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Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

dwarkesh.com

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. There's a view that, as I understand it, suggests that language is intelligence. That language is a requirement for understanding. An example might be kind of the contrary—that you might not be able to hold an idea in your head until it has been named. For myself, until I heard the word gestalt (maybe a fitting example?) I am not sure I could have understood the concept. But when it is described it star…

> There's a view that suggests that language is intelligence. I think you find the limits when you dig in. What are you calling language? Can you really say that Eliza doesn't meet your criteria? What about a more advanced version? I mean we've been passing the Turing Test for decades now. > That language is a requirement for understanding. But this contradicts your earlier statement. If language is a requirement the…

> It is the condition where a person does not have an internal monologue.

These people are just nutjobs that misinterpreted what internal monologue means, and have trouble doing basic introspection.

I know there are a myriad of similar conditions, aphantasia, synaesthesia, etc. But someone without internal monologue simply could not function in our society, or at least not pass as someone without obvious mental diminishment.

If there really were some other, hidden code in the mind, that could express "thoughts" in the same depth as language does - then please show it already. At least the tiniest bit of a hint.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#442
post #68

>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three…

I also quite like the way he puts it. However, from a certain point onward, the AI itself will contribute to the development—adding nines—and that’s the key difference between this analogy of nines in other systems (including earlier domain‑specific ML ones) and the path to AGI. That's why we can expect fast acceleration to take off within two years.

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Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#443
post #68

>What takes the long amount of time and the way to think about it is that it’s a march of nines. Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine. While I was at Tesla for five years or so, we went through maybe three…

The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s. The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here…

This world model talk is interesting, and Yann Lecunn has broached on the same topic, but the fact is there are video diffusion models that are quite good at representing the "video world" and even counterfactually and temporally coherently generating a representation of that "world" under different perturbations.

In fact you can go to a SOTA LLM today, and it will do quite well at predicting the outcomes of basic counterfactual scenarios.

Animal brains such as our own have evolved to compress information about our world to aide in survival. LLMs and recent diffusion/conditional flow matching models have been quite successful in compressing the "text world" and the "pixel world" to score good loss metrics on training data.

It's incredibly difficult to compress information without have at least some internal model of that information. Whether that model is a "world model" that fits the definition of folks like Sutton and LeCunn is semantic.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view 'understand' is a folk psychology term that does not have a technical meaning. Like 'intelligent', 'beautiful', and 'interesting'. It usefully labels a basket of behaviors we see in others, and that is all it does. In this view, if a machine performs a task as well as a human, it understands it exactly as much as a human. There's no problem of how to do understanding, only how to do tasks. The 'problem' me…

So my toaster understands toast and I don’t understand toast? Then why am I operating the toaster and not the other way around?

A toaster cannot perform the task of making toast any more than an Allen key can perform the task of assembling flat pack furniture.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#445
post #58

I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet.

> how I can make good on this bet.

I agree with you, and I think that's where Polymarket or similar could be used to see if these people would put your money where their mouth is (my guess is that most won't).

But first we would need a precise definition of AGI. They may be able to come with a definition that makes the bet winnable for them.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#447
post #293
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but modeling the structure of language is a question of modeling word order and binding affinities. It's the Chinese Room thought experiment - can you get away with a form of "understanding" which is fundamentally incomplete but still produces reasonable outputs? Language in itself attempts to model the world and the processes by which it changes. Knowing which parts-of-speech about sunrises appear together an…

> Knowing which parts-of-speech about sunrises appear together and where is not the same as understanding a sunrise What does "understanding a sunrise" mean though? Arguments like this end up resting on semantics or tautology, 100% of the time. Arguments of the form "what AI is really doing" likewise fail because we don't know what real brains are "really" doing either . I mean, if we knew how to model human language…

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Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#448
post #401
post #58

I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet.

Well you wouldn't bet all your assets because it would be an illiquid market that could only resolve in your favor in earliest 80 years. If you're really serious about it put the money into a prediction market. Poly market has multiple AGI bets.

I see only one with 4% chance in 2025 (obviously...). And AGI is defined as "OpenAI announces they reached AGI".

https://polymarket.com/event/openai-announces-it-has-achieve...

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my toaster understands toast and I don’t understand toast? Then why am I operating the toaster and not the other way around?

A toaster cannot perform the task of making toast any more than an Allen key can perform the task of assembling flat pack furniture.

This is contrary to my experience with toasters, but it doesn’t seem worth arguing about.

Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

#450
So "we haven't finished inventing it yet, but when we do it will be awesome".

https://xkcd.com/678/

I'm sure the US economy has ten more years of the data centre money, it'll be fine.

I wonder how far off the "Sell it all — today" Margin Call moment is.

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