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As LeCun always says: The term "AGI" is a bit ill-formed. What does "general" really mean? Human intelligence is not really general. It's actually very very spe

As LeCun always says: The term "AGI" is a bit ill-formed. What does "general" really mean? Human intelligence is not really general. It's actually very very specialized towards the world we live in. So he prefers the term "human-level intelligence", or maybe super-human-level at some point. Another implication: It's not really a yes/no property, whether you have AGI or not. It's a level of intelligence. And this level is continuous. And it's also not really one-dimensional. What does human-level intelligence mean? It's still not very well-defined. You would need to define a number of tests, which measure the performance, and the model need to perform at least as good as a human on average. So, I assume this is what the author means by "AGI-hard": A problem which requires some model to be at least as good as a human in a wide number of tests. But I don't think this is necessary for driving. You want it actually to be much better in some tests (computer vision, reaction time, etc) and many other tests don't really matter (eg. logical reasoning, speech recognition, or so). So the autonomous driving problem is not AGI-hard.

fnfontana 4y ago
Indeed. A person can be bad at math, but really good on play musical instruments or to guide himself through a unknown city. That requires a certain level of intelligence. But I think there's no human that is intelligent on every aspect, maybe some exceptions like Da Vinci, but most people are good at some tasks while other people doesn't. The human intelligence seems to be distributed throughout the population. This creates an illusion that human intelligence is general.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notahacker 4y ago
  But there's no such thing as.a person who is flawless at maths but has no concept of a musical instrument or navigating a city, or moving their limbs, or communicating, or eating, or setting itself any goals, or achieving any goals other than answer the math question. General intelligence isn't a claim that all humans are polymaths. It's a claim that AIs are so overfitted to succeeding in one narrow human domain like rearranging ASCII strings they fail to achieve infant-level (or even worm-level) competence in virtually all others, and that it responds to new situations by assuming they're an instance of what it has been trained to do rather than considering different approaches.
  - fnfontana 4y ago
    Interesting point you raised.
fartsucker69 4y ago
It's totally general in the sense that we can logically approach arbitrary problem types and there is nothing known that we can't approach with our tools of intelligence, so to speak. That doesn't necessarily mean that we are actually good at solving those problems or that there isn't an upper level of difficulty that we will just not be able to solve practically, but we are definitely able to approach all classes of problems in general. By contrast, a chess ai can't do anything but solve for chess states. A diffusion NN can't do anything but create images, or something that is mathematically analogous. We can in principle do anything any conceivable specialized AI can do, even if a lot slower or error prone. Therefor, we have general intelligence.
- dbspin 4y ago
  > there is nothing known that we can't approach with our tools of intelligence, so to speak. Such things may necessarily be unknowable. If there are classes of observations that we are unable to make, or problems that we are unable to comprehend, its absolutely plausible that they would be cognitive blindspots. In fact there's a whole theoretical strand in cognitive science / ontology that suggests this. We perceive and act only against a model of the world tuned for fitness rather than accuracy. i.e.: we are not perceiving objective reality at any scale, but rather a mental representation of it which is tailored to fitness. This is deeply unintuitive, but of course it would be since it relates to the limits on our ability to intuit.
  - jvm___ 4y ago
    What's your definition of fitness in this case? Survival of the fittest?
    - dbspin 4y ago
      Here's a background on some of the arguments - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421 https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
  - fartsucker69 4y ago
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> What does human-level intelligence mean? What about a simple test: it means being able to create better versions of ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. Can an AI create a better version of itself, all by itself? Because humans are going to create better versions of ChatGPT. So no matter the exact definition of "intelligence" or "human intelligence", the goal is simple: create a better version of itself and it'll be considered intelligent. Can't do that? It's simply not matching human-level intelligence. So I don't see how intelligent machines wouldn't lead to "intelligence explosion" and the "technological singularity".
- dbspin 4y ago
