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There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI despite a never-ending deluge of AI articles; that's normally the cause of scepticism. After several d

There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI despite a never-ending deluge of AI articles; that's normally the cause of scepticism. After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more.

richk449 6y ago
> After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more. Why should I care if my fridge is fake clever or real clever?
- mellosouls 6y ago
  You should care if the makers of your fridge are charging you a billion dollars to buy it because its "real clever".
- Carpetsmoker 6y ago
  I think the problem is that in a long list of edge cases, it's neither fake clever nor real clever but just "dumb". This is, of course, always an issue with computers, but what makes ML so vexing is that it's inscrutable. For your fridge that's an annoyance, but when used for more serious applications the ramifications can be large. Example: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... – there's much more where that came from. ML works by taking a huge amount of data and finding patterns and is pretty much incapable of judging individual cases. We have ugly words for humans who judge people based on generalisations instead of judging the individual... Computers and algorithms are devoid of empathy and humanity, I am extremely apprehensive in using them to make any sort of judgement call, especially if the calculation is inscrutable. Humans may not be perfect, but at least they're ... human. ML is an interesting tool which can be used for many things, but right now it's also being misapplied for many things. I think a lot of opposition comes from that, rather than your fridge or whatnot.
- hyperbovine 6y ago
  Why do I want my fridge to be clever at all. Just keep things cold please.
- smabie 6y ago
  For the same reason you should care if another person is conscious or not.
effable 6y ago
It's even hard to say how "genuine" cleverness in human beings works - and we've had a lot more time to study ourselves - granted that most of that time we've not had the tools to understand how our brains work at the algorithmic level. I am not claiming that achieving some version of "genuine" AGI necessarily involves understanding how human intelligence works, but it is reasonable to expect that knowing more about it will definitely reduce the search space of possible systems.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Is it reasonable? What would you learn about wheels by studying cheetahs? Or about steam engines by studying strong elephants? Or about cranes by studying giraffe? Or about jet engines by studying birds? What if AI is like that to a human brain? Completely different and way better in some dimensions?
whymauri 6y ago
>There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI I mean, really? In the most pessimistic evaluation of ML research, we still know which techniques and paradigms won't work for AGI. That's not zero progress. Nobody is expecting this to happen overnight.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  My comment was in the context of yet another completely unsourced claim of progress. No evidence - as always. No progress. Of course, if you - or anybody else - can show evidence of a genuine advance towards AGI, rather than breathless hype and vague assertions based on the impressive but irrelevant narrow-domain "AI" expertise of Alpha-x and the like, I (and many others) would love to read it. We've been waiting since at least Alan Turing.
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I would say the only tangible evidence of a "genuine advance" towards AGI would be the growing amount of computational power available to us every year.
    - mellosouls 6y ago
      That presupposes we need that power. Perhaps we do, but if we don't, then the continued lack of progress is in fact evidence of our ineptitude and inefficiency in the face of an embarrassment of riches in terms of tools and power. It's kind of like a having a searchlight that is more and more powerful and still not being able to find the object in the darkness we are looking for because we have given it to a blind man. Plenty of practitioners ready to impress us with buzzwords, empty assurances and paper after paper on the brilliance of obscure statistical formulae and their money pit implementation in server farms. But all this power and cliquey self congratulation is just noise drowning out a very embarrassing truth: We don't have any new ideas.
thu2111 6y ago
Disagree. GPT-2/GPT-3 are able to pass for humans when the reader isn't paying close attention. This article seems insightful to me: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html A scarily large amount of human speech is essentially word prediction, especially in cases where someone wants to seem impressive without having actually done the work. We're all familiar with the problem of people "bullshitting" about technical topics, especially in the business realm where there are lots of people with no technical background who want to learn and have authoritative opinions on technology, like in this article. The GPT models are quite capable of producing this kind of "sounds legit" speech. And if that isn't a form of intelligence, then what is?
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Where in the GPT models is the conscious (or even subconscious) thinking, comprehension, understanding, relating to experience, imagination etc, etc, you know: actual intelligence as a human would feel and use it, general or otherwise? Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Image Classifying, Translation, Go, Sentence Construction, etc.; We are creating phenomenally impressive calculating worm-equivalents, but nothing human-level, or even remotely so.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Where in the human mind are these things? We judge that they exist based primarily on what people say and do. GPT-style models can't do anything, but they can say. And for better or worse a whole lot of ordinary, everyday speech doesn't have a whole lot of thinking, comprehension or imagination to it. It's just people saying what other people seem to be saying in order to try and stay with the herd. GPT-3 is scarily close to matching that.
    - burntoutfire 6y ago
      So, they're getting pretty close to matching us in mindlessness and stupidity. Call me when they can match us in our highs, not in our lows.

