is there an definite what an "Agent" is? or dos everyone have their own definition?
Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Photons hit a human eye and then the human came up with language to describe that and then encoded the language into the LLM. The LLM can capture some of this relationship, but the LLM is not sensing actual photons, nor experiencing actual light cone stimulation, nor generating thoughts. Its "world model" is several degrees removed from the real world. So whatever fragment of a model it gains through learning to comp…
> then the human came up with language to describe that and then encoded the language into the LLM
No individual human invented language, we learn it from other people just like AI. I go as far as to say language was the first AGI, we've been riding the coats tails of language for a long time.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that to understand knowledge you have to have a model of the world. You have a small but important mistake. It's to recite (or even apply ) knowledge. To understand does actually require a world model. Think of it this way: can you pass a test without understanding the test material? Certainly we all saw people we thought were idiots do well in class while we've also seen people we thought were geniuses fail. The t…
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…
> 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.
Yes, but you also gloss over what a "task" is or what a "benchmark" is (which has to do with the meaning of generalization).
Suppose an AI or human answers 7 questions correctly out of 10 on an ICPC problem set, what are we able infer from that?
1. Is the task equal to answering these 10 questions well, with a uniform measure of importance?
2. Is the task be good at competitive programming problems?
3. Is the task be good at coding?
4. Is the task be good at problem solving?
5. Is the task not just to be effective under a uniform measure of importance, but an adversarial measure? (i.e. you can probably figure out all kinds of competitive programming questions, if you had more time / etc... but roughly not needing "exponentially more resources")
These are very different levels of abstraction, and literally the same benchmark result can be interpreted to mean very different things. And that imputation of generality is not objective unless we know the mechanism by which it happens. "Understanding" is short-hand for saying that performance generalizes at one of the higher levels of abstraction (3--5), rather than narrow success -- because that is what we expect of a human.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#614To throw two pennies in the ocean of this comment section - I’d argue we still lack schematic-level understanding of what “intelligence” even is or how it works. Not to mention how it interfaces with “consciousness”, and their likely relation to each other. Which kinda invalidates a lot of predictions/discussions of “AGI” or even in general “AI”. How can one identify Artificial Intelligence/AGI without a modicum of u…
That would require philosophical work, something that the technicians building this stuff refuse to acknowledge as having value.
Ultimately this comes down to the philosophy of language and of the history of specific concepts like intelligence or consciousness - neither of which exist in the world as a specific quality, but are more just linguistic shorthands for a bundle of various abilities and qualities.
Hence the entire idea of generalized intelligence is a bit nonsensical, other than as another bundle of various abilities and qualities. What those are specifically doesn’t seem to be ever clarified before the term AGI is used.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm good point. I skimmed the transcript looking for an accurate, representative quote that we could use in the title above. I couldn't exactly find one (within HN's 80 char limit), so I cobbled together "It will take a decade to get agents to work", which is at least closer to what Karpathy actually said. If anyone can suggest a more accurate and representative title, we can change it again. Edit: I thought of using…
To be fair to the OP of the thread, he's just using Patel's title word-for-word. It's Patel who is being inaccurate.
Oh that's clear, and the submitter didn't do anything wrong. It's just that on HN the idea is to find a different title when the article's own title is misleading or linkbait (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
The best way to do that of course is to find a more representative phrase from the article itself. That's almost always possible but I couldn't quite swing it in this case.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's to recite (or even apply) knowledge. To understand does actually require a world model. This is a shell game, or a god of the gaps. All you're saying is that the models "understand" how to recite or apply knowledge or language, but somehow don't understand knowledge or language. Well what else is there really?
> Well what else is there really? Differentiate from memorization. I'd say there's a difference between a database and understanding. If they're the same, well I think Google created AGI a long time ago.
A database doesn't recite or apply knowledge, it stores knowledge.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that's the definition that is leading to all these investments, the promise that very soon they will reach it. If Altman said plainly that LLMs will never reach that stage, there would be a lot less investment into the industry.
Hard disagree. You don’t need AGI to transform countless workflows within companies, current LLMs can do it. A lot of the current investments are to help with the demand with current generation LLMs (and use cases we know will keep opening up with incremental improvements). Are you aware of how intensely all the main companies that host leading models (azure, aws, etc) are throttling usage due to not enough data cent…
This is a relatively reasonable take. Unfortunately, that's not what most AI investors or non-technical punters think. Since GPT 1 it's been all about unlocking 100%+ annual GDP growth by wholesale white collar automation. I agree with AK that the actually effect on GDP will be more or less negligible, which will be an unmitigated disaster for us economically given how much cash has already been incinerated
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. So I’d agree that the night sky is “beautiful”, but not because I somehow have access to a deeper meaning of the word or the sky than an LLM does. As someone who (long ago) studied philosophy of mind and (Chomskian) li…
> I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful” There’s a quality to it - not because you heard someone say it but because you experience it
my thought exactly
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lost all respect for him after reading about his views on medical immortality. His argument is that over time human life expectancy has been constantly increasing * and he calculated that based on some arbitrary rate of acceleration, that science would be expanding human life expectancy by more than a year, per year - medical immortality in other words, and all expected to happen just prior to the time he's reachin…
This is backward looking. Future advances don't have to work like this Example: 20ish years ago, stage IV cancer was a quick death sentence. Now many people live with various stage IV cancers for many years and some even "die of sending else" these advancements obviously skew towards helping older people.
Your claim doesn't argue against the issue. Even if we accept that you're correct there, you're again speaking of more people getting to their 'expiration date' rather than expanding that date itself. If you cure cancer, heart disease, and everything else - we're still not going to be living to a 100, or even near it, on average.
The reason humans die of 'old age' is not because of any specific disease but because of advanced senescence. Your entire body just starts to fail. At that point basically anything can kill you. And sometimes there won't even be any particular cause, but instead your heart will simply stop beating one night while you sleep. This is how you can see people who look like they're in great shape for their age, yet the next month they're dead.
Re: Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
#620Did anyone here actually watch the video before commenting? I’m seeing all the same old opinions and no specific criticisms of anything Karpathy said here.
More specific responses have come in as people have digested more of the content.
This is the reflexive/reflective distinction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Reflexive comments—the kind that express some pre-existing feeling or opinion that happens to get triggered by association—are much faster to produce, so unfortunately they show up first in many threads.