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AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

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Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#331

Post by prmph »

exe34 wrote: post #321
Jensson wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has some introspection into their own thoughts, it just takes different forms.

[citation needed]

Let's be careful of creating different classes of consciousness, and declaring people to be on lower rungs of it.

Sure, some aspects of consciousness might differ a bit for different people, but so long as you have never had another's conscious experience, I'd be wary of making confident pronouncements of what exactly they do or do not experience.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#332

Post by prmph »

9dev wrote: post #293
root_axis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for consciousness to be an illusion? That "illusion" is the bedrock for our shared definition of reality.

You can never know whether anyone else is actually conscious, or just appearing to be. This shared definition of reality was always on shaky ground, given that we don’t even have the same sensory input, and "now" isn’t the same concept everywhere. You are a collection of processes that work together to keep you alive. Part of that is something that collects your history to form a distinctive narrative of yourself, an…

Yes, but that is not an illusion. There's a reason I am perceiving something this was vs that other way. Perception is the most fundamental reality there is.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#333

Post by jjaksic »

Jensson wrote: post #299
exe34 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh no, those people without an inner voice are now cowering in a corner...

Everyone has some introspection into their own thoughts, it just takes different forms.

Introspection is just a debugger (and not a very good one).

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#334

Post by prmph »

_w1tm wrote: post #262
tomrod wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I'm conscious to a degree, and can alter that state through a number of activities. I can't speak for you or Metzinger ;). But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims. It…

> But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims. Do people choose a thing or was the thing chosen for them by some inputs they received in the past?

Our minds and intuitive logic systems are too feeble to grasp how free will can be a thing.

It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#335

Post by jjaksic »

imtringued wrote: post #310
galangalalgol wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Metzinger nailed it, we aren't conscious at all. We confuse the map for the territory in thinking the model we build to predict our other models is us. We are a collection of models a few of which create the illusion of consciousness. Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.

Consciousness as illusion is illogical. If that was true then consciousness would have been evolved away because it is unnecessary. It's more likely that there is a physical law that makes consciousness necessary. We don't perceive what our eyes see, we perceive a projection of reality created by the brain and we intuitively understand more than we can see. We know that things are distinct objects and what kind of cl…

Illusion doesn't imply it's unnecessary. Humans (and animals) had a much higher probability of survival as individuals and as species if their experiences felt more "real and personal".

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#336

Post by audunw »

andy99 wrote: post #19

If you believe the bitter lesson, all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data. Someone likely would have written the same thing as this 8 years ago about what it would take to get current LLM performance. So I don't buy the engineering angle, I also don't think LLMs will scale up to AGI as imagined by Asimov or any of the usual sci-fi tropes. There is something more fundamental missing, as in missing…

8 years is a pretty short perspective. The current growth phase was unlocked by more engineering. We could’ve had some of these kinds of capabilities decades ago, as illustrated by how cutting edge AI research is now trickling down all the way to microcontrollers with 64MHz CPU and kBs of RAM.

Once we got the “Attention is all you need” paper I don’t remember anyone saying we couldn’t get better results by throwing more data and compute at it. But now we’ve pretty much thrown all the data and all (as much as we can reasonably manufacture) at it. So clearly we’re at the end of that phase.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#337

Post by dns_snek »

ACCount37 wrote: post #326
dns_snek wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual people don't but we did it as a species. Any purported AGI should be capable of doing the same.

...if you run millions of instances of it for hundreds of thousands of years. Either the bar of general intelligence set by humans is not very high, or humans are not "generally intelligent" at all. No third option there.

> Either the bar of general intelligence set by human is not very high, or humans are not "generally intelligent" at all. No third option there.

Based on... what?

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#338

Post by bilsbie »

tshaddox wrote: post #99
bilsbie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. It could simply be a question of scale. Being analog and molecular means that brain could be doing enormously more than any foreseeable computer. For a simple example what if every neuron is doing trillions of calculations. (I’m not saying it is, just that it’s possible)

I think you’re merely referring to what is feasible in practice to computer with our current or near-future computers. I was referring to what is computable in principle.

Right. That’s what I was responding to.

OP wrote: > We don't know if AGI is even possible outside of a biological construct yet

And you replied that means it’s impossible in principle. I’m correcting you in saying that it can be impossible in ways other than principle.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#339

Post by ACCount37 »

dns_snek wrote: post #337
ACCount37 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...if you run millions of instances of it for hundreds of thousands of years. Either the bar of general intelligence set by humans is not very high, or humans are not "generally intelligent" at all. No third option there.

> Either the bar of general intelligence set by human is not very high, or humans are not "generally intelligent" at all. No third option there. Based on... what?

Based on anatomically modern humans existing for over a hundred thousand years - without inventing all the modern technology and math and science until the far end of that timetable.

Re: AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

#340

Post by hnfong »

nikkwong wrote: post #164
hnuser123456 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more fundamental than science, there is missing philosophy, both in us regarding these systems, and in the systems themselves. An AGI implemented by an LLM needs to, at the minimum, be able to self-learn by updating its weights, self-finetune, otherwise it quickly hits a wall between its baked-in weights and finite context window. What is the optimal "attention" mechanism for choosing what to self-finetune with,…

I found it strange that John Carmack and Ilya Sutskever both left prestigious positions within their companies to pursue AGI as if they had some proprietary insight that the rest of industry hadn't caught on to. To make as bold of a career move that publicly would mean you'd have to have some ultra serious conviction that everyone else was wrong or naive and you were right. That move seemed pompous to me at the time;…

They’re rich enough in both money and reputation to take the risk. Even if AGI (whatever that means) turns out to be utterly impossible, they’re not really going to suffer for it.

On the other hand if you think there’s a say 10% chance you can get this AGI thing to work, the payoffs are huge. Those working in startups and emerging technologies often have worse odds and payoffs

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