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Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

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Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationality != comprehensible to us We can't look at quantum mechanics and call it irrational. The way the universe works is by definition the right / correct / only way. If logic points one way and reality points another, the logic isn't taking everything into account.

You're confusing the map for the territory. Rationality is something that makes sense for us. That need not apply to nature. It's misplaced to say that nature is rational. Nature just is.

You say:

>Rationality is something that makes sense for us

But I say:

Rationality is something that makes sense.

So nature cannot be irrational. For instance: we had the very logical Newtonian mechanics. But Mercury's orbit did not make sense. Later on Einstein saw another layer of logic that put both Newton and Mercury in more context, and now both make sense again.

When we see things now that make no sense, it indicates faults in our mental models, not in the things.

In the context of a person behaving or thinking "irrationally": their brain is just atoms and chemicals. It has to work right. If their behaviour and thoughts do not line up to reality, that's a feature of said brain.

Perhaps the irrationality is due to the brain giving too much weight to certain factors, or perhaps they are in fact behaving perfectly logically given what they know and you don't. Perhaps its workings can be improved in software, or in the next hardware generation.

But there's no spooky mechanism that can't in principle be modelled and implemented in a different architecture, ie, transistors.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#302
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s right. In many ways, AGI and AI are opposites. We don’t actually “train” humans. We present them information. And a human can choose to ingest that information or - just as importantly - choose not to. A 3yo learns English not through being force fed, but through their own curiosity and motivation to learn. GPT and the like are proving to be amazing tools. The compute model of probabilistic algorithms (“plain”…

again, I believe the opposite to you. I literally think a smarter chatGPT would be AGI. However I agree, it wouldn't be the thing you describe. But recognise that your disagreement is not because of a misunderstanding of the existing technology, but over what an AGI is. I think some people explitly dont want AGI to simulate emotion or self-defined goals because that would be little more than an artistic curiousity. W…

Sorry, I must have missed the rest of your prior comment (or posted before you made an edit to it?)

LLMs are not able to create new knowledge, only organize existing knowledge. Critically, we don't use induction to create new knowledge - but induction is all these LLMs can do. (e.g. To explain the origin of the universe, there is nothing we can induce, as the big bang is not observable.)

I don't see how training these AI models more will cause this property to emerge. But knowledge creation is the thing that we want when we say we want AGI.

The reason I describe AGI as such is because we only have one example of what an AGI is, namely humans. A popular idea is that machine AGI will look very different from human AGI (e.g. no consciousness or intrinsic motivation or qualia).

But this is a bold claim. It contends that there are multiple kinds of general intelligences vs some universal kind. Other universal concepts don't look like this. Consider the universality of computation: a computer is either Turing-complete or it isn't. There is no other kind of general purpose computer.

Once we created a Turing-complete computer, it could perform all conceivable computation. This is the power of universality. The first Turing-complete computer could technically play Call of Duty (though no one would have had the patience to play it).

It's not like there is some mode of ChatGPT that will produce AGI-level responses if given months or years of time to compute it.

Fundamentally, its ability to do whatever it is that AGIs do (AGI's version of Turing computation) is missing.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#304
post #32

I am curious to do a poll of what AGI means to each person. It stands for "Artificial General Intelligence" but some have different definitions. For some, it might mean any that is as capable as a normal human. For some, non-biological life axiomatically cannot become AGI. For some, it might require literal omniscience and omnipotence and accepting anything as AGI means, to them, that they are being told to worship i…

Yeah, even the linked article acknowledges the problem while defining AGI as a computer with “human-level cognitive abilities”, which is broad enough as to be borderline useless. Whenever a major company references AGI, as is the case here, I mentally replace the term with “Skynet”, because I expect the statement’s aim is to instill fear. If Google ever develops AGI, you can be sure they’ll call it something else.

> If Google ever develops AGI, you can be sure they’ll call it something else.

They will paint it in their primary colors logo and call it the Happy Fun Ball.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#305

I wish I could bet real money on this cause I would bet hard against this statement. The issue is that nobody seems to agree what AGI even is.

There are betting markets that have odds up for this, you generally have to pay in crypto and the odds suck given your money is locked up for a decade plus(if they pay out at all). Importantly though, what do you think the odds are? I don't think anyone is saying 50/50 in a few years, just greater than 0%.

If an AGI means equivalent to a human (not just online, but in full robotic form, even if compute is not done in the body), then Id put 0% in the next 5 years. Maybe like 5% in 10 years, but that human will be very much limited, since it will most likely be trained using traditional methods, which means for the physical interaction part it will have to be trained on a representative subset of physical tasks, and just like ChatGPT, it will fall short in areas.

If an AGI means that something is sentient enough to be able to rewrite itself to be better, id put 0% in the next 50 years. There needs to be way to run accurate simulations of reality faster than reality, which is a fundamental physics problem as well as a computation one.

What is going to happen is more and more efficient information compression that will appear like AI, but under the hood it will basically be just emergent software. It will be totally possible in the future to ask an agent and get a full step by step plan of building a personal VTOL in your garage without specialized equipment, but all that is is just information from different domains rolled into one compression algorithm with efficient language based search.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#306
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, I believe the opposite to you. I literally think a smarter chatGPT would be AGI. However I agree, it wouldn't be the thing you describe. But recognise that your disagreement is not because of a misunderstanding of the existing technology, but over what an AGI is. I think some people explitly dont want AGI to simulate emotion or self-defined goals because that would be little more than an artistic curiousity. W…

Sorry, I must have missed the rest of your prior comment (or posted before you made an edit to it?) LLMs are not able to create new knowledge, only organize existing knowledge. Critically, we don't use induction to create new knowledge - but induction is all these LLMs can do. (e.g. To explain the origin of the universe, there is nothing we can induce, as the big bang is not observable.) I don't see how training thes…

what would you consider a test of the ability to create new knowledge? I don't think there exists a meaningful distinction here. If I give an AI the same information astronomers had to figure out the big bang conclusion, it would probably be able to figure it out. They "induced" from a bunch of data points that there was one likely explanation.

Similarly if I gave it a phenomena I wanted to know about it could propose experiements to run to understand that thing.

taking independant action in the world is indeed beyond the limits of chatgpt on it's own, but its not hard to build systems relying heavily on chatgpt to do that, a simple loop calling it with information from sensors and a prompt to experiment with outputs is enough to get some kind of agent. It can process any information, and given more power it can draw ever-higher inferences from that information. This is analogous to a turing machine, something that can eventually get anywhere, but it will take an arbitrarily long time to do it.

I think of it kinda like the CPU in a Von Neumann architecture. A cpu on it's own doesn't do much of anything unless you tell it to. We have that part solved, we just need to settle on a good structure for repeatedly querying it.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the debate, isn’t it? I think if we create tests for understanding and deliver them to people, we will find variations in what people understand. I think we will find the same for chatGPT. But I suspect your notion of understanding is not measurable, is it? For you, chatGPT lacks something essential such that it is incapable of understanding, no matter the test. Or do you have a way to measure this without ap…

Well, consciousness is part of the question, isn't it? We know that we are conscious (even if we can't precisely define what that means). Is ChatGPT conscious? I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but how do you prove it? Does understanding require consciousness? Maybe yes, for the kind of understanding I'm thinking of, but I'm not certain of that. How do you measure understanding? You step a bit outside the training se…

Another part of all this is chatgpt was trained on the entire internet and still does a mediocre job when its doing well. That's an amazing amount of resources required to do all that to arrive at it being able to do what it does writing codes or whatever when a person typically requires a couple slices of pizza and general access to the internet which that person has Read almost none of.

How come humans are so efficient when these computers are using enormous amounts of energy? When will we have a computer that only requires a few slices of pizza worth of energy to get to the next step?

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#308

As someone who has worked in the field of AI/ML for quite awhile now, the problem with current AGI predictions is ML hasn't done anything new since the 80s (or arguably earlier). At the end of the day all ML is using gradient descent to do some sort of non-linear projection of the data on to a latent space, then doing some relatively simple math in this latent space to perform some task. Personally I think the limits…

I disagree with you. > Essentially all we've done is pushed the basic model proposed by linear regression to it's absolutely limits No, we haven't pushed linear regression to its limits. If it was only linear regression, it wouldn't work. Neural networks need a non-linearity to model complex things. The beauty is that given an infinite series of nonlinearities, one can model any mathematical function. In practice we…

I like what you are saying but not the last line. Angels exist - what evidence do we have that they don't?

ChatGPT points to us possibly going in the right direction. It is so good that people need to write long articles about why it is not as good as a human. Contrast to older efforts, which were pretty clearly not so great. I find this pretty compelling, and GOTCHA examples that show that ChatGPT isn't as good as humans in everything miss the point.

Birds fly and drones don't look like birds - but they fly. If the goal is flying, it's okay that we achieve it through something that doesn't exactly mimic what inspired it. Do we need a "full human" for all we do? Our billions of machines, many performing work previously done by humans, show that we don't.

If we can largely replicate intelligence, it's not super important whether "this is how human intelligence works".

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#309
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, more optimistically, AGI will accelerate scientific progress and we will have fusion, quantum computers, and self driving cars shortly after. If AIs had the tendency to recursively devour worlds you would expect at least one alien AI to have conquered our galaxy by now. But the sky is quiet, so either we are the very first species to get this far, or there’s a natural ceiling to the pace of technological progress…

They probably can't overcome the universal speed limit. Space is big.

A nearly omnipotent AI could probably get close to light speed, which would allow it to reach all edges of the galaxy in 100,000 or so years.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#310
post #13

The other few things possible in next few years for past few years are: 1. Fusion 2. Self driving cars. 3. Ubiquitous, generally available and stable 8192 bit quantum computers. 4. High energy density grid scale batteries. Just few more "this maybe the... what could revolutionize..." articles away. What we forget is that it is in these people's business interest (executives making such statements) to state the exagge…

were we ever promised high-speed (fiber) internet everywhere or was that always a pipe dream?
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