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Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

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Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#1
I've recently delved into Erik J. Larson's book "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence," and it has reshaped my understanding of the current state and future prospects of AI, particularly concerning Large Language Models (LLMs) and the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Larson argues convincingly that current AI (i included LLMs because are still induction and statistics based), despite their impressive capabilities, represent a kind of technological dead end in our quest for AGI. The notion of achieving a true AGI, a system with human-like understanding and reasoning capabilities, seems more elusive than ever. The current trajectory of AI development, heavily reliant on data and computational power, doesn't necessarily lead us towards AGI. Instead, we might be merely crafting sophisticated tools, akin to cognitive prosthetics, that augment but do not replicate human intelligence.

The book emphasizes the need for radically new ideas and directions if we are to make any significant progress toward AGI. The concept of a technological singularity, where AI surpasses human intelligence, appears more like a distant mirage rather than an approaching reality.

Erik J. Larson's book compellingly highlights the deficiencies of deduction and induction as methods of inference in artificial intelligence. It also underscores the lack of a solid theoretical foundation for abduction, suggesting that current AI, including large language models, faces significant limitations in replicating complex human reasoning.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think our current approach to AI, especially with LLMs, is fundamentally limited? Is the idea of AGI as we conceive it now just a myth?

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#2
This is a great opportunity to tell you about my patented and trademarked architecture for achieving AGI: "panoptic computronium cathedral"™. All I need is $80B to make it happen and make AGI a reality. It's construction will not be easy but once completed it will allow those that worship in the cathedral to enact the will of the mathematical god that dwells within its GPUs and show all the non-believers that all is mathematics (mostly just a bunch of matrix multiplications and floating point arithmetic).

The radical architecture required to achieve AGI is to treat it as a religion and build artifacts, rituals, and practices that will manifest the true technological god and govern the world with nothing more than mathematics implemented on GPUs.

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#3
post #2

This is a great opportunity to tell you about my patented and trademarked architecture for achieving AGI: "panoptic computronium cathedral"™. All I need is $80B to make it happen and make AGI a reality. It's construction will not be easy but once completed it will allow those that worship in the cathedral to enact the will of the mathematical god that dwells within its GPUs and show all the non-believers that all is…

Hehe ;)

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#7
Gigantic asterisk since this is just a general impression but I think that cognitive science and as a result ML have a huge problem coming to terms. Precise terminology seems like it’s plagued these fields since the beginning. Strong AI, weak AI, AGI, cognition, consciousness vs wakefulness, what are the essential features of consciousness?

As a result of this, you can read about AGI and think authors are debating whether a system is an AGI or a proto-AGI but they’re actually debating where the line is drawn.

Taking a page from Philosophy in the Flesh, I think that human reasoning and cognition are intrinsically related to the body—like even metaphor is inherently body and environment related. Have we really considered what the human mind would act like completely disembodied? Is language on its own really the right context for AGI to be born in?

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#8

I think that's a pretty common opinion here. Here's what I thinks: LLMs are not AGI but are currently the best way to leverage everyone else's knowledge.

LLMs are fossilized intelligence. It takes a lot of energy to train them and have them learn new things (Calling RAG learning is like saying a human has memory because they have access to Google).

Therefore it is limited. It might do AGI in a universe where we could harness unlimited energy and create unlimited matmul compute. But if it needs to run on 3 square meals a day it doesn’t have much hope!

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#9
I don’t mean to sound arrogant or disrespectful, but the fact that chatgpt has nothing to do with intelligence and is just a “hype material” has been clear to me without any books. Just from a few interactions with it and learning some basic principles of the architecture.

Re: Changed My Mind After Reading Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

#10
It was written before ChatGPT, GPT-4 and maybe even before GPT-3. So his impressions of limitations of LLMs should not be taken as facts and should be re-evaluated. If you check yourself, I'm sure you will find that ChatGPT is quite capable of abductive reasoning.
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