Live data from Hacker News

AGI Is Here

robinsloan.com

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: AGI Is Here

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with beads, or shoving it in git, or .MD files, it's not clear that we do.

These are all very much in the same category of hacks that I mentioned. A cat doesn't know its way around a house when it's born, but it also doesn't have to flick through markdown files to find its way around. A child can touch a hot stove once and be neurotic about touching hot things for the rest of their life, without having to read flash cards each morning or think for a few minutes about "what do I know about s…

Call them a "hack" all you want, they seem to work. What's particularly intesting is how claude has been trained on skills, so it doesn't need to be taught how to use a skill, so that's been baked into it.

Re: AGI Is Here

#23

I want a thing that has a fuzzy capability . To make this easier to discuss and think about, here's a short name for that thing, and a longer definition that probably describes that thing. . Oh look, if I take the literal definitions of some words in , there's a thing that fits! Therefore is solved!

Typical software engineer "reasoning."

Re: AGI Is Here

#24
[Recycled from a dupe submission]

> This is why I pro­pose uni­lat­eral dec­la­ra­tion as a strategic countermove [... tearing] away the veil of any-minute-now mil­lenar­i­anism to reveal deployed tech­nology

I think that in an ideal world, this would thoroughly embarrass the over-promisers by forcing them to put-up-or-shut-up, and it's fun to imagine... however I worry that it won't work out that way. Instead of deflating the nonsense in its tracks, it'll just give it more momentum and worsen the eventual mess.

> What do I mean by AGI ?

Can we fight it with a better term? Something like... Oh, I dunno, maybe "Artificial Narrative Intelligence", in the same sense that we could say A* is a kind of pathfinding intelligence.

I say "narrative" because we've got these machines that grow "fitting" documents, and are often used with stories to "decide" what happens next. For example, the story setting is a Support Page, the Customer Character says X, and the Very Helpful Robot Character then does Y and says Z in response, etc.

However just because these stories fit surprisingly well doesn't mean it's doing the kind of "thinking" we really dreamed of.

> You some­times read about employees of AI com­pa­nies absorbed by their own products. Nobody on Earth has spent more hours talking to YakGPT than Katie Echo! Nobody can pump more code out of Shan­non­Soft than Johnny Narcissus! Recalling my Twitter expe­ri­ence, I think boasts (and posts) of this kind should inspire caution.

To me a lot of that feels like just the thing-of-the-day LinkedIn Lunacy, albeit running at an unusual intensity.

Re: AGI Is Here

#25
> AGI is here!

Can AGI not speak for itself? Does it need humans to speak and act on its behalf? Who are the high-priests and what are the sects?

Re: AGI Is Here

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all very much in the same category of hacks that I mentioned. A cat doesn't know its way around a house when it's born, but it also doesn't have to flick through markdown files to find its way around. A child can touch a hot stove once and be neurotic about touching hot things for the rest of their life, without having to read flash cards each morning or think for a few minutes about "what do I know about s…

Call them a "hack" all you want, they seem to work. What's particularly intesting is how claude has been trained on skills, so it doesn't need to be taught how to use a skill, so that's been baked into it.

I'm not claiming they don't work in some sense, but as a user you have to be fairly deeply aware of how they work, context engineering is A Thing, you have to tell LLMs to remember stuff, etc.

We're hacking around the fact that the models don't learn in normal use. That's in no way controversial.

A model that continuously learnt would not need the same sort of context engineering, external memory databases, etc.

Re: AGI Is Here

#27

It's not even AI, let alone AGI. It's a high dimensional statistical map of language, that's all.

"It's a mindless next-token predictor," says the human, as he skillfully emulates a mindless next-token predictor.

Re: AGI Is Here

#28

It's not even AI, let alone AGI. It's a high dimensional statistical map of language, that's all.

"It's a mindless next-token predictor," says the human, as he skillfully emulates a mindless next-token predictor.

"the apparent is the same as the real", "this two dimensional photo is the same as the world it was taken in" says the tech bro, as he unskilfully attempts to emulate a philosopher.

Re: AGI Is Here

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call them a "hack" all you want, they seem to work. What's particularly intesting is how claude has been trained on skills, so it doesn't need to be taught how to use a skill, so that's been baked into it.

I'm not claiming they don't work in some sense, but as a user you have to be fairly deeply aware of how they work, context engineering is A Thing, you have to tell LLMs to remember stuff, etc. We're hacking around the fact that the models don't learn in normal use. That's in no way controversial. A model that continuously learnt would not need the same sort of context engineering, external memory databases, etc.

You speak the truth but looking back, what I reacted to is

> It's clear that we need a paradigm shift on memory to unlock the next level of performance.

and my take is that we might not need to get there to get the next level of performance, based on how well the latest models are able to utilize these hacks of a memory feature. On top of that, Claude was specifically RLHF'd to have the skills concept, so it's good with those. We disagree. Let's let time see who ends up being right.

Re: AGI Is Here

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's a mindless next-token predictor," says the human, as he skillfully emulates a mindless next-token predictor.

"the apparent is the same as the real", "this two dimensional photo is the same as the world it was taken in" says the tech bro, as he unskilfully attempts to emulate a philosopher.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN