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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#31

Post by Animats »

Now that understanding video and projecting what happens next indicates we're getting past the LLM problem of lacking a world model. That's encouraging.

There's more than one way to do intelligence. Basic intelligence has evolved independently three times that we know of - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All three show at least ape-level intelligence, but the species split before intelligence developed, and the brain architectures are quite different. Corvids get more done with less brain mass than mammals, and don't have a mammalian-type cortex. Octopuses have a distributed brain architecture, and have a more efficient eye design than mammals.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#32

Post by beloch »

dd8601fn wrote: post #19
est31 wrote: post #4

Our brains evolved to hunt prey, find mates, and avoid becoming hunted ourselves. Those three tasks were the main factors for the vast majority of evolutionary history. We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. That's why you get AI competing at IMO level but unable to…

I'm not excited about a future where the division of labor is something like: AI does all of the interesting stuff and the humans clean the toilets. Especially now that I'm older and my joints won't tolerate it.

It's not that AI is intrinsically better at software engineering, writing, or art than it is at learning how to clean toilets. It's not. The real issue is that cleaning toilets using humans is cheap.

That, sadly, is the incentive driving the current wave of AI innovation. Your job will be automated long before your household chores are.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#33

Post by nsainsbury »

I used to also believe along these lines but lately I'm not so sure.

I'm honestly shocked by the latest results we're seeing with Gemini 3 Deep Think, Opus 4.6, and Codex 5.3 in math, coding, abstract reasoning, etc. Deep Think just scored 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2 (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/)! And these benchmarks are supported by my own experimentation and testing with these models ~ specifically most recently with Opus 4.6 doing things I would have never thought possible in codebases I'm working in.

These models are demonstrating an incredible capacity for logical abstract reasoning of a level far greater than 99.9% of the world's population.

And then combine that with the latest video output we're seeing from Seedance 2.0, etc showing an incredible level of image/video understanding and generation capability.

I was previously deeply skeptical that the architecture we have would be sufficient to get us to AGI. But my belief in that has been strongly rattled lately. Honestly I think the greatest gap now is simply one of orchestration, data presentation, and work around in-context memory representations - that is, converting work done into real world into formats/representations, etc. amenable for AI to run on (text conversion, etc.) and keeping new trained/taught information in context to support continual learning.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#34

Post by Lerc »

I don't really understand the argument that AGI cannot be achieved just by scaling current methods. I too believe that (for any sane level of scaling anyway), but this-year's LLMs are not using entirely last-year's methods. And they, in turn, are using methods that weren't used the year before.

It seems like a prediction like "Bob won't become a formula one driver in a minivan". It's true, but not very interesting.

If Bob turned up a couple of years later in Formula one, you'd probably be right in saying that what he is driving is not a mini van. The same is true for AGI anyone who says it can't be done with current methods can point to any advancement along the way and say that's the difference.

A better way to frame it would be, is there any fundimental, quantifiable ability that is blocking AGI? I would not be surprised if the breakthrough technique has been created, but the research has not described the problem that it solves well enough for us to know that it is the breakthrough.

I realise that, for some the notion of AGI is relatively new, but some of us have been considering the matter for some time. I suspect my first essay on the topic was around 1993. It's been quite weird watching people fall into all of the same philosophical potholes that were pointed out to us at university.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#35

Post by alex43578 »

andsoitis wrote: post #30
est31 wrote: post #4

Our brains evolved to hunt prey, find mates, and avoid becoming hunted ourselves. Those three tasks were the main factors for the vast majority of evolutionary history. We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. That's why you get AI competing at IMO level but unable to…

> We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. Humans discovered or invented all of those.

Only in small ways and very recently, evolutionarily speaking, were those things rewarded by natural selection (and even that has stopped nowadays).

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#36

Post by causal »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #25
ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

> there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Lolwut. I keep having to correct Claude at trivial code organization tasks. The code it writes is correct; it’s just ham-fisted and violates DRY in unholy ways. And I’m not even a great coder…

> violates DRY in unholy ways

Well said

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#37

Post by 9x39 »

JSDave wrote: post #22
ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

AGI is when it can do all intellectual work that can be done by humans. It can improve its own intelligence and create a feedback loop because it is as smart as the humans who created it.

Why the super-high bar? What's unsatisfying is that aren't the 'dumbest' humans still a general intelligence that we're nearly past, depending how you squint and measure?

It feels like an arbitrary bar to perhaps make sure we aren't putting AIs over humans, which they are most certainly in the superhuman category on a rapidly growing number of tasks.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#38

Post by pixl97 »

andsoitis wrote: post #30
est31 wrote: post #4

Our brains evolved to hunt prey, find mates, and avoid becoming hunted ourselves. Those three tasks were the main factors for the vast majority of evolutionary history. We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. That's why you get AI competing at IMO level but unable to…

> We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. Humans discovered or invented all of those.

And it took a massively long time for that to happen after we gained that capability. Human ingenuity really only took off after we put a lot of the work on writing and tools. It wasn't so much that humans created many of these, but the super human organism that uses language and writing to express ideas.

Now think about what we just created.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#39

Post by AnimalMuppet »

raddan wrote: post #21
SoftTalker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe you could not find humans who would do this?

That's not really the point. If our definition of AGI does not include "being able to reliably do logic" then what are we even talking about? We don't really need computers with human abilities--we have plenty of humans. We need computers with _better_ abilities.

OK, but "what we need" is not the question. If the definition of AGI is "as smart as the average human in all areas", then it doesn't matter if the average human is pretty useless at a lot of tasks, that's still the definition of AGI.

But I'd like to think that, even though you could find exceptions, the average human is never confused about whether dogs can lay eggs or not.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#40

Post by trial3 »

Lerc wrote: post #34

I don't really understand the argument that AGI cannot be achieved just by scaling current methods. I too believe that (for any sane level of scaling anyway), but this-year's LLMs are not using entirely last-year's methods. And they, in turn, are using methods that weren't used the year before. It seems like a prediction like "Bob won't become a formula one driver in a minivan". It's true, but not very interesting. I…

i think the minivan analogy is flawed, and that AGI is moving from "bob driving a minivan" to "bob literally becoming the thing that is formula one"
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