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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#661

Post by nawgz »

Nevermark wrote: post #645
nawgz wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree that all the computer processors in the world combined don't have enough raw processing power to simulate a single bee brain. That to me is an absurd idea. A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms. The largest supercomputers, at hundreds of trillions of transistors, come in at 2-5 * 10^14 transistors. I don't think that combining all the compute…

> A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms. Any rational characterization of the problem has left the building here. Nobody wants to simulate any creature's brain or nervous system atom for atom. Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction suppor…

We’re talking about whether or not humanity has enough compute to simulate a bee brain, how can us having orders of magnitude less transistors than there are atoms in the system we wish to simulate possibly be hand waved away? A single transistor doesn’t do much, regardless of how much you wish to baldly assert atoms are supposedly trivial.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#662

Post by thunky »

fallingfrog wrote: post #651
titzer wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally see no irony here? You are doubling, tripling down on some idea you won't even vaguely describe to people, but you are so utterly convinced that it's right you don't appear to even admit the possibility that your idle thoughts could be wrong, or just silly. Frankly it sounds delusional and you should question yourself more often. If you're so afraid of being right that you won't even write the idea down…

Tell you what, here's a story from my last job. I was hired on to help run these experiments with a machine they were trying to perfect. They wanted to do all this stuff with running two machines in parallel, dumping the refuse from one into another machine, all kinds of silly stuff. I looked at it and in a few minutes I sketched in my notebook a solution to their problem that would achieve the maximum theoretical yi…

> If i had given them the answer months earlier, I would not have gotten any kind of bonus even in the unlikely event that I had been taken seriously.

You guaranteed that you wouldn't get recognition by keeping the idea to yourself. Your victimization was by your own design, and it stayed where it started: in your head. And ironically you were the one being passive agressive and showing bias towards your coworkers.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#663

Post by jayd16 »

undeveloper wrote: post #567
jayd16 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason search might not be as good as an AI is enshitifications. I expect these LLMs will be the same after the open web has withered.

LLMs are quite good at "semantic search", where traditional search engines struggle

No one said search engines need to be "traditional" or only Page Rank or whatever.

But you also don't need to filter the information through an hallucinating UX just so you can use vectorization to match actual results.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#664

Post by fallingfrog »

thunky wrote: post #662
fallingfrog wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell you what, here's a story from my last job. I was hired on to help run these experiments with a machine they were trying to perfect. They wanted to do all this stuff with running two machines in parallel, dumping the refuse from one into another machine, all kinds of silly stuff. I looked at it and in a few minutes I sketched in my notebook a solution to their problem that would achieve the maximum theoretical yi…

> If i had given them the answer months earlier, I would not have gotten any kind of bonus even in the unlikely event that I had been taken seriously. You guaranteed that you wouldn't get recognition by keeping the idea to yourself. Your victimization was by your own design, and it stayed where it started: in your head. And ironically you were the one being passive agressive and showing bias towards your coworkers.

Oh honey. I wasn't born with this attitude you know- it was beaten into me.

Nothing is punished so swiftly and severely as outshining your boss or making him look stupid.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#665

Post by panarky »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #513
lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1] > religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion Religions have of course come and gone throughout huma…

The thing about bubbles is that it's devilishly difficult to tell the difference between a total sham and a genuine regime shift while it's happening because the hype level is similar for both.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#666

Post by pavas »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #648
pavas wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually curious here, because maybe our experiences are different. When you look at something red, before any associations or thoughts kick in, before you start thinking "this reminds me of fire" or analyzing it, is there something it's like for that redness to be there? Some quality to it that exists independent of what you can say about it? For me, I can turn off all the thinking and associations and just... l…

> And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense I think I know what you mean, but if you consider something really simple like the patch of a single color, even without any color associations (although presumably they are always there subconsciously) then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". There is something there, that is the same in that sp…

Yeah that pretty much seems to be it.

> then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent".

I don't know why this seems to be so hard for me to think about and even put into words, but isn't "the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent" something other than the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent itself?

I mean that the words we use to describe something aren't the something itself. Conceivably, you can experience something without ever having words, and having words about a phenomenal visual experience doesn't seem to change the experience much or at all (at least for me).

