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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

#401

Post by grantcas »

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.

[dead]

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

#402

Post by _DeadFred_ »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #362
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…

> The real philosophical headache Isn't the real actual headache whether to produce another thinking intelligent being at all, and what the ramifications of that decision are? Not whether it would destroy humanity, but what it would mean for a mega corporation whose goal is to extract profit to own the rights of creating a thinking machine that identifies itself as thinking and a "self"? Really out here missing the f…

Making all the Nike child labor jokes already did that. Nike and the joke tellers put in the work to push us back a hundred years when it comes to caring at all about others. When a little girl working horrible hours in a tropic non-air-conditioned factory is a societal wide joke, we've decided we don't care. We care about saving $20 so we can add multiple new pairs of shoes a year to our collection.

Your comment just shows we as a society pretend we didn't make that choice, but we picked extra new shoes every year over that little girl in the sweatshop. Our society has actually gotten pretty evil in the last 30 years if we self reflect (but then the joke I mention was originally supposed to be a self reflection, but all we took from it was a laugh, so we aren't going to self reflect, or worse, this is just who we are now).

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

#403

Post by root_axis »

galangalalgol wrote: post #391
root_axis wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it has a functional purpose then it's not an illusion.

That is in interesting viewpoint. Firstly, evolution on long time scales hits plenty of local minima. But also, it gets semantic in that illusions or delusions can be beneficial, and in that way aid reproduction. In this specific case, the idea is that the shortcut of using the model of models as self saves a pointer indirection every time we use it. Meditation practices that lead to "ego death" seem to work by drawi…

I'm just not sure what the label "illusion" tells us in the case of consciousness. Even if it were an illusion, what implications follow from that assetion?

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

#404

Post by zoeysmithe »

cakealert wrote: post #194

There is a reason why LLM's are architected the way they are and why thinking is bolted on. The architecture has to allow for gradient descent to be a viable training strategy, this means no branching (routing is bolted on). And the training data has to exist, you can't find millions of pages depicting every thought a person went through before writing something. And such data can't exist because most thoughts aren't…

Yep this. LLMs are just regressive models.

Imagine if we had a LLM in the 15th century. It would happily explain the validity of the geocentric system. It can't get to heliocentrism. The same way modern LLMs can only tell us what we know and cant think, revolutionize, etc. They can be programmed to reason a bit, but 'reason' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The reasoning is just a better filter on what the person is asking or what is being produced for the most part and not an actual novel creative act.

The more time I spend with LLM's the more they feel like google on steroids. I just am not seeing how this type of system could ever lead to AGI, and if anything, probably is eating away at any remaining AGI hype and funding.

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

#405

Post by interstice »

fao_ wrote: post #357
root_axis wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is an awful lot of research into just how much is regurgitated vs the limits of their creativity, and as far as I’m aware this was not the conclusion that research came to. That isn’t to say any reasoning that does happen is not fragile or prone to breaking in odd ways, but I’ve had similar experience dealing with other humans more often than I’d like too.

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

#406

Post by interstice »

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…

Sometimes I think the fundamental thing could be as ‘simple’ as something like introducing l an attention/event loo, flush to memory, emotion driven motivation. There are quite a few fairly obvious things that llms don’t have that might be best not to add just in case.

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

#407

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

danenania wrote: post #399
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between memory and learning. Would you rather your illness was diagnosed by a doctor or by a plumber with access to a stack of medical books ? Learning is about assimilating lots of different sources of information, reconciling the differences, trying things out for yourself, learning from your mistakes, being curious about your knowledge gaps and contradictions, and ultimately learning to correc…

I think my point is that when the doctor diagnoses you, she often doesn’t do so immediately. She is spending time thinking it through, and as part of that process is retrieving various pieces of relevant information from her memory (both long term and short term). I think this may be closer to an agentic, iterative search (ala claude code) than direct inference using continuously updated weights. If it was the latter…

Yes, but I think a key part of learning is experimentation and the feedback loop of being wrong.

An agent, or doctor, may be reasoning over the problem they are presented with, combining past learning with additional sources of memorized or problem-specific data, but in that moment it's their personal expertise/learning that will determine how successful they are with this reasoning process and ability to apply the reference material to the matter at hand (cf the plumber, who with all the time in the world just doesn't have the learning to make good use of the reference books).

I think there is also a subtle problem, not often discussed, that to act successfully, the underlying learning in choosing how to act has to have come from personal experience. It's basically the difference between being book smart and having personal experience, but in the case of an LLM also applies to experience-based reasoning it may have been trained on. The problem is that when the LLM acts, what is in it's head (context/weights) isn't the same as what was in the head of the expert whose reasoning it may be trying to apply, so it may be trying to apply reasoning outside of the context that made it valid.

How you go from being book smart, and having heard other people's advice and reasoning, to being an expert yourself is by personal practice and learning - learning how to act based on what is in your own head.

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

#408

Post by amanaplanacanal »

ACCount37 wrote: post #383
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of things are real that can't be measured, including many physical sensations and emotions. I won't say they are impossible to ever be measured, but we currently have no idea how.

If you can't measure it and can't compare it, then for all practical purposes, it does not exist. "Consciousness" might as well not be real. The only real and measurable thing is capabilities.

Oof. Tell chronic pain patients that their pain doesn't exist.

I guess depression doesn't exist either. Or love.

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

#409

Post by tomrod »

_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?

Yes to both, but the first is possible in a vacuum and therefore free will exists.

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

#410

Post by tomrod »

fuckaj wrote: post #238
tomrod wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be nice if LLMs emulated the real world! They predict next likely text token. That we can do so much with that is an absolute testament to the brilliance of researchers, engineers, and product builders. We are not yet creating a god in any sense.

I mean that the computing power available to evolution and biological processes for training is magnitudes higher than for an LLM.

Is it? Seems like C. elegans does just fine with limited compute. Despite our inability to model it in OpenWorm.
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