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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#221

Post by deadbabe »

sharemywin wrote: post #217
gtowey wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before. What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.

People assume training on past data means no novelty, but novelty comes from recombination. No one has written your exact function, with your exact inputs, constraints, and edge cases, yet an LLM can generate a working version from a prompt. That’s new output. The real limitation isn’t novelty, it’s grounding.

That’s only part of it. The true intelligence is knowing what to recombine, and this is where AI falls short.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#222

Post by thinkling »

computably wrote: post #161
thinkling wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being. The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to d…

It is irrelevant whether consciousness is an "illusion." The hard problem of consciousness is why there's any conscious experience at all . The existence of the illusion, if that's what you choose to label it, is still equally as inexplicable. Of course science may one day be able to solve the hard problem. But at this point in time, it's basically inconceivable that any methodology from any field could produce meani…

One thing scientists are trying is to see what interventions in the brain seem to make consciousness go away. Continued work in that vein may well set bounds on how consciousness can and cannot be caused and give us some idea.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#223

Post by fluoridation »

snowwrestler wrote: post #219
fluoridation wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think we’ll need to split the concept of intelligence into the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to conceive and prompt a task. If the former is called “intelligence” then LLMs are intelligent. Huh? No. "The capacity to accomplish a task" is not intelligence. By that definition, a washing machine is intelligent.

Capacity is not binary. A washing machine can accomplish one task, so it has low capacity. An LLM can accomplish many tasks, so it has higher capacity.

You said "the capacity to accomplish a task", not "the capacity to accomplish a certain number of tasks". Those are two different definitions.

Either way, as definitions for intelligence they're very lacking. Most people would include such abilities as making connections between unrelated facts, making abstractions, understanding what is relevant and what isn't, learning. Just being able to "accomplish many tasks" doesn't cut it. You could build a really complex machine that can accomplish many different tasks and that wouldn't make it more intelligent than a washing machine, it'd just make it more complicated. Intelligence is not in how many things the intelligent thing is able to do, but in how on-the-fly adaptable it is. Something truly intelligent does not need to be purpose-built to do anything, it can learn to make do with whatever resources it's got.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#224

Post by gtowey »

sharemywin wrote: post #217
gtowey wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before. What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.

People assume training on past data means no novelty, but novelty comes from recombination. No one has written your exact function, with your exact inputs, constraints, and edge cases, yet an LLM can generate a working version from a prompt. That’s new output. The real limitation isn’t novelty, it’s grounding.

Synthesis is different than genesis.

Just because there are lots of tasks which can be accomplished without the need for anything novel doesn't mean LLMs can match a human. It just means humans spend a lot of time doing some really boring stuff.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#225

Post by reverius42 »

mxkopy wrote: post #211
reverius42 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Source? This does not sound possibly true to me (by any common way we might measure intelligence).

The phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human

I'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#226

Post by guerrilla »

danielbln wrote: post #64
guerrilla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.

Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter. With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.

None of that matters if it's not sustainable. We're talking about the end of our species here or maybe you missed the memo.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#227

Post by jbverschoor »

Bewelge wrote: post #132
Jensson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.

Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence? I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle". There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intellig…

And by that definition, large language models are intelligent. They have connections where they draw upon

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#228

Post by mxkopy »

reverius42 wrote: post #225
mxkopy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human

I'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.

Eh I don’t think it’s something we can ever discount. Some cavewoman could’ve daydreamed the entire theory of general relativity in her own private language while weaving a basket and we would never know because she never felt the need to talk about it. On the other hand there are people today who will emit novels of profound nothingness.

Technology and language is sort of like speaking in this sense, it’s evidence of mind but it’s not mind. And the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and all that

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#229

Post by computably »

thinkling wrote: post #222
computably wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is irrelevant whether consciousness is an "illusion." The hard problem of consciousness is why there's any conscious experience at all . The existence of the illusion, if that's what you choose to label it, is still equally as inexplicable. Of course science may one day be able to solve the hard problem. But at this point in time, it's basically inconceivable that any methodology from any field could produce meani…

One thing scientists are trying is to see what interventions in the brain seem to make consciousness go away. Continued work in that vein may well set bounds on how consciousness can and cannot be caused and give us some idea.

Investigating the mechanics of consciousness is addressing the (misleadingly termed) "easy problem." The hard problem is why physical stuff would generate the weird metaphysical thing we call consciousness.
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