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How to build a thinking AI

aithought.com

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#51

Many such thinking architectures are probably possible. The hard part is learning a good representation of the world and all its constituents, without which none of these thinking architectures are possible. What's exciting about LLMs is that they are approaching this learned representation. There are already people attempting to build AGI (or less ambitiously, task automation) on top of LLMs with projects like BabyA…

If you insist on being able to boot the thing up and immediately be self aware, yes, you need to figure out how to construct it so that all the training of 'how to be this particular self aware intelligence' is intrinsic to it, which is a bootstrapping problem. Human intelligence solves this a different way. It instantiates the architecture without any of the weights pretrained, in the form of a 'baby'. The training…

simple solution - create a human world simulation, with intelligent ai's that think they're biological and real, have them grow old, die, lose people they love, etc...then when they die they wake up as an ai robot with learned ethics/morality from life in the sim, other important gained intelligence, and the ability to compute 10000x faster than in the sim. Live, die, wake up as a robotic slave.

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go into studio with a producer and turn your ideas into a beat and then to a song. The same thing does not applies to engineering. This is like comparing apple with an orange.

well, you could hire a team of developers and neuroscientists to build a prototype of the idea and concept and do physical research, whether you yourself have the chops to do it yourself is irrelevant at that point.

You still can't see the difference, can you?

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#53

“Implementing this in a machine will enable artificial general intelligence” If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it? Why should I take anyone seriously that just talks about code instead of actually coding it? This would be much more compelling if he just showed benchmarks and performance instead of writing up an argument. Furthermore, I don’t believe him.

> If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it?

Simple answer: most of the things he mentions haven't been invented yet. At least in terms of computation. Or some parts have been built, but not to sufficient degrees and most don't have bridges for what's being proposed.

I do agree that the title is arrogant, but I'd say so is this comment. There's absolutely nothing wrong with people proposing systems, detailing them out, and publishing (communicating to peers. Idk if blog, paper, whatever, it's all the same in the end). We live in a world that is incredibly complex and we have high rates of specialization. I understand that we code a lot and that means we dip our fingers in a lot of pies, but that doesn't mean we're experts in everything. The context does matter, and the context is that this is a proposal. The other context is, this is pretty fucking hard. If it seems simple, that's because it was communicated well or you simplified what he said. Another alternative is that you're right, which if so please implement it and write a paper, it'll be quite useful to the community as there are a lot of people suggesting quite similar ideas to this. Ruling out what doesn't work is pretty much how science works (which is why I find it absurd that we use and protect a system that disincentivizes communicating negative results).

It's also worth mentioning that if you go to the author's about page[0] that you'll see that he has a video lecture where he discusses this and literally says that he's building it. So... he is? Just not in secret.

Edit: I'll add that several of the ideas here are abstract. I thought I'd clarify this around the "not invented yet" part. So the work he's doing and effectively asking for help with (which is why you put this out) is to get higher resolution on these ideas. Which, criticism is helpful in doing that. But criticism is not just complaints, it is more specific and a clear point of improvement can be drawn from criticism. If you've ever submitted a paper to a journal/conference, you're probably familiar with how Reviewer 2 just makes complaints that aren't addressable and can leave you more confused asking what paper they read. Those are complaints, not critiques.

[0] https://aithought.com/about/

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#54

“Implementing this in a machine will enable artificial general intelligence” If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it? Why should I take anyone seriously that just talks about code instead of actually coding it? This would be much more compelling if he just showed benchmarks and performance instead of writing up an argument. Furthermore, I don’t believe him.

Xanadu.

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#55

“Implementing this in a machine will enable artificial general intelligence” If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it? Why should I take anyone seriously that just talks about code instead of actually coding it? This would be much more compelling if he just showed benchmarks and performance instead of writing up an argument. Furthermore, I don’t believe him.

