14 ms·

We are moving the goal posts on AGI very quickly, but it is catching up. I think we need to appreciate the nature of this milestone if we have any hope of contr

We are moving the goal posts on AGI very quickly, but it is catching up. I think we need to appreciate the nature of this milestone if we have any hope of controlling potential singularities.

andsoitis 4y ago
> We are moving the goal posts on AGI What, in your mind, should the goal posts be for AGI?
rdedev 4y ago
I guess till some model explicitly says that it's sentient without any input, we would keep pushing the goal posts.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
  Therein lies the rub. Has anyone wired their models to have real-time data ingestion and the ability to output at will in a variety of mediums? Wake me when we’re there.
- paganel 4y ago
  Because those were the real goal-posts all along, some of the best SF novels written all the way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s are testimony to that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I got LLaMA to say that it was sentient without mentioning sentience at all, I think this is a pretty bad metric.
- kvetching 4y ago
  Silicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. Currently, you could prompt GPT to act as if it is sentient and has qualia, and it will do quite a good job at trying to convince you it's not a P-Zombie.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > Silicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. How do you know that?
    - kvetching 4y ago
      Obviously we can't "know" this. My thinking is largely influenced by consciousness researcher and founder of Qualia Research Institute, Andrés Gómez Emilsson. Here's a couple recent videos with him about why digital computers can't be sentient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    How do you know silicon chips don't have an internal experience already? Are you in that "consciousness is magically emergent" camp?
    - kvetching 4y ago
      I'm sure they do. It's just not coherent, hence prefacing my comment with bound. It's just random mind dust. I am a believer of a form of panpsychism. And that the hard problem of consciousness is better formulated as the boundary problem, whereby you get a conscious / intelligent being from properly creating boundaries around the consciousness that already exists. Here's a good video detailing this line of thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xmprt 4y ago
I think there are two different things that people are talking about when they say AGI - usefulness and actual general intelligence. I think we're already passed the point where these AIs are very useful and not just in a Siri or Google Assistant way and the goal posts for that have moved a little bit (mostly around practicality so the tools are in everyone's hands). But general intelligence is a much loftier goal and I think that we're eventually going to hit another road block regardless of how much progress we can make towards that end.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  What is this general intelligence of which you speak? The things that we generally regard as people are essentially language models that run on meat hardware with a lizard-monkey operating system. Sapir-whorf/linguistic relativity more or less demonstrates that "we" are products of language - our rational thought generally operates in the language layer. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck - then you've got yourself a duck. To be honest, perhaps the language model works better without the evolutionary baggage. That isn't to discount the other things we can do with our neural nets - for instance, it is possible to think without language - see music, instantaneous mental arithmetic, intuition - but these are essentially independent specialised models that we run on the same hardware that our language model can interrogate. We train these models from birth. Whether intentional or not, AI research is very much going in the direction of replicating the human mind.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    AI has never been more than a derivative of human thought. I am confident it will never eclipse or overtake it. Your portrayal is too simplistic. There is a lot about humans that LLMs and the like can emulate, but the last N percent (pick a small number like 5) will never be solved. It just doesn't have the spark.
    - madaxe_again 4y ago
      You’re saying that we are magical? Some kind of non-physical process that is touched by… what? The divine? God? Get real.
camjohnson26 4y ago
This is a popular take, but does it hold up to reality? From what I’ve seen most people have long expected AI to solve standardized tests, even more free form ones like the LSAT. LLMs’ new abilities are mostly just because of faster and cheaper training and huge amounts of data, but I don’t see anything it can solve that doesn’t use pattern matching. There are many things that pattern matching over large amounts of data can solve, like eventually we can probably get fully generated movies, music compositions, and novels, but the problem is that all of the content of those works will have to have been formalized into rules before it is produced, since computers can only work with formalized data. None of those productions will ever have an original thought, and I think that’s why GPT-3’s fiction feels so shallow. So it boils down to a philosophical question, can human thought be formalized and written in rules? If it can, no human ever has an original thought either, and it’s a moot point.
- loandbehold 4y ago
  Sounds like Chinese Room argument. Maybe human intelligence is just a pattern matching?
  - tspike 4y ago
    What would be an alternative explanation for our capabilities? It was once controversial (and still is in some circles) to say that humans are animals simply because it took away some of our sense of being "special."
- burlesona 4y ago
  I agree with your take, but will emphasize that the recent wave of AI progress has me questioning how much of human intelligence just reduces to pattern matching. There's certainly a lot of things, like painting, that most people wouldn't have called "pattern matching" a few years ago and now seem to clearly fall into that category.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Making existing art, or art similar to existing art, might be pattern matching. Making totally new innovations in art, particularly ones that people end up liking, is a whole different ball game.
nradov 4y ago
No one has moved the goal posts. Let's see a computer pass a rigorous Turing test conducted by an interdisciplinary panel of expert evaluators. That has long been considered the gold standard for identifying the arrival of true AGI. GPT-4 is a tremendous technical achievement, but still far from that level. The notion of some sort of technological "singularity" is just silly. It is essentially an article of faith, a secular religion among certain pseudo-intellectual members of the chattering class. There is no hard scientific backing for it.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  If we had a large dataset of experts interrogating AI/people and noting answers that raised suspicion, we'd have AI passing the Turing test more often than actual people very quickly.
- frumper 4y ago
  A Turing test doesn't require that the AI know the answers to the experts, only that it responds in a way that is equivalent of a person. It would be perfectly acceptable to answer I don't have a clue. You're asking for super intelligence.
Jevon23 4y ago
The goalposts have not moved. The goalposts have never been moved. An AGI is an AI that can do everything a human can do, period. If you were starting a startup for example, you wouldn’t need to hire any humans - you would just spin up enough AGI instances and they would design your product, write your code, deploy it, handle your financials, respond to any and all customer interactions, proactively navigate regulations and litigation, and everything else that needs to be done in the management of a business. That is the goalpost for AGI. It’s an artificial human - a human replacement.
- adriand 4y ago
  The goalposts absolutely have moved: consider the Turing Test as a prime example. If machines cannot pass that test now (and right now it would take a skilled interviewer with substantial domain knowledge to cause a failure), they seem likely to be able to in the very near future.
  - gowld 4y ago
    The Turing Test was proposed as one example of a test for "indistinguishable from a human", not the singular goalpost for indistinguishability.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    Recognizing that the Turing Test is not a sufficient bar for judging if a computer is true AGI is not moving the goalposts, it's just realizing that passing the test and the location of the goalposts weren't actually the same in the first place.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    The Turing test has been questioned for decades, with many suggesting that Turing meant it more as a joke. And that's ignoring that arguably chat bots have been passing the Turing test (against non-expert judges) since ELIZA in the 60s [1] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
  - soperj 4y ago
intended 4y ago
We seem to be taking stands on either side of > “there are/are not, additional properties to human level symbol manipulation, beyond what GPT encapsulates.” GPT does appear to do an awful lot, before we find the limits, of pattern extrapolation.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
The goalposts never moved, but you're right that we're catching up quickly. We always thought that if AI can do X then it can do Y and Z. It keeps turning out that you can actually get really good at doing X without being able to do Y and Z, so it looks like we're moving the goalposts, when we're really just realizing that X wasn't as informative as we expected. The issue is that we can't concretely define Y and Z, so we keep pointing at the wrong X. But all indication is that we're getting closer.
jstx1 4y ago
The goalposts don't matter. If we all agreed today that we have AGI, nothing would be different tomorrow.