  > What about a simple test: it means being able to create better versions of ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. This doesn't follow at all. An ant will haphazardly create a better (fitter) version of an ant simply through breeding and natural selection. Meanwhile humans cannot intentionally create 'better versions' of humans (with any degree of reliability for a given selection criteria). There's no intelligence on earth (arguably including humans) whose goal is 'to create a better version of itself'. The goal for lifeforms is reproduction, specifically at the levels of gene and individual selection. Increases in fitness are due to the process of the environment shaping the adaptation. So it follows that while a future GPT might well be able to duplicate or improve itself, that wouldn't directly reflect its intelligence in comparison to living intelligences. Nor would it necessarily generalise beyond domain specificity.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Humanity has developed technology to improve humanity. Glasses correct issues, and microscopes added new capacity. We haven’t gone down the genetic engineering path but we could fix issues with our DNA.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      > Humanity has developed technology to improve humanity. I would argue that the vast majority of technology has hurt humanity and that a large proportion of technology is simply solving problems caused by other technology.
bmitc 4y ago
> As LeCun always says: The term "AGI" is a bit ill-formed. What does "general" really mean? Human intelligence is not really general. It's actually very very specialized towards the world we live in. So he prefers the term "human-level intelligence", or maybe super-human-level at some point. That’s kind of a silly semantic argument though. It also assumes that everyone interested in AGI is trying to make “human-level” intelligence. So my argument would be that: * not everyone interested in AGI is interested in replicating human intelligence, * human-level intelligence is undefined, * there’s an implicit assumption by your paraphrasing (quoting?) of LeCun that assumes human intelligence is the most general we know of, which is something we don’t have the ability to know. So I think AGI is fine unless you’re explicitly trying to mimic human intelligence.
- albertzeyer 4y ago
  I just wanted to stress the point that "general" is misleading (no intelligence will ever be truly general), and the term "AGI" is somewhat unclear. Some people mean human-level intelligence, some people just mean some reasonable intelligent agent in a number of tasks, some people really mean a truly-general intelligence, being able to handle any problem (unlike a human). In the post, when arguing about "AGI-hard", this is very relevant. For a truly-general intelligence, it makes sense. But I think most people would not understand "AGI" this way. For some more narrow general intelligence, I don't think "AGI-hard" makes sense. Driving needs some intelligence which is a bit generic but still different to other general intelligences, so it is not AGI-hard.
  - lonelyasacloud 4y ago
    > Driving needs some intelligence which is a bit generic but still different to other general intelligences, so it is not AGI-hard. For automated driving to be acceptable within society it is going have to be at least as good as an average human driver. In an urban street most non-speeding human drivers will see a child with a puppy off the lead and will understand that that child will be very likely to run after the puppy if it jumps into the road (And will most likely slow down in anticipation). AGI, according to Wikipedia, is "the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can". How in general can an automated driving perform as well as a system with a human in the loop if it does not richly model human behaviour, i.e. achieve AGI?
dontreact 4y ago
In normal situations you don't need speech recognition, but to drive as well as a human in all possible situations you do. What if there is an emergency and there is a loudspeaker giving drivers instructions on how to turn around?
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  I don't think it's a desirable trait for a "smart car" to accept arbitrary loudspeaker drive instructions and override your explicit commands. "For the next 12 miles, please drive on the opposite lane of the motorway due to a motorcycle accident" next level prank.
  - dontreact 4y ago
    Yes it’s even harder as you have to figure out which loudspeakers to trust!
jasfi 4y ago
General means its not hard-coded to solve specific problems. Rather there are general purpose algorithms that can solve just about any problem you throw at it. It could be that some of these algorithms are somewhat specialized, but can still solve a wide range of problems never seen before. Then there's a question of how supervised these algorithms are during training. Unsupervised is ideal, but some degree of supervised training isn't bad either and is more practical.
karaterobot 4y ago
I don't know if "human-level" makes sense to me either. We already have human-level AI in plenty of areas, from chess to illustration to translation. A pocket calculator is human-level at arithmetic. Some flow-control monitoring software in a water treatment plant is human level at monitoring flow control. You could enumerate any number of skills in which software already meets or exceeds human levels, but even if you had a single AI that could do all of those things at a human level it would just feel like a bloated piece of software with a bunch of specialized modules that didn't add up to "real intelligence". The only thing that I can think of which would suffice is human-type intelligence, rather than human-level intelligence. That is, a machine which is intelligent in a way that reminds us of humans. It's the Potter Stewart test for intelligence: "you know it when you see it". I don't know what else would end the debate. To be clear, this is related to the argument about what AGI means, not whether that's a relevant topic to discuss, not whether we have systems which can solve useful problems, etc.