richk449 6y ago

> After several decades and a much-hyped last few years we have fake cleverness - impressively so in both cases - but nothing more. Why should I care if my fridge is fake clever or real clever?

mellosouls 6y ago
You should care if the makers of your fridge are charging you a billion dollars to buy it because its "real clever".
Carpetsmoker 6y ago
I think the problem is that in a long list of edge cases, it's neither fake clever nor real clever but just "dumb". This is, of course, always an issue with computers, but what makes ML so vexing is that it's inscrutable. For your fridge that's an annoyance, but when used for more serious applications the ramifications can be large. Example: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... – there's much more where that came from. ML works by taking a huge amount of data and finding patterns and is pretty much incapable of judging individual cases. We have ugly words for humans who judge people based on generalisations instead of judging the individual... Computers and algorithms are devoid of empathy and humanity, I am extremely apprehensive in using them to make any sort of judgement call, especially if the calculation is inscrutable. Humans may not be perfect, but at least they're ... human. ML is an interesting tool which can be used for many things, but right now it's also being misapplied for many things. I think a lot of opposition comes from that, rather than your fridge or whatnot.
hyperbovine 6y ago
Why do I want my fridge to be clever at all. Just keep things cold please.
smabie 6y ago
For the same reason you should care if another person is conscious or not.

effable 6y ago

It's even hard to say how "genuine" cleverness in human beings works - and we've had a lot more time to study ourselves - granted that most of that time we've not had the tools to understand how our brains work at the algorithmic level. I am not claiming that achieving some version of "genuine" AGI necessarily involves understanding how human intelligence works, but it is reasonable to expect that knowing more about it will definitely reduce the search space of possible systems.

jodrellblank 6y ago
Is it reasonable? What would you learn about wheels by studying cheetahs? Or about steam engines by studying strong elephants? Or about cranes by studying giraffe? Or about jet engines by studying birds? What if AI is like that to a human brain? Completely different and way better in some dimensions?

whymauri 6y ago

>There has been next to ZERO progress towards genuine AGI I mean, really? In the most pessimistic evaluation of ML research, we still know which techniques and paradigms won't work for AGI. That's not zero progress. Nobody is expecting this to happen overnight.

mellosouls 6y ago
My comment was in the context of yet another completely unsourced claim of progress. No evidence - as always. No progress. Of course, if you - or anybody else - can show evidence of a genuine advance towards AGI, rather than breathless hype and vague assertions based on the impressive but irrelevant narrow-domain "AI" expertise of Alpha-x and the like, I (and many others) would love to read it. We've been waiting since at least Alan Turing.
- whymauri 6y ago
  I would say the only tangible evidence of a "genuine advance" towards AGI would be the growing amount of computational power available to us every year.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    That presupposes we need that power. Perhaps we do, but if we don't, then the continued lack of progress is in fact evidence of our ineptitude and inefficiency in the face of an embarrassment of riches in terms of tools and power. It's kind of like a having a searchlight that is more and more powerful and still not being able to find the object in the darkness we are looking for because we have given it to a blind man. Plenty of practitioners ready to impress us with buzzwords, empty assurances and paper after paper on the brilliance of obscure statistical formulae and their money pit implementation in server farms. But all this power and cliquey self congratulation is just noise drowning out a very embarrassing truth: We don't have any new ideas.

thu2111 6y ago

Disagree. GPT-2/GPT-3 are able to pass for humans when the reader isn't paying close attention. This article seems insightful to me: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html A scarily large amount of human speech is essentially word prediction, especially in cases where someone wants to seem impressive without having actually done the work. We're all familiar with the problem of people "bullshitting" about technical topics, especially in the business realm where there are lots of people with no technical background who want to learn and have authoritative opinions on technology, like in this article. The GPT models are quite capable of producing this kind of "sounds legit" speech. And if that isn't a form of intelligence, then what is?

mellosouls 6y ago
Where in the GPT models is the conscious (or even subconscious) thinking, comprehension, understanding, relating to experience, imagination etc, etc, you know: actual intelligence as a human would feel and use it, general or otherwise? Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Image Classifying, Translation, Go, Sentence Construction, etc.; We are creating phenomenally impressive calculating worm-equivalents, but nothing human-level, or even remotely so.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Where in the human mind are these things? We judge that they exist based primarily on what people say and do. GPT-style models can't do anything, but they can say. And for better or worse a whole lot of ordinary, everyday speech doesn't have a whole lot of thinking, comprehension or imagination to it. It's just people saying what other people seem to be saying in order to try and stay with the herd. GPT-3 is scarily close to matching that.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    So, they're getting pretty close to matching us in mindlessness and stupidity. Call me when they can match us in our highs, not in our lows.