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OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

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Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#71

Post by falcor84 »

nerdypirate wrote: post #12

"We will have better and better models," wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a recent Reddit AMA. "But I think the thing that will feel like the next giant breakthrough will be agents." Is this certain? Are Agents the right direction to AGI?

Nothing is certain, but my $0.02 is that setting LLM-based agents up with long-running tasks and giving them a way of interacting with the world, via computer use (e.g. Anthropic's recent release) and via actual robotic bodies (e.g. figure.ai) are the way forward to AGI. At the very least, this approach allows the gathering of unlimited ground truth data, that can be used to train subsequent models (or even allow for actual "hive mind" online machine learning).

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#72

Post by aresant »

Taking a hollistic view informed by a disruptive OpenAI / AI / LLM twitter habit I would say this is AI's "What gets measured gets managed" moment and the narrative will change

This is supported by both general observations and recently this tweet from an OpenAI engineer that Sam responded to and engaged ->

"scaling has hit a wall and that wall is 100% eval saturation"

Which I interpert to mean his view is that models are no longer yielding significant performance improvements because the models have maxed out existing evaluation metrics.

Are those evaluations (or even LLMs) the RIGHT measures to achieve AGI? Probably not.

But have they been useful tools to demonstrate that the confluence of compute, engineering, and tactical models are leading towards signifigant breathroughts in artificial (computer) intelligence?

I would say yes.

Which in turn are driving the funding, power innovation, public policy etc needed to take that next step?

I hope so.

(1) https://x.com/willdepue/status/1856766850027458648

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#73

Post by wslh »

It sounds a bit sci-fi, but since these models are built on data generated by our civilization, I wonder if there's an epistemological bottleneck requiring smarter or more diverse individuals to produce richer data. This, in turn, could spark further breakthroughs in model development. Although these interactions with LLMs help address specific problems, truly complex issues remain beyond their current scope.

With my user hat on, I'm quite pleased with the current state of LLMs. Initially, I approached them skeptically, using a hackish mindset and posing all kinds of Turing test-like questions. Over time, though, I shifted my focus to how they can enhance my team's productivity and support my own tasks in meaningful ways.

Finally, I see LLMs as a valuable way to explore parts of the world, accommodating the reality that we simply don’t have enough time to read every book or delve into every topic that interests us.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#74

Post by swatcoder »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #17
irrational wrote: post #13

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

I think your definition is off from what most people would define AGI as. Generally, it means being able to think and reason at a human level for a multitude/all tasks or jobs. "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a theoretical form of artificial intelligence that possesses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to that of a human being." A…

On the contrary, I think you're conflating the narrow jargon of the industry with what "most people" would define.

"Most people" naturally associate AGI with the sci-tropes of self-aware human-like agents.

But industries want something more concrete and prospectively-acheivable in their jargon, and so that's where AGI gets redefined as wide task suitability.

And while that's not an unreasonable definition in the context of the industry, it's one that vanishingly few people are actually familiar with.

And the commercial AI vendors benefit greatly from allowing those two usages to conflate in the minds of as many people as possible, as it lets them suggest grand claims while keeping a rhetorical "we obviously never meant that!" in their back pocket

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#75

Post by Filligree »

jedberg wrote: post #20
irrational wrote: post #13

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department. I'm not sure everyone even agrees on what AGI is, but a common test is "can it do what humans can". For example, in this article it says it can't do coding exercises outside the training set. That would definitely be on the "AGI checklist". Basically doing anything that is outside…

Let me modify that a little, because humans can't do things outside their training set either.

A crucial element of AGI would be the ability to self-train on self-generated data, online. So it's not really AGI if there is a hard distinction between training and inference (though it may still be very capable), and it's not really AGI if it can't work its way through novel problems on its own.

The ability to immediately solve a problem it's never seen before is too high a bar, I think.

And yes, my definition still excludes a lot of humans in a lot of fields. That's a bullet I'm willing to bite.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#76

Post by falcor84 »

Oras wrote: post #53

I think Meta will have upper hand soon with the release of their glasses. If they managed to make it a daily use glass, and paid users to record and share their life, then they will have data no one else has now. Mix of vision, audio, and physics.

Do these companies actually even have the compute capacity to train on video at scale at the moment? E.g. I would assume that Google haven't trained their models on the entirety of YouTube yet, as if they had, Gemini would be significantly better than it is at the moment.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#77

Post by nomel »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #17
irrational wrote: post #13

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

I think your definition is off from what most people would define AGI as. Generally, it means being able to think and reason at a human level for a multitude/all tasks or jobs. "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a theoretical form of artificial intelligence that possesses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to that of a human being." A…

> than a self aware entity.

What does this mean? If I have a blind, deaf, paralyzed person, who could only communicate through text, what would the signs be that they were self aware?

Is this more of a feedback loop problem? If I let the LLM run in a loop, and tell it it's talking to itself, would that be approaching "self aware"?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#78

Post by headcanon »

I don't see a problem with this, we were inevitably going to reach some kind of plateau with existing pre-LLM-era data.

Meanwhile, the existing tech is such a step change that industry is going to need time to figure out how to effectively use these models. In a lot of ways it feels like the "digitization" era all over again - workflows and organizations that were built around the idea humans handled all the cognitive load (basically all companies older than a year or two) will need time to adjust to a hybrid AI + human model.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#79

Post by ActionHank »

aresant wrote: post #72

Taking a hollistic view informed by a disruptive OpenAI / AI / LLM twitter habit I would say this is AI's "What gets measured gets managed" moment and the narrative will change This is supported by both general observations and recently this tweet from an OpenAI engineer that Sam responded to and engaged -> "scaling has hit a wall and that wall is 100% eval saturation" Which I interpert to mean his view is that model…

> Which in turn are driving the funding, power innovation, public policy etc needed to take that next step?

They are driving the shoveling of VC money into a furnace to power their servers.

Should that money run dry before they hit another breakthrough "AI" popularity is going to drop like a stone. I believe this to be far more likely an outcome than AGI or even the next big breakthrough.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#80

Post by norir »

jedberg wrote: post #20
irrational wrote: post #13

> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

Whether self awareness is a requirement for AGI definitely gets more into the Philosophy department than the Computer Science department. I'm not sure everyone even agrees on what AGI is, but a common test is "can it do what humans can". For example, in this article it says it can't do coding exercises outside the training set. That would definitely be on the "AGI checklist". Basically doing anything that is outside…

Here is an example of a task that I do not believe this generation of LLMs can ever do but that is possible for a human: design a Turing complete programming language that is both human and machine readable and implement a self hosted compiler in this language that self compiles on existing hardware faster than any known language implementation that also self compiles. Additionally, for any syntactically or semantically invalid program, the compiler must provide an error message that points exactly to the source location of the first error that occurs in the program.

I will get excited for/scared of LLMs when they can tackle this kind of problem. But I don't believe they can because of the fundamental nature of their design, which is both backward looking (thus not better than the human state of the art) and lacks human intuition and self awareness. Or perhaps rather I believe that the prompt that would be required to get an LLM to produce such a program is a problem of at least equivalent complexity to implementing the program without an LLM.

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