fnfontana 4y ago

Indeed. A person can be bad at math, but really good on play musical instruments or to guide himself through a unknown city. That requires a certain level of intelligence. But I think there's no human that is intelligent on every aspect, maybe some exceptions like Da Vinci, but most people are good at some tasks while other people doesn't. The human intelligence seems to be distributed throughout the population. This creates an illusion that human intelligence is general.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
notahacker 4y ago
But there's no such thing as.a person who is flawless at maths but has no concept of a musical instrument or navigating a city, or moving their limbs, or communicating, or eating, or setting itself any goals, or achieving any goals other than answer the math question. General intelligence isn't a claim that all humans are polymaths. It's a claim that AIs are so overfitted to succeeding in one narrow human domain like rearranging ASCII strings they fail to achieve infant-level (or even worm-level) competence in virtually all others, and that it responds to new situations by assuming they're an instance of what it has been trained to do rather than considering different approaches.
- fnfontana 4y ago
  Interesting point you raised.

fartsucker69 4y ago

It's totally general in the sense that we can logically approach arbitrary problem types and there is nothing known that we can't approach with our tools of intelligence, so to speak. That doesn't necessarily mean that we are actually good at solving those problems or that there isn't an upper level of difficulty that we will just not be able to solve practically, but we are definitely able to approach all classes of problems in general. By contrast, a chess ai can't do anything but solve for chess states. A diffusion NN can't do anything but create images, or something that is mathematically analogous. We can in principle do anything any conceivable specialized AI can do, even if a lot slower or error prone. Therefor, we have general intelligence.

dbspin 4y ago
> there is nothing known that we can't approach with our tools of intelligence, so to speak. Such things may necessarily be unknowable. If there are classes of observations that we are unable to make, or problems that we are unable to comprehend, its absolutely plausible that they would be cognitive blindspots. In fact there's a whole theoretical strand in cognitive science / ontology that suggests this. We perceive and act only against a model of the world tuned for fitness rather than accuracy. i.e.: we are not perceiving objective reality at any scale, but rather a mental representation of it which is tailored to fitness. This is deeply unintuitive, but of course it would be since it relates to the limits on our ability to intuit.
- jvm___ 4y ago
  What's your definition of fitness in this case? Survival of the fittest?
  - dbspin 4y ago
    Here's a background on some of the arguments - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421 https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
- fartsucker69 4y ago

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> What does human-level intelligence mean? What about a simple test: it means being able to create better versions of ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. Can an AI create a better version of itself, all by itself? Because humans are going to create better versions of ChatGPT. So no matter the exact definition of "intelligence" or "human intelligence", the goal is simple: create a better version of itself and it'll be considered intelligent. Can't do that? It's simply not matching human-level intelligence. So I don't see how intelligent machines wouldn't lead to "intelligence explosion" and the "technological singularity".

dbspin 4y ago
> What about a simple test: it means being able to create better versions of ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. This doesn't follow at all. An ant will haphazardly create a better (fitter) version of an ant simply through breeding and natural selection. Meanwhile humans cannot intentionally create 'better versions' of humans (with any degree of reliability for a given selection criteria). There's no intelligence on earth (arguably including humans) whose goal is 'to create a better version of itself'. The goal for lifeforms is reproduction, specifically at the levels of gene and individual selection. Increases in fitness are due to the process of the environment shaping the adaptation. So it follows that while a future GPT might well be able to duplicate or improve itself, that wouldn't directly reflect its intelligence in comparison to living intelligences. Nor would it necessarily generalise beyond domain specificity.
- Retric 4y ago
  Humanity has developed technology to improve humanity. Glasses correct issues, and microscopes added new capacity. We haven’t gone down the genetic engineering path but we could fix issues with our DNA.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    > Humanity has developed technology to improve humanity. I would argue that the vast majority of technology has hurt humanity and that a large proportion of technology is simply solving problems caused by other technology.

