GPTs are trained on natural language. Why should it surprise anyone that it would fail at cellular automata?
A simple example is that they fundamentally can not balance parentheses more than half their context width.
261–270 of 385 posts
GPTs are trained on natural language. Why should it surprise anyone that it would fail at cellular automata?
A simple example is that they fundamentally can not balance parentheses more than half their context width.
Fantastic essay. Highly recommended! I agree with all key points: * There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. * Providing an LLM with examples and step-by-step…
> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. Wordle and cellular automata are very 2D, and LLMs are fundamentally 1D. You might think "but what about Chess!" -…
Visual transformers are gaining traction and they are 100% focus in 2d data.
Fantastic essay. Highly recommended! I agree with all key points: * There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. * Providing an LLM with examples and step-by-step…
> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…
This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception of _some_ of the basic concepts in physics. Scientific progress cannot be and is not predicated upon perfect definitions. For some reason when the topic of consciousness or AGI comes up around here, everyone commits a sort of "all or nothing" logical fallacy: absence of perfect knowledge is cast as total ignorance.
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> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…
Arriving at a generally accepted scientific definition of AGI might be difficult, but a more achievable goal might be to arrive at a scientific way to determine something is not AGI. And while I'm not an expert in the field, I would certainly think a strong contender for relevant criteria would be an inability to process information in a way other than the one a system was explicitly programmed to, even if the new wa…
That would be like an alien race that could see in an extra dimension, or see the non-visible light spectrum, presenting us with problems that we cannot even see and saying that we don't have AGI when we fail to solve them.
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>We don't fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. In complete seriousness, can anyone can explain why LLMs are good at some tasks?
LLMs are good at tasks that don't require actual understanding of the topic. They can come up with excellent (or excellent-looking-but-wrong) answers to any question that their training corpus covers. In a gross oversimplification, the "reasoning" they do is really just parroting a weighted average (with randomness injected) of the matching training data. What they're doing doesn't really match any definition of "und…
You mean like the microtubles of Roger Penrose ???.
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> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…
Arriving at a generally accepted scientific definition of AGI might be difficult, but a more achievable goal might be to arrive at a scientific way to determine something is not AGI. And while I'm not an expert in the field, I would certainly think a strong contender for relevant criteria would be an inability to process information in a way other than the one a system was explicitly programmed to, even if the new wa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are problems that are easy for human beings but hard for current LLMs (and maybe impossible for them; no one knows). Examples include playing Wordle and predicting cellular automata (including Turing-complete ones like Rule 110). We don’t fully understand why current LLMs are bad at these tasks. I thought we did know for things like playing Wordle, that its because they deal with words as sequence of tokens t…
"Since there is no objective definition of AGI or test for it, there’s no basis for any meaningful speculation on what can or cannot achieve it; discussions about it are quasi-religious, not scientific." This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why you believe it must experience continuous time. If you had a system which clearly could reason, which could learn new tasks on its own, which didn't hallucinate any more than humans do, but it was only active for the period required for it to complete an assigned task, and was completely dormant otherwise, why would that dormant period disqualify it as AGI? I agree that such a system should pro…
I think its note worthy that humans actually fail this test... We have to go dormant for 8 hours every day.
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I think one should feel comfortable arguing that AGI must be stateful and experience continuous time at least. Such that a plain old LLM is definitively not ever going to be AGI; but an LLM called in a do while true for loop might.
I don't understand why you believe it must experience continuous time. If you had a system which clearly could reason, which could learn new tasks on its own, which didn't hallucinate any more than humans do, but it was only active for the period required for it to complete an assigned task, and was completely dormant otherwise, why would that dormant period disqualify it as AGI? I agree that such a system should pro…
As opposed to “active when called”. A function, being called repeatedly over a length of time is reasonably “continuous” imo
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I think one should feel comfortable arguing that AGI must be stateful and experience continuous time at least. Such that a plain old LLM is definitively not ever going to be AGI; but an LLM called in a do while true for loop might.
Some good prompt-reply interactions are probably fed back in to subsequent training runs, so they're still stateful/have memory in a way, there's just a long delay.