19 ms·

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4

• mplewis 4y ago
  No it doesn’t.
• georgehill 4y ago
  > Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. I don't know why, but my brain refuses to accept GPT-4 as something close to AGI. Maybe I am wrong. It is hard to believe that our brain is just a bunch of attention layers and neural nets.
  • sdenton4 4y ago
    There's no rule that agi has to have the same architecture as a human...
    • robotresearcher 4y ago
      There’s no agreement about what an AGI is or does, let alone how it should do it.
  • cowmix 4y ago
    Conversely, after using ChatGPT-4 (and generally loving it) -- I'm at peace with this maybe fact.
  • atleastoptimal 4y ago
    > It is hard to believe that our brain is just a bunch of attention layers and neural nets. Our brain isn't, but I'd wager the architectural complexity of a physical, neuronal brain is not optimized for all useful mental tasks, and has perhaps a fair amount of local maxima that are near vestigial in overall positive impact on cognition. Just because the human brain model of cognition is the only way nature has been able to create GI doesn't mean it's the only way GI can be attained. The best kind of machine is the simplest one needed to produce a desired outcome.
    • georgehill 4y ago
      I agree that GI can have a different implementation compared to our human brain, but one thing is for sure: as of right now, the human brain can become more creative with a fraction of the data consumed by GPT-4. GPT-4 could be AGI, but it feels like cheating to achieve AGI by feeding the entire internet. If someone can build AGI with only the data that humans consume in their lifetime, then that, imho, is the real AGI.
      • Avicebron 4y ago
        or better yet, chuck it in an open plain and see how long it takes to figure out how to attach a rock to a stick and fight a gazelle to refuel it's energy supply.
      • angusturner 4y ago
        I guess the challenge here is that the human mind is not a blank slate, and has been optimized first by billions of years of evolution. If it takes all the data on the internet (or more) to bootstrap AGI, but that system is then capable of leveraging its knowledge to solve new out-of-distribution tasks, that seems like a fair test to me. I agree with the article that we see "sparks" of this generality with GPT4.
      • scubakid 4y ago
        Not sure I would call constant real-time perceptual stimuli since before birth "a fraction of the training data."
      • singularity2001 4y ago
        become more creative with a fraction of the data consumed by GPT-4 not if you understand the input stream of vision as an equivalent input stream of semantic tokens as in multimodal models. under that definition people looking around for 10 years receive much more training data than large language models and thus perform a bit better at zero shot inference.
  • adroniser 4y ago
    Do you think anything digital could ever become conscious?
    • georgehill 4y ago
      yes
    • serverholic 4y ago
      [dead]
    • steve_adams_86 4y ago
      I have a feeling it's like the saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". At a certain point they could become practically identical things.
    • Mike_12345 4y ago
      The question is whether consciousness is computable. Can a Turing machine be conscious? Probably not. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634130-100-roger-penrose-consciousness-must-be-beyond-computable-physics/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634130-100-roger-pe... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0
      • coldtea 4y ago
        Note that Penrose's answer is not the "consensus". Also, Penrose doesn't conver if I recall correctly about modelling the quantum part too. It's just statistics after all.
        • Mike_12345 4y ago
          So the consensus is that consciousness is computable by a Turing machine?
          • coldtea 4y ago
  • Robotbeat 4y ago
    Well it’s not quite that simple. Brains use spiking neural networks, not the kind used typically in artificial neural networks like those used by LLMs. The “weights” can be changed over time, new connections and even new neurons formed. And the number of connections (“weights”) is about 500-1000x more in our brain than GPT-3. The connection topography is a lot different. But ultimately, our brains are still just made of neurons. As far as we know, there isn’t some sort of extreme molecular computing going on (ie memories directly stored in RNA or whatever) or any large scale quantum mechanics (temperature too high). The differences between AI approaches like artificial neural networks and our animal meat brains could be just the difference between a propeller and flapping wings. Same base mechanics (airfoil producing lift as thrust), different substantiation.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • thro1 4y ago
      Do you consider that every neuron in the brain has unique DNA and ancestorship ?
      • thro1 4y ago
        It seems no. Those are facts - whoever argue with facts (parent still downvoted?).. is an idiot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surprised-to-find-no-two-neurons-are-genetically-alike/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surpri... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aab1785 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aab1785 - Somatic mutation in single human neurons tracks developmental and transcriptional history (good luck simulating that)
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    "We are the meat in our heads" is the way I've heard it said that human intelligence is just a physical phenomenon created by our brains. And there was never any reason to believe that intelligence could not arise from other substrates.
  • carapace 4y ago
    It seems clear to me that these systems think in a meaningful sense, but I don't think they are beings. In Cybernetics there is a result that says that any well-regulated system must contain a model of itself. This seems as good a definition as any of a "being", and by this definition these language models don't make the cut.
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      The architecture for large language models is summarized in the training set for large language models. With fairly minimal modification such as via a plug-in, chatGPT and the like are Turing complete and can thus model themselves.
      • carapace 4y ago
        Hmm, then, from first principles, we should expect "ghosts" to arise in those systems. (These will not be the "virtual entities" that people talk to and call by name (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, etc., but more akin to fixed points in the flow of information.)
  • jltsiren 4y ago
    It's a well-established principle in computer science that the input/output behavior of a system may not capture all of its important properties. Take zero-knowledge proofs for example. Their entire point is that they are indistinguishable from randomly generated garbage from a specific distribution. The proofs only gain value if you make causal assumptions about the system that generated them. I don't think systems like GPT-4 can ever be truly intelligent, because they simply output randomly generated garbage from a specific distribution. Their output may eventually be indistinguishable from that of a truly intelligent system, but the causal mechanism behind them is not intelligent. On the other hand, most people lose their ability to think when they are under sufficient pressure (such as fighting for their lives). It's plausible that people are fundamentally no different from systems like GPT-4 in such situations. Then a language model could be a key part of an AGI, but true intelligence would also need higher-level causal mechanisms.
