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OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

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Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#31

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

They're trying to redefine "AGI" so it means something less than what you & I would think it means. That way it's possible for them to declare it as "achieved" and rake in the headlines.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#33

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

I’m sure they are smart enough to know this, but the money is good and the koolaid is strong.

If it doesn’t lead to AGI, as an employee it’s not your problem.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#34
post #31

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

They're trying to redefine "AGI" so it means something less than what you & I would think it means. That way it's possible for them to declare it as "achieved" and rake in the headlines.

“Autocomplete General Intelligence”?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#35
post #20

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department. I'm not sure everyone even agrees on what AGI is, but a common test is "can it do what humans can". For example, in this article it says it can't do coding exercises outside the training set. That would definitely be on the "AGI checklist". Basically doing anything that is outside…

> Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department.

Depends on how you define “self awareness” but knowing that it doesn't know something instead of hallucinating a plausible-but-wrong is already self awareness of some kind. And it's both highly valuable and beyond current tech's capability.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#36

"We will have better and better models," wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a recent Reddit AMA. "But I think the thing that will feel like the next giant breakthrough will be agents." Is this certain? Are Agents the right direction to AGI?

If by agents you mean systems comprised of individual (perhaps LLM-powered) agents interacting with each other, probably not. I get the vague impression that so far researchers haven’t found any advantage to such systems — anything you can do with a group of AI agents can be emulated with a single one. It’s like chaining up perceptrons hoping to get more expressive power for free.

> I get the vague impression that so far researchers haven’t found any advantage to such systems — anything you can do with a group of AI agents can be emulated with a single one. It’s like chaining up perceptrons hoping to get more expressive power for free. Emergence happens when many elements interact in a system. Brains are literally a bunch of neurons in a complex network. Also research is already showing promising results of the performance of agent systems.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#37
It's easy to be snarky at ill-informed and hyperbolic takes, but it's also pretty clear that large multi-modal models trained with the data we already have, are going to eventually give us AGI.

IMO this will require not just much more expansive multi-modal training, but also novel architecture, specifically, recurrent approaches; plus a well-known set of capabilities most systems don't currently have, e.g. the integration of short-term memory (context window if you like) into long-term "memory", either episodic or otherwise.

But these are as we say mere matters of engineering.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#39

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

It's an attention-grabbing term that took hold in pop culture and business. Certainly there is a subset of research around the subject of consciousness, but you are correct in saying that the majority of researchers in the field are not pursuing self-awareness and will be very blunt in saying that. If you step back a bit and say something like "human-like, logical reasoning", that's something you may find alignment with though. A general purpose logical reasoning engine does not necessarily need to be self-aware. The word "Intelligent" has stuck around because one of the core characteristics of this suite of technologies is that a sort of "understanding" emergently develops within these networks, sometimes in quite a startling fashion (due to the phenomenon of adding more data/compute at first seemingly leading to overfitting, but then suddenly breaking through plateaus into more robust, general purpose understanding of the underlying relationships that drive the system it is analyzing.)

Is that "intelligent" or "understanding"? It's probably close enough for pop science, and regardless, it looks good in headlines and sales pitches so why fight it?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#40
post #31

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

They're trying to redefine "AGI" so it means something less than what you & I would think it means. That way it's possible for them to declare it as "achieved" and rake in the headlines.

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