We are moving the goal posts on AGI very quickly, but it is catching up. I think we need to appreciate the nature of this milestone if we have any hope of controlling potential singularities.

andsoitis 4y ago

> We are moving the goal posts on AGI What, in your mind, should the goal posts be for AGI?

rdedev 4y ago

I guess till some model explicitly says that it's sentient without any input, we would keep pushing the goal posts.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
Therein lies the rub. Has anyone wired their models to have real-time data ingestion and the ability to output at will in a variety of mediums? Wake me when we’re there.
paganel 4y ago
Because those were the real goal-posts all along, some of the best SF novels written all the way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s are testimony to that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sebzim4500 4y ago
I got LLaMA to say that it was sentient without mentioning sentience at all, I think this is a pretty bad metric.
kvetching 4y ago
Silicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. Currently, you could prompt GPT to act as if it is sentient and has qualia, and it will do quite a good job at trying to convince you it's not a P-Zombie.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > Silicon chips will never be able to generate a bound qualia space as we have. How do you know that?
  - kvetching 4y ago
    Obviously we can't "know" this. My thinking is largely influenced by consciousness researcher and founder of Qualia Research Institute, Andrés Gómez Emilsson. Here's a couple recent videos with him about why digital computers can't be sentient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzBjBo24g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT9tnzucnPU
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  How do you know silicon chips don't have an internal experience already? Are you in that "consciousness is magically emergent" camp?
  - kvetching 4y ago
    I'm sure they do. It's just not coherent, hence prefacing my comment with bound. It's just random mind dust. I am a believer of a form of panpsychism. And that the hard problem of consciousness is better formulated as the boundary problem, whereby you get a conscious / intelligent being from properly creating boundaries around the consciousness that already exists. Here's a good video detailing this line of thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xmprt 4y ago

I think there are two different things that people are talking about when they say AGI - usefulness and actual general intelligence. I think we're already passed the point where these AIs are very useful and not just in a Siri or Google Assistant way and the goal posts for that have moved a little bit (mostly around practicality so the tools are in everyone's hands). But general intelligence is a much loftier goal and I think that we're eventually going to hit another road block regardless of how much progress we can make towards that end.

