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AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

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Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#81
post #63
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's already been pretty well digested and excreted for the most part, now we're into the re-ingestion phase until the bubble bursts.

Not even close. Software can now understand human language... this is going to mean computers can be a lot more places than they ever could. Furthermore, software can now understand the content of images... eventually this will have a wild impact on nearly everything.

Understand? It fails with to understand a rephrasing of a math problem a five year old can solve... They get much better at training to the test from memory the bigger they get. Likewise you can get some emergent properties out of them.

Really it does not understand a thing, sadly. It can barely analyze language and spew out a matching response chain.

To actually understand something, it must be capable of breaking it down into constituent parts, synthesizing a solution and then phrasing the solution correctly while explaining the steps it took.

And that's not even what huge 62B LLM with the notepad chain of thought (like o3, GPT-4.1 or Claude 3.7) can really properly do.

Further, it has to be able to operate on sub-token level. Say, what happens if I run together truncated version of words or sentences? Even a chimpanzee can handle that. (in sign language)

It cannot do true multimodal IO either. You cannot ask it to respond with at least two matching syllables per word and two pictures of syllables per word, in addition to letters. This is a task a 4 year old can do.

Prediction alone is not indicative of understanding. Pasting together answers like lego is also not indicative of understanding. (Afterwards ask it how it felt about the task. And to spot and explain some patterns in a picture of clouds.)

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the opposite. LLMs are unbelievably useful for me - never have I had a tool more powerful to assist my brain work. I useLLMs for work and play constantly every day. It pretends to sound like a person and can mimic speech and write and is all around perhaps the greatest wonder created by humanity. It’s still not artificial intelligence though, it’s a talking library.

Fair. For engineering work they have been a terrible drain on me save for the most minor autocomplete. Its recommendations are often deeply flawed or almost totally hallucinated no matter the model. Maybe I am a better software engineer than a “prompt engineer”. Ive tried to use them as a research assistant in a history project and they have been also quite bad in that respect because of the immense naivety in its ap…

I’m curious you’re a developer who finds no value in LLMs?

It’s weird to me that there’s such a giant gap with my experience of it bein a minimum 10x multiplier.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#83

Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.

If/when we will have AGI, we will likely have something fundamentally superhuman very soon after, and that will be very recognizable. This is the idea of "hard takeoff" -- because the way we can scale computation, there will only ever be a very short time when the AI will be roughly human-level. Even if there are no fundamental breakthroughs, the very least silicon can be ran much faster than meat, and instead of com…

But that's not ten times the workdays. That's just taking a bunch of speed and sitting by yourself worrying about something. Results may be eccentric.

Though I don't know what you mean by "width of a human brain".

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people do you know who are capable of doing something truly novel? Definitely not me, I'm just an average phd doing average research.

Literally every single person I know that is capable of holding a pen or typing on a keyboard can create something new.

Something new != truly novel. ChatGPT creates something new every time I ask it a question.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#86

LLMs are basically a library that can talk. That’s not artificial intelligence.

There’s increasing evidence that LLMs are more than that. Especially work by Anthropic has been showing how to trace the internal logic of an LLM as it answers a question. They can in fact reason over facts contained in the model, not just repeat already seen information. A simple example is how LLMs do math. They are not calculators and have not memorized every sum in existence. Instead they deploy a whole set of me…

[dead]

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#87

Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.

Mustafa Suleyman says AGI is when a (single) machine can perform every cognitive task better than the best humans. That is significantly different from OpenAIs definition (...when we make enough $$$$$, it's AGI).

Suleyman's book "The Coming Wave" talks about Artificial Capable Intelligence (ACI) - between today's LLMs (== "AI" now) and AGI. AI systems capable of handling a lot of complex tasks across various domains, yet not being fully general. Suleyman argues that ACI is here (2025) and will have huge implications for society. These systems could manage businesses, generate digital content, and even operate core government services -- as is happening on a small scale today.

He also opines that these ACIs give us plenty of frontier to be mined for amazing solutions. I agree, what we have already has not been tapped-out.

His definition, to me, is early ASI. If a program is better than the best humans, then we ask it how to improve itself. That's what ASI is.

The clearest thinker alive today on how to get to AGI is, I think, Yann LeCun. He said, paraphrasing: If you want to build an AGI, do NOT work on LLMs!

Good advice; and go (re-?) read Minsky's "Society of Mind".

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#88

Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.

If/when we will have AGI, we will likely have something fundamentally superhuman very soon after, and that will be very recognizable. This is the idea of "hard takeoff" -- because the way we can scale computation, there will only ever be a very short time when the AI will be roughly human-level. Even if there are no fundamental breakthroughs, the very least silicon can be ran much faster than meat, and instead of com…

Would AGI be recognisable to us? When a human pushes over an anthill, what do the ants think happened? Do they even know the anthill is gone; did they have concept of the anthill as a huge edifice, or did they only know earth to squeeze through and some biological instinct.

If general intelligence arrived and did whatever general intelligence would do, would we even see it? Or would there just be things that happened that we just can't comprehend?

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#89

Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.

AGI isn't ASI; it's not supposed to be smarter than humans. The people who say AGI is far away are unscientific woo-mongers, because they never give a concrete, empirically measurable definition of AGI. The closest we have is Humanity's Last Exam, which LLMs are already well on the path to acing.

Consider this: Being born/trained in 1900 if that were possible and given a year to adapt to the world of 2025, how well would an LLM do on any test? Compare that to how a 15 years old human in the same situation would do.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will keep improving LLMs, and by the time they are AGI (less than 30 years), you will say, "Well, these are no longer LLMs."

What the hell is general intelligence anyway? People seem to think it means human-like intelligence, but I can't imagine we have any good reason to believe that our kinds of intelligence constitute all possible kinds of intelligence--which, from the words, must be what "general" intelligence means. It seems like even if it's possible to achieve GI, artificial or otherwise, you'd never be able to know for sure that th…

> What the hell is general intelligence anyway?

OpenAI used to define it as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

Now they used a Level 1-5 scale: https://briansolis.com/2024/08/ainsights-openai-defines-five...

So we can say AGI is "AI that can do the work of Organizations":

> These “Organizations” can manage and execute all functions of a business, surpassing traditional human-based operations in terms of efficiency and productivity. This stage represents the pinnacle of AI development, where AI can autonomously run complex organizational structures.

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