It's the same hyperbolic nonsense we've seen from hundreds of other confident "researchers" over the past 50 years. Eliasmith has a book called "How to Build a Brain", Hawkins built an entire company, Numenta, around a theory that hasn't created anything remotely useful or interesting in almost 2 decades and has pivoted to creating tools for current ML zeitgeist methods. This unknown researcher is exactly the same. W…

wut?

i'm not even sure what your argument is:

- some people have tried and failed, so anyone else who tries is grandiose?

- anyone who ventures beyond streetlights is spouting hyperbolic nonsense?

and why: "creating claims in the hope that others are impressed"; rather than communicating ideas in the hopes of continuing a conversation?

- why didn't they just build it? eh, cause writing it up is the first step/ limit of budget/ project scope/ overall skill set/ etc

what a toxic take on the effort and courage required to explore and refine new perspectives on this important (and undoubtedly controversial) space

f###

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#56
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A brain specialist can’t code therefore his argument is invalid. HN at its best worst.

I am skeptical of anyone making grandiose claims.

Me too, but you responded to an arrogant claim with a naive one (see my other comment). Please do critique their work, but don't bash it. Point to specific things rather than just throwing something out outright. Just bashing turns the comment section into noise and HN isn't trying to be reddit.

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#57
Over the years hundreds of variants of RNN, CNN and Transformer have been proposed, but under the same budget of weights and compute, and with the same dataset, they are very close in performance. Models don't matter, gradient descent finds a way. The real hero is the dataset.

And what is in the training set? Language is our best repository for past experience. We have painstakingly collected our lessons, over thousands of years, and transmitted them through culture and books. To recreate them from scratch would take a similarly long time. Our culture is smarter than us, it is the result of our history.

So under these reasons I believe the real secret is in the training set. I don't think the problem was the model, but everything else around it.

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#58

“Implementing this in a machine will enable artificial general intelligence” If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it? Why should I take anyone seriously that just talks about code instead of actually coding it? This would be much more compelling if he just showed benchmarks and performance instead of writing up an argument. Furthermore, I don’t believe him.

[deleted]

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same hyperbolic nonsense we've seen from hundreds of other confident "researchers" over the past 50 years. Eliasmith has a book called "How to Build a Brain", Hawkins built an entire company, Numenta, around a theory that hasn't created anything remotely useful or interesting in almost 2 decades and has pivoted to creating tools for current ML zeitgeist methods. This unknown researcher is exactly the same. W…

wut? i'm not even sure what your argument is: - some people have tried and failed, so anyone else who tries is grandiose? - anyone who ventures beyond streetlights is spouting hyperbolic nonsense? and why: "creating claims in the hope that others are impressed"; rather than communicating ideas in the hopes of continuing a conversation? - why didn't they just build it? eh, cause writing it up is the first step/ limit…

I've been seeing an increasing cynicism for anything that isn't a finished product and I'm a bit confused and concerned. It also seems a bit random. Like someone's blog post is okay, but a research paper is garbage? These can definitely be overselling, but I think that's a different discussion about the weird academic incentives (which we definitely should have, but is different). I feel like there's just an acceptance of cynicism and complaining but weirdly not for critiques. Just feels like we're throwing context out the window arbitrarily.

Re: How to build a thinking AI

#60

“Implementing this in a machine will enable artificial general intelligence” If that’s true why didn’t he just implement it? Why should I take anyone seriously that just talks about code instead of actually coding it? This would be much more compelling if he just showed benchmarks and performance instead of writing up an argument. Furthermore, I don’t believe him.

It's the same hyperbolic nonsense we've seen from hundreds of other confident "researchers" over the past 50 years. Eliasmith has a book called "How to Build a Brain", Hawkins built an entire company, Numenta, around a theory that hasn't created anything remotely useful or interesting in almost 2 decades and has pivoted to creating tools for current ML zeitgeist methods. This unknown researcher is exactly the same. W…

At the same time though (before LLMs) I also thought not enough people were interested in AGI and not enough people were willing to put forth half baked algorithms to try out.
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