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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

#351

Post by amanaplanacanal »

missingrib wrote: post #139
AIPedant wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is vacuously true that a Turing machine can implement human intelligence: simply solve the Schrödinger equation for every atom in the human body and local environment. Obviously this is cost-prohibitive and we don’t have even 0.1% of the data required to make the simulation. Maybe we could simulate every single neuron instead, but again it’ll take many decades to gather the data in living human brains, and it woul…

That is only true if consciousness is physical and the result of some physics going on in the human brain. We have no idea if that's true.

You got downvoted so I gave you an upvote to compensate.

We seem to all be working with conflicting ideas. If we are strict materialists, and everything is physical, then in reality we don't have free will and this whole discussion is just the universe running on automatic.

That may indeed be true, but we are all pretending that it isn't. Some big cognitive dissidence happening here.

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

#352

Post by danaris »

galangalalgol wrote: post #173
Uehreka wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain. Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thoug…

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.

That's effectively a semantic argument, redefining "consciousness" to be something that we don't definitively have.

I know that I am conscious. I exist, I am self-aware, I think and act and make decisions.

Therefore, consciousness exists, and outside of thought experiments, it's absurd to claim that all humans without significant brain damage are not also conscious.

Now, maybe consciousness is fully an emergent property of several parts of our brain working together in ways that, individually, look more like those models you describe. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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

#353

Post by exe34 »

prmph wrote: post #331
exe34 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

I'm not the one who made a list of things AI couldn't do. Every time we try to exclude hypothetical future machines from consciousness, we exclude real living people today.

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

#354

Post by galangalalgol »

prmph wrote: post #331
exe34 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

You can take their word for it, but yes, that is unreliable. I don't typically have an internal narrative, it takes effort. I sometimes have internal dialogue to think through an issue by taking various sides of it. Usually it is quiet in there. Or there is music playing. This is the most replies I have ever received. I think I touched a nerve by suggesting to people they do not exist.

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

#355

Post by [deleted] »

cowboylowrez wrote: post #342
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…

I agree with your comment and the article. LLMs should be part of the answer, but the core of the progress should probably dive back into neural networks in general. Language is how we communicate as well as with other senses, but right now we're stuck at LLMs that just seem to be blown out elizas trained with other actual humans work. I remember early on, training of simple neural networks was done with rules in the…

[deleted]

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

#356

Post by 9dev »

prmph wrote: post #332
9dev wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet that perception is completely flawed! The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good. Your senses make stuff up all the time, and apply all sorts of corrections you’re not aware of. By blinking rapidly, you can slow down your subjective experience of time.

There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not accessible to humans.

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

#357

Post by fao_ »

root_axis wrote: post #258
Uehreka wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain. Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thoug…

It doesn't seem clear that there is necessarily any connection between consciousness and intelligence. If anything, LLMs are evidence of the opposite. It also isn't clear what the functional purpose of consciousness would be in a machine learning model of any kind. Either way, it's clear it hasn't been an impediment to the advancement of machine learning systems.

> It doesn't seem clear that there is necessarily any connection between consciousness and intelligence. If anything, LLMs are evidence of the opposite.

This implies that LLMs are intelligent, and yet even the most advanced models are unable to solve very simple riddles that take humans only a few seconds, and are completely unable to reason around basic concepts that 3 year olds are able to. Many of them regurgitate whole passages of text that humans have already produced. I suspect that LLMs have more akin with Markov models than many would like to assume.

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

#358

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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…

I think the gist of TFA is just that we need a new architecture/etc not scaling.

I suppose one can argue about whether designing a new AGI-capable architecture and learning algorithm(s) is a matter of engineering (applying what we already know) or research, but I think saying we need new scientific discoveries is going to far.

Neural nets seems to be the right technology, and we've now amassed a ton of knowledge and intuition about what neural nets can do and how to design with them. If there was any doubt, then LLMs, even if not brain-like, have proved the power of prediction as a learning technique - intelligence essentially is just successful prediction.

It seems pretty obvious that the rough requirements for an neural-net architecture for AGI are going to be something like our own neocortex and thalamo-cortical loop - something that learns to predict based on sensory feedback and prediction failure, including looping and working memory. Built-in "traits" like curiosity (prediction failure => focus) and boredom will be needed so that this sort of autonomous AGI puts itself into leaning situations and is capable of true innovation.

The major piece to be designed/discovered isn't so much the architecture as the incremental learning algorithm, and I think if someone like Google-DeepMind focused their money, talent and resources on this then they could fairly easily get something that worked and could then be refined.

Demis Hassabis has recently given an estimate of human-level AGI in 5 years, but has indicated that a pre-trained(?) LLM may still be one component of it, so not clear exactly what they are trying to build in that time frame. Having a built-in LLM is likely to prove to be a mistake where the bitter lesson applies - better to build something capable of self-learning and just let it learn.

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

#359

Post by DrewADesign »

kelnos wrote: post #103
DrewADesign wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t contradict what they said. We may one day design a biological computing system that is capable of it. We don’t entirely understand how neurons work; it’s reasonable to posit that the differences that many AGI boosters assert don’t matter do matter— just not in ways we’ve discovered yet.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do wonder if we engineer a sort of biological computer, will it really be a computer at all, and not a new kind of life itself?

Maybe — though we’d still have engineered it, which is the point I was trying to make.

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

#360

Post by x1f604 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #358
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…

I think the gist of TFA is just that we need a new architecture/etc not scaling. I suppose one can argue about whether designing a new AGI-capable architecture and learning algorithm(s) is a matter of engineering (applying what we already know) or research, but I think saying we need new scientific discoveries is going to far. Neural nets seems to be the right technology, and we've now amassed a ton of knowledge and…

> Demis Hassabis has recently given an estimate of human-level AGI in 5 years

He said 50% chance of AGI in 5 years.

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