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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

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Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#91

Post by cess11 »

Jensson wrote: post #87
paganel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.

You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.

The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over.

Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#93

Post by orangebread »

torben-friis wrote: post #82
orangebread wrote: post #50

As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness. Hear me out. I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determ…

I think you are mixing up consciousness and will. I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday is the same as you, since you-today could be another consciousness that just happens to share the same memories. All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a spirit/soul... but getti…

You bring up an interesting point, but I would pose the following: where does will come from?

To me, consciousness is the seat, or root, of where will comes from. Let's say you get expert level surgeon or politician training, what then?

There is nothing that specifically silos a surgeon or politician's knowledge-set. Meaning a politician's skillset isn't purely in a domain that doesn't cross into a surgeon's and vice-versa. There are nuances to being a politician and a surgeon that extend beyond diplomacy or "being able to cut real good".

What you're left with is just high-skilled workflows. But what utilizes these workflows? To me, the answer is that consciousness needs to be powering these workflows.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#94

Post by adrian_b »

m_mueller wrote: post #47
komali2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the v…

it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the b…

The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.

The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.

Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.

The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.

The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.

There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#95

Post by [deleted] »

imetatroll wrote: post #76
pocketarc wrote: post #20

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.

[deleted]

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#96

Post by freeboon »

imetatroll wrote: post #76
pocketarc wrote: post #20

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.

I could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a salient point in your response? You are ostensibly challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental feats if raised in the present day.

> This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective.

Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add.

> At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now.

I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that the essence of this rebuttal?

> Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.

Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the relevance.

> Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.

The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you mean to reference here with "AI"?

I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them. However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#97

Post by technothrasher »

mhl47 wrote: post #46
pocketarc wrote: post #20

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as int…

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#99

Post by Jensson »

cess11 wrote: post #91
Jensson wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.

The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over. Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?

> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me

I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.

For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.

Re: Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

#100

Post by saalweachter »

beeflet wrote: post #52
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of things LLMs can do is insane. It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of info…

My current way of thinking about LLMs is "an echo of human intelligence embedded in language".

It's kind of like in those sci fi or fantasy stories where someone dies and what's left behind as a ghost in the ether or the machine isn't actually them; it's just an echo, an shallow, incomplete copy.

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