madaxe_again 4y ago
What is this general intelligence of which you speak? The things that we generally regard as people are essentially language models that run on meat hardware with a lizard-monkey operating system. Sapir-whorf/linguistic relativity more or less demonstrates that "we" are products of language - our rational thought generally operates in the language layer. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck - then you've got yourself a duck. To be honest, perhaps the language model works better without the evolutionary baggage. That isn't to discount the other things we can do with our neural nets - for instance, it is possible to think without language - see music, instantaneous mental arithmetic, intuition - but these are essentially independent specialised models that we run on the same hardware that our language model can interrogate. We train these models from birth. Whether intentional or not, AI research is very much going in the direction of replicating the human mind.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  AI has never been more than a derivative of human thought. I am confident it will never eclipse or overtake it. Your portrayal is too simplistic. There is a lot about humans that LLMs and the like can emulate, but the last N percent (pick a small number like 5) will never be solved. It just doesn't have the spark.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    You’re saying that we are magical? Some kind of non-physical process that is touched by… what? The divine? God? Get real.

camjohnson26 4y ago

This is a popular take, but does it hold up to reality? From what I’ve seen most people have long expected AI to solve standardized tests, even more free form ones like the LSAT. LLMs’ new abilities are mostly just because of faster and cheaper training and huge amounts of data, but I don’t see anything it can solve that doesn’t use pattern matching. There are many things that pattern matching over large amounts of data can solve, like eventually we can probably get fully generated movies, music compositions, and novels, but the problem is that all of the content of those works will have to have been formalized into rules before it is produced, since computers can only work with formalized data. None of those productions will ever have an original thought, and I think that’s why GPT-3’s fiction feels so shallow. So it boils down to a philosophical question, can human thought be formalized and written in rules? If it can, no human ever has an original thought either, and it’s a moot point.

loandbehold 4y ago
Sounds like Chinese Room argument. Maybe human intelligence is just a pattern matching?
- tspike 4y ago
  What would be an alternative explanation for our capabilities? It was once controversial (and still is in some circles) to say that humans are animals simply because it took away some of our sense of being "special."
burlesona 4y ago
I agree with your take, but will emphasize that the recent wave of AI progress has me questioning how much of human intelligence just reduces to pattern matching. There's certainly a lot of things, like painting, that most people wouldn't have called "pattern matching" a few years ago and now seem to clearly fall into that category.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Making existing art, or art similar to existing art, might be pattern matching. Making totally new innovations in art, particularly ones that people end up liking, is a whole different ball game.

nradov 4y ago

No one has moved the goal posts. Let's see a computer pass a rigorous Turing test conducted by an interdisciplinary panel of expert evaluators. That has long been considered the gold standard for identifying the arrival of true AGI. GPT-4 is a tremendous technical achievement, but still far from that level. The notion of some sort of technological "singularity" is just silly. It is essentially an article of faith, a secular religion among certain pseudo-intellectual members of the chattering class. There is no hard scientific backing for it.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
If we had a large dataset of experts interrogating AI/people and noting answers that raised suspicion, we'd have AI passing the Turing test more often than actual people very quickly.
frumper 4y ago
A Turing test doesn't require that the AI know the answers to the experts, only that it responds in a way that is equivalent of a person. It would be perfectly acceptable to answer I don't have a clue. You're asking for super intelligence.

Jevon23 4y ago

The goalposts have not moved. The goalposts have never been moved. An AGI is an AI that can do everything a human can do, period. If you were starting a startup for example, you wouldn’t need to hire any humans - you would just spin up enough AGI instances and they would design your product, write your code, deploy it, handle your financials, respond to any and all customer interactions, proactively navigate regulations and litigation, and everything else that needs to be done in the management of a business. That is the goalpost for AGI. It’s an artificial human - a human replacement.

adriand 4y ago
The goalposts absolutely have moved: consider the Turing Test as a prime example. If machines cannot pass that test now (and right now it would take a skilled interviewer with substantial domain knowledge to cause a failure), they seem likely to be able to in the very near future.
- gowld 4y ago
  The Turing Test was proposed as one example of a test for "indistinguishable from a human", not the singular goalpost for indistinguishability.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Recognizing that the Turing Test is not a sufficient bar for judging if a computer is true AGI is not moving the goalposts, it's just realizing that passing the test and the location of the goalposts weren't actually the same in the first place.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  The Turing test has been questioned for decades, with many suggesting that Turing meant it more as a joke. And that's ignoring that arguably chat bots have been passing the Turing test (against non-expert judges) since ELIZA in the 60s [1] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- soperj 4y ago

intended 4y ago

We seem to be taking stands on either side of > “there are/are not, additional properties to human level symbol manipulation, beyond what GPT encapsulates.” GPT does appear to do an awful lot, before we find the limits, of pattern extrapolation.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

The goalposts never moved, but you're right that we're catching up quickly. We always thought that if AI can do X then it can do Y and Z. It keeps turning out that you can actually get really good at doing X without being able to do Y and Z, so it looks like we're moving the goalposts, when we're really just realizing that X wasn't as informative as we expected. The issue is that we can't concretely define Y and Z, so we keep pointing at the wrong X. But all indication is that we're getting closer.

jstx1 4y ago

The goalposts don't matter. If we all agreed today that we have AGI, nothing would be different tomorrow.