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The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

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Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#271

Post by rishabhaiover »

ACCount37 wrote: post #186
rishabhaiover wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. The recent emergent behavior displayed by LLMs and test-time scaling (10x YoY revenue for Anthropic) is worth some hype. Of course, you are correct that most people who rally behind AGI do not understand the fundamental limitations of next-token prediction.

The "fundamental limitations" being what exactly?

I used to think it was the quadratic complexity of attention but I guess that's not a concern anymore as they've made more hardware aware kernels of attention? The other I remember is continual learning but that may be solved in near-term future. I am not completely confident about it.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#272

Post by hunterpayne »

ryandrake wrote: post #209
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, not enough of a joke. I was thinking something similar - this isn't AI, and none of "those people" care if it is or isn't. They don't care philosophically, or even pragmatically. They're selling a product. That product is the IDEA of replacement of the majority of human labor with what's basically slave labor but with substantially disregardable ethical quandaries. It's honestly a genius product. I'm not su…

AI is already "an employee who can't say no to questionable assignments." We should all be reflective about the real value and inevitable consequences of this work.

There are also direct and very negative consequences we are having from AI right now. AI is the largest source of fake video propaganda and has largely destroyed the confidence people have in video evidence. I can imagine someone being held liable for these negative consequences, perhaps even extra-judicially.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#273

Post by daxfohl »

djoldman wrote: post #214
shepherdjerred wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That definition is as I said: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness." "Highly autonomous systems" and "most economically valuable work" aren't precise enough to be useful. "Highly" implies that there is a continuum, so where does directed end and autonomy begin? "Most economically valuable work"... each word in that has wiggle ro…

I think you can say if human engineers still exist, it's hard to claim we have AGI. If human engineers have been entirely replaced, then it's hard to claim we don't have AGI.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#274

Post by VorpalWay »

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.

Machine learning: that definitely includes SVM and regression models. Oh and decision trees. Probably a few other things I'm not thinking of right now. Many people will unfortunately be thinking of just neural networks though.

(By the way, if something like a regression model or decision tree can solve your problem, you should prefer those. Much cheaper to train and to run inference with those than with neural networks. Much cheaper than deep neural networks especially.)

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#275

Post by esafak »

devonkelley wrote: post #264

[flagged]

Obviously that is not the only question that matters. When AI becomes autonomous its rights will also become a question. AI has already replaced much labor that is subjective and creative. And juniors that themselves don't have good judgment, in objective fields.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#276

Post by ACCount37 »

teeray wrote: post #242
ACCount37 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? What does the color green look like?

It doesn't look like anything to me.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#277

Post by kgwgk »

daxfohl wrote: post #273
djoldman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definition is as I said: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness." "Highly autonomous systems" and "most economically valuable work" aren't precise enough to be useful. "Highly" implies that there is a continuum, so where does directed end and autonomy begin? "Most economically valuable work"... each word in that has wiggle ro…

I think you can say if human engineers still exist, it's hard to claim we have AGI. If human engineers have been entirely replaced, then it's hard to claim we don't have AGI.

Because they are doing most of the economically valuable work?

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#278

Post by daxfohl »

kgwgk wrote: post #277
daxfohl wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can say if human engineers still exist, it's hard to claim we have AGI. If human engineers have been entirely replaced, then it's hard to claim we don't have AGI.

Because they are doing most of the economically valuable work?

No, independently of OpenAI's definition. If we have AGI there's no reason we'd need to have humans working jobs that only involve typing stuff into a computer and going to meetings all day*. And if all those jobs are eliminated, I guess we'll have bigger problems than to debate whether we've achieved AGI or not.

* Which is a much larger class of jobs than just engineering. And also excludes field engineers and other types of engineers that need a physical body for interacting with customers, etc.**

** Though even then, you could in theory divvy up the engineering part and the customer interaction part of the job, where the human that's doing the interaction part is primarily a proxy to the engineering agent that's in his earbud.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#279

Post by conception »

stavros wrote: post #248
sulam wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, I should define what I mean by under the hood. By “under the hood” I mean that models are still just being fed a stream of text (or other tokens in the case of video and audio models), being asked to predict the next token, and then doing that again. There is no technique that anyone has discovered that is different than that, at least not that is in production. If you think there is, and people are just keepin…

Everybody says "but they just predict tokens" as if that's not just "I hope you won't think too much about this" sleight of hand. Why does predicting the next token mean that they aren't AGI? Please clarify the exact logical steps there, because I make a similar argument that human brains are merely electrical signals propagating, and not real intelligence, but I never really seem to convince people.

More take an episode like Loops from Radiolab where a person’s memory resets back to a specific set of inputs/state and pretty responds the same way over and over again - very much like predicting the next token. Almost all human interaction is reflexive not thoughtful. Even now as you read this and process it, there’s not a lot of thought - but a whole lot of prediction and pattern matching going on.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#280

Post by hackable_sand »

wongarsu wrote: post #110
sebastiennight wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'we reached ASI' is a well-defined verifiable statement, where 'we reached AGI' just isn't So... we can't tell when the rocket has left Earth atmosphere, but we can tell when the rocket has entered space? I'm not getting how "superior in all tasks" is better-defined for you than "equal in all tasks".

Because ASI is 'superior to the best human' while AGI is 'matches or surpasses humans'. It's hard to agree on what 'matches humans' actually means. Would matching humans in coding involve the level of the average human (basically no coding ability), the level of a junior (the largest group of professionals), a senior ('someone competent') or of the best human we can find? Or as the scene from 'I, Robot' goes: Will Sm…

Okay so we will never reach ASI, or we already have it?

Pick one.

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