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Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

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Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#261

I always get a weird feeling when AI researchers and CS people start talking about comparisons between human brains and AI/computers Why is there a presumption that we (as people who have only studied CS) know enough about biology/neuroscience/evolution to make these comparisons/parallels/analogies? I enjoy the discussions but I always get the thought in the back of my head "...remember you're listening to 2 CS major…

From personal experience making the same comparisons during undergrad, I think it just comes down to the availability of conceptual models. If the brain does X, there's a good chance that a computer does something that looks like X, or that X could be recreated through steps Y & Z, etc.

Once I started to realize just how much of the brain is inscrutable, because it is a machine operating on chemicals instead of strict electrical processing, I became a lot more reluctant to draw those comparisons

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#262
> If I were to steelman the Sutton perspective, it would be...

I don't find it very courteous to say that you're steelmanning someone's argument. Sutton is certainly smart enough to have steelmanned his argument himself. Steelmanning : do it in your head, don't say it!

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does "it's called machine learning not AI" help anyone know how it works? It's just a fancier sounding name.

Because if they're curious, they can look up (or ask an "AI") about machine learning, rather than just AI, and learn more about the capabilities and difficulties and mechanics of how it works, learn some of the history, and have grounded expectations for what the next 10 years of development might look like.

They can google AI too... Do you think googling "how does AI work" won't work?

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#265

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra The debate about AGI is interesting from a philosophical perspective, but from a practical perspective AI doesn't need to get anywhere close to AGI to turn the world upside down.

I think this quote is often misapplied. The question "can a submarine safely move through water" IS a very interesting question (especially if you are planning a trip in one!). Obviously this quote would be well applied if we were at a stage where computers were better at everything humans can do and some people were saying "This is not AGI because it doesn't think exactly the same as a human". But we aren't anywhere…

> The question "can a submarine safely move through water" IS a very interesting question

Sure, and the question of whether AI can safely perform a particular task is interesting.

> Obviously this quote would be well applied if we were at a stage where computers were better at everything humans can do and some people were saying "This is not AGI because it doesn't think exactly the same as a human".

Why would that be required?

I used the quote primarily to point out that discussing the utility of AI is wholly distinct from discussing the semantics of words like "think", "general intelligence", or "swim". Knowing whether we are having a debate about utility/impact or philosophy/semantics seems relevant regardless of the current capabilities of AI.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#266
When I think about a problem, I consciously explore a tree (or graph) of possibility chains. This requires a mental space to keep track of “state”. Sometimes jotting things down on paper helps if I can’t keep it all in my head. The process is: - generate some possibilities - rank them based on intuition (this might happen subconsciously!) - ask what if we follow possibility Pn - push Pn on to the stack. - recourse or pop stack if deadened

I feel LLMs are fairly capable when it comes to doing each of those steps in isolation. But not when it is all put together as a process.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Adding nines to nature is exactly what humans are doing. We are nature. We are part of the natural order.

Anything that exists is part of nature, there can be no exceptions.

If I go burn a forest down on purpose, that is in fact nature doing it. No different than if a dolphin kills another animal for fun or a chimp kills another chimp over a bit of territory. Insects are also every bit as 'vicious' in their conquests.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#268

I always get a weird feeling when AI researchers and CS people start talking about comparisons between human brains and AI/computers Why is there a presumption that we (as people who have only studied CS) know enough about biology/neuroscience/evolution to make these comparisons/parallels/analogies? I enjoy the discussions but I always get the thought in the back of my head "...remember you're listening to 2 CS major…

>Why is there a presumption that we (as people who have only studied CS) know enough about biology/neuroscience/evolution to make these comparisons? Hubris.

Exactly. Someone way back when decided to call them neural networks, and now a lot of people think that they are a good representation of the real thing. If we make them fast enough, powerful enough, we'll end up with a brain!

Or not.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#270
post #75

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?

I think companies that expect to use AI to cut their salary overhead making the same products they were before are going to get clobbered by companies that use AI to grow. A few people may have to retrain into a different line of work but I don't really see AI putting people out of work en masse.
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