Maybe another way of phrasing this would be something like: can we talk about red blotches using red blotches themselves, in the same way that we can talk about words using words themselves? And then, supposing that we could talk about red blotches using red blotches (maybe the blotches are in the form of words or structured like knowledge, I dunno), can we talk about red blotches without ever having experienced red blotches? I learned this idea from Mary's Room thought experiment, but I still don't know what to think about it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#667

Post by heresie-dabord »

panarky wrote: post #665
heresie-dabord wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1] > religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion Religions have of course come and gone throughout huma…

The thing about bubbles is that it's devilishly difficult to tell the difference between a total sham and a genuine regime shift while it's happening because the hype level is similar for both.

Sure, it certainly could be difficult. But this is often because of information assymetry — the purveyors are making big claims about the dragon in their garage. [1]

If your intuition told you that there ought to be some evidence for grand claims, you would be right to be suspicious of the continuing absence of suitable evidence.

[1] _ http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#668

Post by Nevermark »

nawgz wrote: post #661
Nevermark wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms. Any rational characterization of the problem has left the building here. Nobody wants to simulate any creature's brain or nervous system atom for atom. Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction suppor…

We’re talking about whether or not humanity has enough compute to simulate a bee brain, how can us having orders of magnitude less transistors than there are atoms in the system we wish to simulate possibly be hand waved away? A single transistor doesn’t do much, regardless of how much you wish to baldly assert atoms are supposedly trivial.

Perhaps you are meaning to compare transistors with neurons? If we do that, then yes, a transistor is a lot simpler than a neuron. But transistors are also insanely fast compared to neurons, so transistors do far FAR more, per unit of time.

A bee brain might have a million neurons, operating at maximum speed of about 250 Hz.

10^6 neurons x 250 Hz

= 2.5 x 10^8 Hz for a bee brain.

We can easily model that many neurons with a trillion transistors, operating at 100 Ghz. (If that sounds fast to you, keep in mind that CPU clock speeds account for many transistors switching in series.)

10^12 transistors x 10^11 Hz

= 10^23 Hz for a CPU

That is a factor of 4 x 10^14 more powerful.

So yeah, the only problem for modeling a bee brain is identifying the organization of its neurons.

Nature does a lot with a little. Trillions of bee life years went into designing a really efficient bee brain.

---

Atoms:

A bee brain might have 10^20 atoms. Atoms interact at speeds that are far beyond anything we are talking about here. But they don't "switch", they bounce around every which way and slowly end up reacting when they connect with the right conditions. This is called Brownian motion and its not computation, its natures way of using the chaos produced by heat to give compounds so many chances to find their right context that they eventually do.

While we could not easily model that many atoms, nobody wants to (with regard to bees). Atoms are neither the "transistors" or the neurons of a bee brain.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#669

Post by daveguy »

XorNot wrote: post #646
daveguy wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure human level cognition requires human level processing power. We are still multiple orders of magnitude away from that. A blind programmer still has human processing power. The "usually-sight" regions of the brain don't just shut down. They're still used.

Sure, but there are animals with much larger brains on Earth which have - we believe - a reasonably high level of cognition but have not achieved the technological and engineering feats which we have (i.e. dolphins, whales, elephants as naive examples based on brain mass and complexity). Conversely you have birds - with much smaller brains - which also don't achieve those things but display advanced language skills,…

You are absolutely correct. There are multiple algorithmic advances required in addition to hardware advances.

Parrots have hundreds of millions to a few billion neurons, which are just as much parallel-local state-proceasing units as the ones in the mammalian brain. We haven't done a great job of simulating a ~300 neuron c. elegans worm. Not that simulation is required for equivalent intelligence. I'm just saying these analog machines are much much more complex and powerful than the average AI aficionado gives credit. So complex that we are nowhere near AGI.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#670

Post by mbreese »

nawgz wrote: post #661
Nevermark wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bee weighs 100mg. If they are 5% brain, their brain weighs 5mg. 5mg of carbon is 2.5 * 10^20 atoms. Any rational characterization of the problem has left the building here. Nobody wants to simulate any creature's brain or nervous system atom for atom. Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction suppor…

We’re talking about whether or not humanity has enough compute to simulate a bee brain, how can us having orders of magnitude less transistors than there are atoms in the system we wish to simulate possibly be hand waved away? A single transistor doesn’t do much, regardless of how much you wish to baldly assert atoms are supposedly trivial.

You’re not trying to simulate a brain atom for atom. Individual atoms don’t do much on their own. Even if you did do that, you’d really need to simulate electron flow, which is whole other level.

Now, simulating what outputs the bees brain yields from a set of stimuli — that could be done. If it could be done as fast as a brain is a whole other question, and I’m not sure of that answer.

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