bmitc 4y ago

> As LeCun always says: The term "AGI" is a bit ill-formed. What does "general" really mean? Human intelligence is not really general. It's actually very very specialized towards the world we live in. So he prefers the term "human-level intelligence", or maybe super-human-level at some point. That’s kind of a silly semantic argument though. It also assumes that everyone interested in AGI is trying to make “human-level” intelligence. So my argument would be that: * not everyone interested in AGI is interested in replicating human intelligence, * human-level intelligence is undefined, * there’s an implicit assumption by your paraphrasing (quoting?) of LeCun that assumes human intelligence is the most general we know of, which is something we don’t have the ability to know. So I think AGI is fine unless you’re explicitly trying to mimic human intelligence.

albertzeyer 4y ago
I just wanted to stress the point that "general" is misleading (no intelligence will ever be truly general), and the term "AGI" is somewhat unclear. Some people mean human-level intelligence, some people just mean some reasonable intelligent agent in a number of tasks, some people really mean a truly-general intelligence, being able to handle any problem (unlike a human). In the post, when arguing about "AGI-hard", this is very relevant. For a truly-general intelligence, it makes sense. But I think most people would not understand "AGI" this way. For some more narrow general intelligence, I don't think "AGI-hard" makes sense. Driving needs some intelligence which is a bit generic but still different to other general intelligences, so it is not AGI-hard.
- lonelyasacloud 4y ago
  > Driving needs some intelligence which is a bit generic but still different to other general intelligences, so it is not AGI-hard. For automated driving to be acceptable within society it is going have to be at least as good as an average human driver. In an urban street most non-speeding human drivers will see a child with a puppy off the lead and will understand that that child will be very likely to run after the puppy if it jumps into the road (And will most likely slow down in anticipation). AGI, according to Wikipedia, is "the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can". How in general can an automated driving perform as well as a system with a human in the loop if it does not richly model human behaviour, i.e. achieve AGI?

dontreact 4y ago

In normal situations you don't need speech recognition, but to drive as well as a human in all possible situations you do. What if there is an emergency and there is a loudspeaker giving drivers instructions on how to turn around?

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
I don't think it's a desirable trait for a "smart car" to accept arbitrary loudspeaker drive instructions and override your explicit commands. "For the next 12 miles, please drive on the opposite lane of the motorway due to a motorcycle accident" next level prank.
- dontreact 4y ago
  Yes it’s even harder as you have to figure out which loudspeakers to trust!

jasfi 4y ago

General means its not hard-coded to solve specific problems. Rather there are general purpose algorithms that can solve just about any problem you throw at it. It could be that some of these algorithms are somewhat specialized, but can still solve a wide range of problems never seen before. Then there's a question of how supervised these algorithms are during training. Unsupervised is ideal, but some degree of supervised training isn't bad either and is more practical.

karaterobot 4y ago

I don't know if "human-level" makes sense to me either. We already have human-level AI in plenty of areas, from chess to illustration to translation. A pocket calculator is human-level at arithmetic. Some flow-control monitoring software in a water treatment plant is human level at monitoring flow control. You could enumerate any number of skills in which software already meets or exceeds human levels, but even if you had a single AI that could do all of those things at a human level it would just feel like a bloated piece of software with a bunch of specialized modules that didn't add up to "real intelligence". The only thing that I can think of which would suffice is human-type intelligence, rather than human-level intelligence. That is, a machine which is intelligent in a way that reminds us of humans. It's the Potter Stewart test for intelligence: "you know it when you see it". I don't know what else would end the debate. To be clear, this is related to the argument about what AGI means, not whether that's a relevant topic to discuss, not whether we have systems which can solve useful problems, etc.