX79 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is actually a genius and beautifully simple way to exhibit the difference between thought and the appearance of thought.

It really dispelled the illusion for me, but it's not that easy to find those examples, but the combinatorics of possible number of guesses is untractable enough that it can't learn a good set of clues for all possible guesses.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#195

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#196

Post by zeknife »

ufmace wrote: post #169
sebastos wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> nothing actually passes the Turing test Says who? I had already found this study, published almost a year ago, saying that they do: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelli…

ELIZA fooled plenty of people (both originally and in the study you just linked) but i still wouldn't say Eliza passed/passes the turing test in general. It just shows that occasionally or even frequently fooling people is not a sufficient proxy for general intelligence. Ofc there isn't a standardized definition, but one thing I would personally include in a "strict" Turing test is that the human interrogee ought to be incentivized to cooperate and to make their humanity as clear as possible. And the interrogator should similarly be incentivized to find the right answer.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#197

Post by zeknife »

runarberg wrote: post #192
ufmace wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nothing actually passes the Turing test Says who? I had already found this study, published almost a year ago, saying that they do: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelli…

First of. The Turing test has a rigorous definition. Secondly, it has been debunked for almost half a century at this point by Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment. Thirdly, intelligence it self is a scientifically fraught term with ever changing meaning as we discover more and more “intelligent” behavior in nature (by animals and plants, and more). And to make matters worse, general intelligence is even worse, a…

>The Turing test has a rigorous definition

Does it? Where?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#198

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

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.

If fooling people and doing math good are the criteria, we've had AGI for longer than we've had the modern internet.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#199

Post by eloisant »

wongarsu wrote: post #52
dmix wrote: post #20

This is taking Sam Altmans PR statements as proof of AGI? Even the quote they used questions the premise of the article > “We basically have built AGI” (later: “a spiritual statement, not a literal one”)

AGI is so nebulous we will never be able to tell if we hit it. We have hit human-level abilities in some narrow tasks, and are still leagues away in others. And humans have so vastly different skill-levels that we can't even agree what human-level really means. As bad as the economic definition of AGI in OpenAI's Microsoft deal is, at least it's measurable. Imho that's a big part of why people are shifting to ASI. No…

I feel like AI is actually helping us getting a better understanding of what "human intelligence" really is.

I remember when computers became better than humans at chess, many people were shocked and saw that as machines becoming more intelligent than humans. Because being good at chess what considered equivalent to "being smart".

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#200

Post by irishcoffee »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #168
CamperBob2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers. This doesn't seem contradictory if you consider that success at AGI will solve the problem of carbon emissions, one way or another. If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...

> If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters... Then we find out how long it takes for a medium sized city of commuters to start killing each other, elites and burning down data centers. Once they're hungry enough it'll happen for sure

A given country is about 6 missed meals away from complete anarchy.
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