211–220 of 442 posts
Because if they don't, I honestly don't think they can approach AGI.
I have the feeling it's a common case of lack of humility from an entire field of science who refuses to look at other fields to understand what they're doing.
Not to mention how to define intelligence in evolution, epistemology, ontology, etc.
Approaching AI with a silicon valley mindset is not a good idea.
I have colleagues that want to plan each task of the software team for the next 12 months. They assume that such a thing is possible, or they want to do it anyway because management tells them to. The first would be an example of human fallibility, and the second would be an example of choosing the path of (perceived) least immediate self-harm after accounting for internal politics. I doubt very much we will ever bui…
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This makes no sense. If you believe in eg a mind or soul then maybe it's possible we cannot make AGI. But if we are purely biological then obviously it's possible to replicate that in principle.
That doesn’t contradict what they said. We may one day design a biological computing system that is capable of it. We don’t entirely understand how neurons work; it’s reasonable to posit that the differences that many AGI boosters assert don’t matter do matter— just not in ways we’ve discovered yet.
The suggested requirements are not engineering problems. Conceiving of a model architecture that can represent all the systems described in the blog is a monumental task of computer science research.
I think the OP's point is that all those requirements are to be implemented outside the LLM layer, i.e. we don't need to conceive of any new model architecture. Even if LLMs don't progress any further beyond GPT-5 & Claude 4, we'll still get there. Take memory for example: give LLM a persistent computer and ask it to jot down its long-term memory as hierarchical directories of markdown documents. Recalling a piece of…
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Nah. The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain. Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thoug…
I think Metzinger nailed it, we aren't conscious at all. We confuse the map for the territory in thinking the model we build to predict our other models is us. We are a collection of models a few of which create the illusion of consciousness. Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.
I do feel things at times and not other times. That is the most fundamental truth I am sure of. If that is an "illusion" one can go the other way and say everything is conscious and experiences reality as we do
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The magical thinking around LLMs is getting bizarre now. LLMs are not “intelligent” in any meaningful biological sense. Watch a spider modify its web to adapt to changing conditions and you’ll realize just how far we have to go. LLMs sometimes echo our own reasoning back at us in a way that sounds intelligent and is often useful, but don’t mistake this for “intelligence”
The idea that biological intelligence is impossible to replicate by other means would seem to imply that there’s something magical about biology.
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I don't see how your explanation leads to consciousness not being a thing. Consciousness is whatever process/mechanisms there are that as a whole produce our subjective experience and all its sensations, including but not limited to touch, vision, smell, taste, pain, etc.
You've missed our consciousness of our inner experiences. They are more varied than just perception at the footlights of our consciousness (cf Hurlburt): Imagination, inner voice, emotion, unsymbolized conceptual thinking as well as (our reconstructed view of our) perception.
If we are truly trying to "replace human at work" as the definition of an AGI, then shouldn't the engineering goal be to componentize the human body? If we could component-by-component replace any organ with synthetic ones ( and this is already possible to some degree e.g. hearing aids, neuralinks, pacemakers, artificial hearts ) then not only could we build compute out in such a way but we could also pull humanity f…
This article seems to me like a lot of "if you solve all the hard problems, then you'll have a solution". Which is like... yes, and...?
An unfortunate tendency that many in high-tech suffer from is the idea that any problem can be solved with engineering.