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It's interesting that people keep coming up with things that are meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence, but then when somebody builds a system

It's interesting that people keep coming up with things that are meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence, but then when somebody builds a system that crushes the benchmark the next generation comes up with a new goalpost. The difference now is that the timescales are weeks or months instead of generations. I believe we will see models that have super-human "compositional" reasoning within 1 year.

kevinventullo 4y ago
Perhaps it’s fair to say we will have achieved AGI when we run out of goalposts.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  AGI won't bother convincing us. We don't care what animals in the zoo think.
  - dqpb 4y ago
    It's not just intelligence, it's also speed. If you update your world model fast enough, eventually people just look like trees.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    > We don't care what animals in the zoo think. Tangential to AGI, but don't we? Vegans seem to have quite a strong opinion on this assertion.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I spend a lot of time looking at the various primates and cuttlefish thinking very much about what they "think" and whether we could even conceptualize the self-awareness experience they seem to have.
      - jessaustin 4y ago
        It seems possible that we could eventually gain a better understanding of the intelligences of other species, but at this point most of our consideration of them is a fashioning of mirrors to better examine ourselves. This self-regard was the original purpose of zoos, and it still explains much of their existence.
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    Good point! Or to paraphrase Mad Men… Humanity: I don’t think your intelligence matches that of a human’s. AI: I don’t think about you at all.
seiferteric 4y ago
> meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence > but then when somebody builds a system I mean this is really it. You still have to have a human to build these systems that specialist in one thing. Once you create a system that can automatically create those systems and it doesn't need humans anymore to solve novel problems, then there will be no practical difference in kind between human and AI intelligence.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > Once you create a system that can automatically create those systems... Except we don't have that. We don't have one human that can create this system by themselves. We have a choice group of a handful of smart, motivated, and quite generously compensated humans working on these problems to create such system. As such, you are already surpassing the "general" intelligence level by quite a lot.
  - seiferteric 4y ago
    No, you misunderstand, the "systems" I am talking about are the ones built into our minds, like recognizing faces, or understanding speech. Humans can learn to speak and recognize each other automatically, but AI systems have to be built specifically to do each task.
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > Humans can learn to speak and recognize each other automatically, but AI systems have to be built specifically to do each task. I think that is a very generous take on what we do "automatically". After all, we have millions of years of evolution to build out all the neural circuitry that helps us speech or vision -- it's not like you can throw a soup of genes on the ground and out comes intelligence. What is machine learning doing, if not selecting, out of many possible parametrizations, the ones that are suited to understand vision or speech?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
omnicognate 4y ago
Personally, I haven't moved the goalposts a millimetre in 30 years, and I won't in future. When a computer does maths - not as a tool wielded by a human mathematician, but in its own right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems, advancing some area of research mathematics - I'll take seriously the idea that we've reached AGI. Maths in and of itself doesn't require any physical resources. It's possible that doing maths in practice requires knowledge of the world to extract some kind of product from (I'm skeptical, but it's possible), but in principle a rack mounted server could demonstrate its mathematical ability to the world with nothing more than the ability to send and receive messages. This hasn't been done so far, not because there are obvious missing prerequsites, or because nobody's tried it, or because it has no value, or because there's a prohibitively high barrier to entry for people to have a go. It hasn't been done because nobody knows how to make a machine be a mathematician, and I've seen little evidence of any progress towards it. That's my goalpost, always has been. Reach it and I'll be overjoyed. And FWIW, I strongly believe it can be reached. I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong. When I mention this someone always points at some bit of recent research, such as [1], but it's invariably just a new way for a human mathematician to make use of a computer. If anybody knows of any progress, or serious attempts, towards a true AI mathematician I'm very curious to know. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  You might be out of the loop a bit. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2 Is a well known project for an AI Physicist. There are plenty of other groups working on similar projects >I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong. LLM models have been able to do basic math for quite a while now and some have been trained to solve differential equations, calculus problems, etc. Well on their way to more impressive capabilities.
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    I said "in its own right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems, advancing some area of research mathematics". Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems, etc" are not descriptions of what a research mathematician does.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Isn't that a good thing? Benchmark defeats AI, AI defeats benchmark, new benchmark comes along, progress is made. How else would you measure success? Certainly not with old benchmarks that 10 different methods all score 99% accuracy on.
adamsmith143 4y ago
Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no surprise coming from him. Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him do the talking. https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_contra_marcus_on_ai_scaling/ieixnwm/?context=2#thing_t1_ieixnwm https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c... Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who exactly is backing down. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-... https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus... https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-words-with-gary-marcus/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word... Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts and Logic."
- abiloe 4y ago
  Someone owns a lot of TSLA.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    I own 0 and if I were a gambling man I'd be short.
- garymarcus 4y ago
  every time i ask someone to name a goal post that i have moved, they back down. i have been pretty damn consistent since me 2001 book.
  - freeopinion 4y ago
    Prescilla edit: Maybe I made a composition error. https://imgur.com/a/Q7hHduY https://imgur.com/a/Q7hHduY
cercatrova 4y ago
This is called the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence. > Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"

kevinventullo 4y ago

Perhaps it’s fair to say we will have achieved AGI when we run out of goalposts.

