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The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

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Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#221

Post by Wowfunhappy »

VorpalWay wrote: post #219
ozgung wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the problem with the discussions on AI. No one defines the terms they use. If we define AGI as an AI not doing a preset task but can be used for general purpose, then we already have that. If we define it as human level intelligence at _every_ task, then some humans fail to be an AGI. If we define AGI as a magic algorithm that does every task autonomously and successfully then that thing may not exist at all,…

It is not just AGI that is poorly defined. Plain AI is moving goalposts too. When the A* search algorithm was introduced in the late 60s, that was considered AI, when SVM (support vector machines) and KNN (K nearest neighbor) were new, they were AI. And so on. These days it is neural networks and transformer models for language in particular that people mean when they say unqualified AI. It is very hard to have a mea…

I really wish I could wave a magic wand and make everyone stop using the term "AI". It means everything and nothing. Say "machine learning" if that's what you mean.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#222

Post by maplethorpe »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #207
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."

They define AGI in their charter > artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

In my experience, AGI always seemed to be the stand-in phrase for "human like" intelligence, after AI was co-opted to mean simpler things like markov-chain chat bots and state machines that control agent behaviour in video games.

If the definition has shifted once again to mean "a computer program that does a task pretty well for us", then what's the new term we're using to define human-level artificial intelligence?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#223

Post by frde »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #42
swingboy wrote: post #13

Purely anecdotal, but GPT 5.4 has been better than Opus 4.6 this past week or so since it came out. It’s interesting to see it rank fairly low on that table. Opus “talks” better and produces nicer output (or, it renders better Markdown in OpenCode) than 5.4.

Not in my experience. Quoting my tweet: Gave the same prompt to GPT 5.4 (high) and Opus 4.6 (high). GPT 5.4 implemented the feature, refactored the code (was not asked to), removed comments that were not added in that session, made the code less readable, and introduced a bug. "Undo All". Opus 4.6 correctly recognized that the feature is already implemented in the current code (yeah, lol) and proposed implementing te…

Is this sample size of one task, or a consistent finding across many tasks?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#224

Post by hirvi74 »

Jensson wrote: post #185
hirvi74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is so nebulous we will never be able to tell if we hit it. I completely agree. We can't even measure each other well, let alone machines.

It is very easy to tell if we still need humans in the loop. We still do so its not AGI.

I am unaware of any definition of AGI that states AGI cannot have humans in the loop.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#225

Post by abcde666777 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #217
sulam wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a _text_ model. There is some correlation between the text model and the world, but it’s loose and only because there’s a lot of text about the world. And of course robotics researchers are having to build world models, but these are far from general. If they had a real world model, I could tell them I want to play a game of chess and they would be able to remember where the pieces are from move to move.

What makes you think that text is inherently a worse reflection of the world than light is? All world models are lossy as fuck, by the way. I could give you a list of chess moves and force you to recover the complete board state from it, and you wouldn't fare that much better than an off the shelf LLM would. An LLM trained for it would kick ass though.

"What makes you think that text is inherently a worse reflection of the world than light is?"

Come on man, did you think before you asked that one :)?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#226

Post by catlifeonmars »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #221
VorpalWay wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just AGI that is poorly defined. Plain AI is moving goalposts too. When the A* search algorithm was introduced in the late 60s, that was considered AI, when SVM (support vector machines) and KNN (K nearest neighbor) were new, they were AI. And so on. These days it is neural networks and transformer models for language in particular that people mean when they say unqualified AI. It is very hard to have a mea…

I really wish I could wave a magic wand and make everyone stop using the term "AI". It means everything and nothing. Say "machine learning" if that's what you mean.

To be pedantic, “machine learning” is even underspecified. It’s marginally better in that it sheds _most_ of the marketing baggage, but it still refers to a general concept that can mean may different things across different fields of study.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#227

Post by random3 »

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."

I call these "romantic definitions" or "gesticulations". For private use (personal or even internal to teams) they can be great placeholders, assuming the goal is to refine vocabulary.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#228

Post by catlifeonmars »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #207
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."

They define AGI in their charter > artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

> economically valuable work

Is doing a ton of heavy lifting. What is considered economically valuable work is going to change from decade to decade, if not from year to year. What’s considered economically valuable also is going to be way different depending across individuals and nations within the exact same time frames too.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#229

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

mirekrusin wrote: post #218
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…

I think you're somehow right and wrong at the same. All those "it's like ..." are faulty – "post-it notes" are not 3k pages of text that can be recalled instantly in one go, copied in fraction of a second to branch off, quickly rewritten, put into hierarchy describing virtually infinite amount of information (outside of 3k pages of text limit), generated on the fly in minutes on any topic pulling all information avai…

> you can already stuff-in more information than human can remember during whole lifetime

The human eye processes between 100GB and 800GB of data per day. We then continuously learn and adapt from this firehose of information, using short-term and long-term memory, which is continuously retrained and weighted. This isn't "book knowledge", but the same capability is needed to continuously learn and reason on a human-equivalent level. You'd need a supercomputer to attempt it, for a single human's learning and reasoning.

RL is used for SOTA models, but it's a constant game of catch-up with limited data and processing. It's like self-driving cars. How many millions of miles have they already captured? Yet they still fail at some basic driving tasks. It's because the cars can't learn or form long-term memories, much less process and act on the vast amount of data a human can in real time. Same for LLM. Training and tweaking gets you pretty far, but not matching humans.

> With LoRA and friends it's also already possible to do continuous training that directly affects weights, it's just that economy of it is not that great

And that means we're stuck with non-AGI. Which is fine! We could've had flying cars decades ago, but that was hard, expensive and unnecessary, so we didn't do that. There's not enough money in the global economy to "spend" our way to AGI in a short timeframe, even if we wanted to spend it all, even if we could build all the datacenters quickly enough, which we can't (despite being a huge nation, there are many limitations).

> For some definitions of AGI

Changing the goalposts is dangerous. A lot of scary real-world stuff is hung on the idea of AGI being here or not. People will keep getting more and more freaked out and acting out if we're not clear on what is really happening. We don't have AGI. We have useful LLMs and VLMs.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#230

Post by CamperBob2 »

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

I guess this is what Plato meant when he said that people would have to be dragged out of the cave kicking and screaming, and would then demand to be let back in.
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