251–260 of 1001 posts
Redefinitions aside, fully capable AI is right up there with commercially viable fusion power, cost effective quantum completing, and fully capable self-driving cars, as a technology that is quickly advancing yet always a decade or two away.
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The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s. The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here…
yeah that "model of the world" would mean: babies are already born with "the model of the world" but a lot of experiments on babies/young kids tell otherwise
You have instincts, right? Innate fears? This is definitely something passed down through genetics. The Hawk/Goose Effect isn't just limited to baby chickens. Certainly some mental encoding passes down through genetics as how much the brain controls, down to your breathing and heartbeat.
But instinct is basic. It's something humans are even able to override. It's a first order approximation. Inaccurate to do meaningfully complex things, but sufficient to keep you alive. Maybe we don't want to call the instinct a world model (it certainly is naïve) but can't be discounted either.
In human development, yeah, the lion's share of it happens post birth. Human babies don't even show typical signs of consciousness, even really till the age of 2. There's many different categories of "awareness" and these certainly grow over time. But the big thing that makes humans so intelligent is that we continue to grow and learn through our whole lifetimes. And we can pass that information along without genetics and have very advanced tools to do this.
It is a combination of nature and nurture. But do note that this happens differently in different animals. It's wonderfully complex. LLMs are quite incredible but so too are many other non-thinking machines. I don't think we should throw them out, but we never needed to make the jump to intelligence. Certainly not so quickly. I mean what did Carl Sagan say?
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yeah that "model of the world" would mean: babies are already born with "the model of the world" but a lot of experiments on babies/young kids tell otherwise
> yeah that "model of the world" would mean: babies are already born with "the model of the world" No, not necessarily. Babies don't interact with the world only by reading what people wrote wikipedia and stackoverflow, like these models are trained. Babies do things to the world and observe what happens. I imagine it's similar to the difference between a person sitting on a bicycle and trying to ride it, vs a person…
Now that Nvidia is the most valuable company, all this talk of actual AGI will be washed away by the huge amount of dollars driving the hype train. Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future. AGI being too close or too far away affects the value of these companies- too close and it'll seem too likely that the current leaders will win. Too far away and the level of sp…
> Most of these companies value is built on the idea of AGI being achievable in the near future. Is it? Or is it based on the idea a load of white collar workers will have their jobs automated, and companies will happily spend mid four figures for tech that replaces a worker earning mid five figures?
>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three…
Infinitely big little numbers Academia has rediscovered itself Signal attenuation, a byproduct of entropy, due to generational churn means there's little guarantee. Occam's Razor; Karpathy knows the future or he is self selecting biology trying to avoid manual labor? His statements have more in common with Nostradamus. It's the toxic positivity form of "the end is nigh". It's "Heaven exists you just have to do this w…
Or perhaps Karpathy has a higher level understanding and can see a bigger picture?
You've said something about heaven. Are you able to understand this statement, for example: "Heaven is a memeplex, it exists." ?
I bet you we are all wrong and some random person is going to vibe code himself into something none of us expected. I half kid, if none of you have see it, highly suggest https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html
Then why didn't Karpathy vibe code this? https://x.com/GaryMarcus/status/1978500888521068818
>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three…
The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s. The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here…
I have massive respect for Andrej, my first encounter with "him" was following his tutorials/notes when he was a grad student/tutor for AI/ML. I was a lot disappointed when he went to work for Tesla, and I think that he had some achievement there, butnot nearly the impact I believe he potentially has. His switch (back?) to OpenAI was, in my mind, much more in keeping with where his spirit really lies. So, with that i…
if openAI didn't put a chat interface in front of an LLM and make it available to the public wouldn't we still be in the same AI winter? Google, Meta, Microsoft, all of the major players were doing lots of LLM work already, it wasn't until the general public found out through the OpenAI's website that it really took off. I can't remember who said it, it was some CEO, that OpenAI had no moat but nether did anyone else…
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I also quite like the way he puts it. However, from a certain point onward, the AI itself will contribute to the development—adding nines—and that’s the key difference between this analogy of nines in other systems (including earlier domain‑specific ML ones) and the path to AGI. That's why we can expect fast acceleration to take off within two years.
I don't think we can be confident that this is how it works. It may very well be that our level of intelligence has a hard limit to how many nines we can add, and AGI just pushes the limit further, but doesn't make it faster per se. It may also be that we're looking at this the wrong way altogether. If you compare the natural world with what humans have achieved, for instance, both things are qualitatively different,…
AGI to encompass all of humanity's knowledge in one source and beat every human on every front might be a decade away.
Individual agents with increased agency adequately covering more and more abilities consistently? Seems like a steady path that can be seen into the horizon to put one foot in front of the other.
For me, the grain of salt I'd take Karpathy with is much, much, smaller than average, only because he tries to share how he thinks and examines his own understanding and changes it.
His ability to explain complex things simply is something that for me helps me learn and understand things quicker and see if I arrive at something similar or different, and not immediately assume anything is wrong, or right without my understanding being present.