411–420 of 442 posts
The first premise of the argument is that LLMs are plateauing in capability and this is obvious from using them. It is not obvious to me.
Consensus on GPT-5 has been that it was underwhelming, and definitely a smaller jump than 3 to 4.
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At its core, arithmetic is a deterministic set of rules that can be implemented with logic gates. Computing is just taking that and scaling it up a billion times. What is intelligence? How do you implement intelligence if nobody can provide a consistent, clear definition of what it is?
Same thing: we create models about how to solve the problem, not biomimicry models about how natural entities solve the problem - these are not necessary. They are on a lower layer in the stack.
What I see with these attempts at AGI is VC-funded circuses throwing shit at the wall, hardly checking to see if it sticks, and then heaping more on top. Nobody can explain how exactly transformer models are the building blocks of intelligence or how building on top of it will lead to real intelligence.
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With Carmack it's consciously a dilliante project. He's been effectively retired for quite some time. It's clear at some point he no longer found game and graphics engine internals motivation, possibly because the industry took the path he was advocating against back in the day. For a while he was focused on Armadillo aerospace, and they got some cool stuff accomplished. That was also something of a knowing pet proje…
> possibly because the industry took the path he was advocating against back in the day What path did he advocate? And what path did the industry take instead?
But more technically, when he was experimenting with what became the Doom 3 engine, he favored a model of extending the basic OpenGL state machine to be able to do lots of passes with a wider variety of blending modes.
Basically, you get "dumb" triangles, but can render so many billions of them per frame you build up visual complexity, shadows, lighting, etc that way.
The other model has its roots in Renderman and similar offline rendering frameworks. Here a small shader kernel is invoked per vertex and per fragment. Your shader can run whatever code it wants subject to some limitations. So you get "smart" triangles, and build up complexity, shadows, lighting, etc through having complex shaders.
The shadow algorithm used in Doom 3 is a great example of the difference. Doom 3 figures out the shadow volume, and renders it as triangles with the OpenGL modes set such that how many shadow volumes a given pixel intersects is recorded in the stencil buffer. Then you can render the scene geometry with a blending mode where the stencil selects if you're inside shadow or not.
This is in contrast to shadow map style algorithms, where you render from the PoV of the light into a depth buffer, then inside your fragment shader you sample that shadow map to figure out if the fragment is occluded from the light or not.
Anyhow, Doom 3 is the only major game to use stencil volume shadows afaik.
And not to hang Carmack's dissatisfaction on just that alone, I think it is clear he didn't want a graphics world where NVIDIA was running everything.
I also think not being able to keep up with Unreal Engine's momentum was maybe part of it too.
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Same thing: we create models about how to solve the problem, not biomimicry models about how natural entities solve the problem - these are not necessary. They are on a lower layer in the stack.
Except that doesn't make sense if you can't articulate what the problem space is. We know arithmetic inside and out, and we've understood how to make mechanical calculators centuries before the dawn of electronics. "Intelligence" on the other hand is a nebulously defined philosophical concept. What I see with these attempts at AGI is VC-funded circuses throwing shit at the wall, hardly checking to see if it sticks, a…
The point was, let me remind you, that we do not see any need for biomimicry: we did not need to simulate any brain to implement counting. Similarly, there is no need to simulate a brain to implement a reasoner (and the problem is well defined).
> these attempts at AGI
They are just occasional events in the whole history of the endeavour.
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Edit:
> normal hurdles
...or, in other words: "yes, if we had the recipe, it would be trivial". Yet we normally manage without.
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There are many working quantum computers…
ah, I mean, working in the sense of OP: that a system which overcomes the "engineering hurdles" is actually feasible and will be successful. To be blocked merely by "engineering hurdles" puts QC in approximately the same place as fusion.
Whether these are a commercial success at this point in time is missing the forest for the trees. A LOT of money has been put into getting as far as we have, and the limited market for using these machines at the moment means that getting a return on investment right now is difficult. But this is/has been true of every new technology.
And quantum computers are getting better & more energy efficient year-by-year.
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No you are not the only one. I am continuously mystified by the discussion surrounding this. Clause is absolutely and unquestionably an artificial general intelligence. But what people mean by “AGI” is a constantly shifting, never defined goalpost moving at sonic speed.
What we envisioned with AGI is something like self directed learning, I think. Not just a better search engine.
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> You can't even simply compare it to humans and ask "is it able to do the same things?" because your answer depends on what you define those things to be. Right, but you can’t compare two different humans either. You don’t test each new human to see if they have it. Somehow we conclude that humans have it without doing either of those things.
> You don’t test each new human to see if they have it We do, its called school and we label some humans with different learning disabilities. Some of those learning disabilities are grave enough that they can't learn to do tasks we expect humans to be able to learn, such humans can be argued to not posses the general intelligence we expect from humans. Interacting with an LLM today is like interacting with an Alzhei…
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The magical thinking around LLMs is getting bizarre now. LLMs are not “intelligent” in any meaningful biological sense. Watch a spider modify its web to adapt to changing conditions and you’ll realize just how far we have to go. LLMs sometimes echo our own reasoning back at us in a way that sounds intelligent and is often useful, but don’t mistake this for “intelligence”
They pass human intelligence tests like exams and IQ tests. If I ask chatgpt how to get rid of spiders I'm probably going to get further than the spiders would scheming to get rid of chatgpt.
"Some tests can be cheesed by a statistical model" is much less sexy and clickable than "my computer is sentient", but it's what's actually going on lol
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I'm nowhere implying that it's impossible to replicate, just that LLMs have almost nothing to do with replicating intelligence. They aren't doing any of the things even simple life forms are doing.
They lack many abilities of simple life forms, but they can also do things like complex abstract reasoning, which only humans and LLMs can do.
You don't gotta work hard to break the illusion, either.
People really really really want to believe this thing and I do not understand why. I wish I did lol
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There very well could be something magical about it.
It’s fine to think that—many clearly do. But it would be more honest and productive imo if people would just say outright when they don’t think AGI is possible (or that AI can never be “real intelligence”) for religious reasons, rather than pretending there’s a rational basis.
Plenty of things could theoretically exist that aren't possible and likely will never be possible.
Like, sure, a Dyson sphere would solve our energy needs. We can't build one now and we almost certainly never will lol
"AGI" is theoretically feasible, sure. Our brains are just matter. But they're also an insanely complex and complicated system that came out of a billion years of evolution.
A little rinky dink statistical model doesn't even scratch the surface of it, and I don't understand why people think it does.