jessaustin 4y ago
AGI won't bother convincing us. We don't care what animals in the zoo think.
- dqpb 4y ago
  It's not just intelligence, it's also speed. If you update your world model fast enough, eventually people just look like trees.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  > We don't care what animals in the zoo think. Tangential to AGI, but don't we? Vegans seem to have quite a strong opinion on this assertion.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I spend a lot of time looking at the various primates and cuttlefish thinking very much about what they "think" and whether we could even conceptualize the self-awareness experience they seem to have.
    - jessaustin 4y ago
      It seems possible that we could eventually gain a better understanding of the intelligences of other species, but at this point most of our consideration of them is a fashioning of mirrors to better examine ourselves. This self-regard was the original purpose of zoos, and it still explains much of their existence.
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  Good point! Or to paraphrase Mad Men… Humanity: I don’t think your intelligence matches that of a human’s. AI: I don’t think about you at all.

seiferteric 4y ago

> meant to distinguish AI systems from human intelligence > but then when somebody builds a system I mean this is really it. You still have to have a human to build these systems that specialist in one thing. Once you create a system that can automatically create those systems and it doesn't need humans anymore to solve novel problems, then there will be no practical difference in kind between human and AI intelligence.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
> Once you create a system that can automatically create those systems... Except we don't have that. We don't have one human that can create this system by themselves. We have a choice group of a handful of smart, motivated, and quite generously compensated humans working on these problems to create such system. As such, you are already surpassing the "general" intelligence level by quite a lot.
- seiferteric 4y ago
  No, you misunderstand, the "systems" I am talking about are the ones built into our minds, like recognizing faces, or understanding speech. Humans can learn to speak and recognize each other automatically, but AI systems have to be built specifically to do each task.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > Humans can learn to speak and recognize each other automatically, but AI systems have to be built specifically to do each task. I think that is a very generous take on what we do "automatically". After all, we have millions of years of evolution to build out all the neural circuitry that helps us speech or vision -- it's not like you can throw a soup of genes on the ground and out comes intelligence. What is machine learning doing, if not selecting, out of many possible parametrizations, the ones that are suited to understand vision or speech?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

omnicognate 4y ago

Personally, I haven't moved the goalposts a millimetre in 30 years, and I won't in future. When a computer does maths - not as a tool wielded by a human mathematician, but in its own right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems, advancing some area of research mathematics - I'll take seriously the idea that we've reached AGI. Maths in and of itself doesn't require any physical resources. It's possible that doing maths in practice requires knowledge of the world to extract some kind of product from (I'm skeptical, but it's possible), but in principle a rack mounted server could demonstrate its mathematical ability to the world with nothing more than the ability to send and receive messages. This hasn't been done so far, not because there are obvious missing prerequsites, or because nobody's tried it, or because it has no value, or because there's a prohibitively high barrier to entry for people to have a go. It hasn't been done because nobody knows how to make a machine be a mathematician, and I've seen little evidence of any progress towards it. That's my goalpost, always has been. Reach it and I'll be overjoyed. And FWIW, I strongly believe it can be reached. I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong. When I mention this someone always points at some bit of recent research, such as [1], but it's invariably just a new way for a human mathematician to make use of a computer. If anybody knows of any progress, or serious attempts, towards a true AI mathematician I'm very curious to know. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x

adamsmith143 4y ago
You might be out of the loop a bit. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/132379.2 Is a well known project for an AI Physicist. There are plenty of other groups working on similar projects >I don't see the latest round of ML (or any ML, really) as a step towards it, but I'd love to be proven wrong. LLM models have been able to do basic math for quite a while now and some have been trained to solve differential equations, calculus problems, etc. Well on their way to more impressive capabilities.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  I said "in its own right discovers/invents and proves significant new theorems, advancing some area of research mathematics". Neither of the things you mention are of this nature, or working towards it. "Finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function" (Feynman) and "solv[ing] differential equations, calculus problems, etc" are not descriptions of what a research mathematician does.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

Isn't that a good thing? Benchmark defeats AI, AI defeats benchmark, new benchmark comes along, progress is made. How else would you measure success? Certainly not with old benchmarks that 10 different methods all score 99% accuracy on.

adamsmith143 4y ago

Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no surprise coming from him. Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him do the talking. https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_contra_marcus_on_ai_scaling/ieixnwm/?context=2#thing_t1_ieixnwm https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c... Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who exactly is backing down. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-... https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus... https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-words-with-gary-marcus/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word... Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts and Logic."

abiloe 4y ago
Someone owns a lot of TSLA.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  I own 0 and if I were a gambling man I'd be short.
garymarcus 4y ago
every time i ask someone to name a goal post that i have moved, they back down. i have been pretty damn consistent since me 2001 book.
- freeopinion 4y ago
  Prescilla edit: Maybe I made a composition error. https://imgur.com/a/Q7hHduY https://imgur.com/a/Q7hHduY

cercatrova 4y ago

This is called the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence. > Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"