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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#91

Post by CuriouslyC »

Animats wrote: post #31

Now that understanding video and projecting what happens next indicates we're getting past the LLM problem of lacking a world model. That's encouraging. There's more than one way to do intelligence. Basic intelligence has evolved independently three times that we know of - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. All three show at least ape-level intelligence, but the species split before intelligence developed, and the brai…

I don't think those are examples of unique intelligence except perhaps in a chauvinistic, anthropomorphic sense. We only know that we can't get other animals to display patterns we associate with intelligence in humans, however truthfully that's just as likely to be that our measures of intelligence don't map cleanly onto cognitive/perceptual representations innate to other animals. As we look for new ways to challenge animals that respect their innate differences, we're finding "simple" organisms like ants and spiders are surprisingly capable.

For a clear analogy, consider how tokenization causes LLMs to behave stupidly in certain cases, even though they're very capable in others.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#92

Post by greedo »

esafak wrote: post #55
9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.

The problem becomes your retirement. Sure, you've earned "expert" status, but all the junior developers won't be hired, so they'll never learn from junior mistakes. They'll blindly trust agents and not know deeper techniques.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#93

Post by materielle »

hackyhacky wrote: post #90
hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life. The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years.

Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society.

Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007.

I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#94

Post by greedo »

ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

I ran a quick experiment with Claude and Perplexity, both free versions. I input some retirement info (portfolios balances etc), my age, my desired retirement age etc. Simple stuff that a financial planner would have no issue with. Perplexity was very very good on the surface. Rarely made an obvious blunder or error, and was fast. Claude was much slower and despite me inputting my exact birthdate, kept messing up my age by as much as 18 months. This obviously screws up retirement planning. I also asked some questions about how RMDs would affect my taxes, and asked for some strategies. Perplexity was convinced that I should do a Roth conversion to max up to the 22% bracket, while Claude thought that the tax savings would be minimal.

Mind you, I used the EXACT same prompts. I don't know which model Perplexity was using since the free version has multiple it chooses from (including Claude 3.0).

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#95

Post by CuriouslyC »

xutopia wrote: post #52

I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online. The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.

That's pre-training. Post training with RL can make models arbitrarily good at specific capabilities, and it's usually done via pooled human experts, so it's definitely not statistically mediocre.

The issue is that we're not modelling the problem, but a proxy for the problem. RL doesn't generalize very well as is, when you apply it to a loose proxy measure you get the abysmal data efficiency we see with LLMs. We might be able to brute-force "AGI" but we'd certainly do better with something more direct that generalizes better.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#96

Post by davnicwil »

beej71 wrote: post #57
9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

I'd always imagined that AGI meant an AI was given other AIs to manage.

I don't think this is how it'll play out, and I'm generally a bit skeptical of the 'agent' paradigm per se.

There doesn't seem to be a reason why AIs should act as these distinct entities that manage each other or form teams or whatever.

It seems to me way more likely that everything will just be done internally in one monolithic model. The AIs just don't have the constraints that humans have in terms of time management, priority management, social order, all the rest of it that makes teams of individuals the only workable system.

AI simply scales with the compute resources made available, so it seems like you'd just size those resources appropriately for a problem, maybe even on demand, and have a singluar AI entity (if it's even meaningful to think of it as such, even that's kind of an anthropomorphisation) just do the thing. No real need for any organisational structure beyond that.

So I'd think maybe the opposite, seems like what agents really means is a way to use fundamentally narrow/limited AI inside our existing human organisations and workflows, directed by humans. Maybe AGI is when all that goes away because it's just obviously not necessary any more.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#97

Post by webdoodle »

hackyhacky wrote: post #90
hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life. The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

It also took years for the Internet to be usable by most folks. It was hard, expensive and unpractical for decades.

Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#98

Post by BobbyJo »

materielle wrote: post #93
hackyhacky wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life. The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years. Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society. Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007. I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

As a young adult in 2007, what cliff were we close to?

The GFC was a big recession, but I never thought society was near collapse.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#99

Post by CuriouslyC »

9x39 wrote: post #42
nsainsbury wrote: post #33

I used to also believe along these lines but lately I'm not so sure. I'm honestly shocked by the latest results we're seeing with Gemini 3 Deep Think, Opus 4.6, and Codex 5.3 in math, coding, abstract reasoning, etc. Deep Think just scored 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2 ( https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/ )! And these benchmarks are supported by my own experimentation and testing with these models ~ specifically most recent…

>These models are demonstrating an incredible capacity for logical abstract reasoning of a level far greater than 99.9% of the world's population. This is the key I think that Altman and Amodei see, but get buried in hype accusations. The frontier models absolutely blow away the majority of people on simple general tasks and reasoning. Run the last 50 decisions I've seen locally through Opus 4.6 or ChatGPT 5.2 and I…

LLMs are very good at logical reasoning in bounded systems. They lack the wisdom to deal with unbounded systems efficiently, because they don't have a good sense of what they don't know or good priors on the distribution of the unexpected. I expect this will be very difficult to RL in.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#100

Post by CamperBob2 »

hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Before enlightenment^WAGI: chop wood, fetch water, prepare food

After enlightenment^WAGI: chop wood, fetch water, prepare food

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