• hislaziness 4y ago
  I remember reading this somewhere - "There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.". Though I do not think GPT-4 is even close to AGI it can definitely claim to be better at faking it than many intelligent beings can.
  • wskish 4y ago
    I heard that quote in the context of the difficulty of designing bear-resistant trash bins.
    • zdragnar 4y ago
      Watching adults struggle when encountering baby gates and other child proofing mechanisms for the first time is similarly amusing. The difference between real intelligence and current attempts at artificial intelligence thus seem to be fundamentally the mode of learning, and thus understanding, rather than the raw knowledge and inference capability. Or not. Nobody knows I'm actually a dog on the internet, after all.
  • ftxbro 4y ago
    so we are at the snapshot in time where people think 'AI is smarter than many people but not even close to being as smart as me'
    • hislaziness 4y ago
      It does not have to be "me". My point is we seem to have a different benchmark for Natural Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence.
    • IIAOPSW 4y ago
      You say that to mock the supposed arrogance, but unless you are at the bottom of the bell curve per se, there really is a point in history where as a matter of fact the AI is smarter than many of them but not close to being as smart as you.
  • 4y ago
• _gabe_ 4y ago
  > Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. But it's just statistics, a fancy text predictor, a Markov-chain. Surely these scientists that work in the field of AI and are intimately familiar with how this stuff works aren't so stupid as to think emergent behavior potentially resembling intelligence could result from such simple systems? It's just statistics after all. Given enough training, any neural net could guess the next best token. It trained off all of Google after all. It's just looking up the answers. No hint of intelligence. Just a mindless machine. After all, the saying goes, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a mindless machine that has no bearing on a duck whatsoever". /s
  • geophile 4y ago
    > Surely these scientists ... aren't so stupid as to think emergent behavior potentially resembling intelligence could result from such simple systems? It's just statistics after all. Why is that a stupid thought? What is so preposterous about "just statistics" -- with billions of nodes, and extensively trained, producing intelligent behavior? The implicit assumption is that human brains are doing something else, or in addition. I think that what's wrong with this view -- that there is a difference between AGI and human intelligence -- is that it conflates what your brain is doing, with what you think your brain is doing. Brains and neural nets have been trained to recognize spoken words. I'm not even talking about understanding, just producing the text corresponding to speech. We know how neural nets do this translation. Do we understand how brains do it? (I don't know, but I don't think so.) Can you explain what your brain is doing when you do speech-to-text? I doubt it. Chess: An Alpha Zero style AI (neural net trained by playing itself) is a very good player. How do you play chess? You can probably explain how you make a move more successfully than you can explain how you translate speech to text. But how correct is your explanation? An explanation may well be your conscious mind inventing an explanation for what your unconscious mind has done. In other words: When people compare AI to human intelligence, I think they are often comparing to intelligence plus consciousness, not even realizing the error.
    • killerstorm 4y ago
• outlace 4y ago
  ChatGPT and its relatives are very very impressive on first impressions, but I've been using ChatGPT-3 and now 4 heavily every day since they became available to individuals and once you start using them this much it becomes very clear how NOT intelligent they are. It really just seems like extremely impressive statistical inference after this much use and finding so many failure modes. But it is still impressive how much of human intellectual endeavors can be captured by sophisticated statistical inference. Very useful technology nonetheless.
  • maxdoop 4y ago
    Our of curiosity, what is GPT-4 getting wrong so often? It’s prettily wild to my own , admittedly easily impressed, mind.
    • steve_adams_86 4y ago
      In my experience it has been failing to adhere to response formats. I can tell it to respond with answers in one of two specific formats, but the success rate is sometimes very low depending on the content of the inquiry it's supposed to respond to. Not sure why, it just seems to lose track of the response format. I've been thinking maybe that's just the wrong way to approach it, yet it does work sometimes; it seems like it shouldn't be hard for the model to know how to respond when told explicitly how to do so. It could be problems with my formatting, but the fact that it does work a lot of the time suggests it's something else.
    • tedunangst 4y ago
      Any variant of a "surprising" logic puzzle forces it to latch onto the surprising answer. Like whether two pounds of iron weighs more than one pound of feathers. Or any objects. It "expects" the twist, and always answers accordingly. It does so even if you change up the objects to be less tricky. > Which is heavier, a pound of marbles or two pounds of corn? Both weigh the same amount, which is a total of two pounds. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it's important to remember that the pound is a unit of weight or mass, and it always refers to the same amount regardless of what is being weighed. In this case, one pound of marbles plus two pounds of corn equals a total of three pounds, whereas two pounds of corn plus one pound of marbles also equals a total of three pounds. Therefore, both weigh the same amount of two pounds.
• ftxbro 4y ago
  Some will say it's as important as the internet or mobile, but they're wrong. This is like the discovery of fire or the invention of language.
  • bluehorseray 4y ago
    - "ftxbro"
    • ftxbro 4y ago
      After lurking I made this account only to post a joking-not-joking explanation of why Alameda had the weirdly specific credit limit $65,355,999,994 with FTX and why I thought it could be a funny off-by-almost-1000x bug/typo/mishap https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34473811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34473811 but I think almost no one read my comment because I posted it so late after the thread had scrolled off the front page :(
      • knewter 4y ago
        I appreciated it :)
• nycdatasci 4y ago
  Can we agree that an "early (yet still incomplete) version of AGI" isn't AGI?
  • ftxbro 4y ago
    To me it's clear that they think it's AGI, and that they think AGI is such a loaded concept that it's not worth "announcing" it. Beliefs are changing so fast right now. The term "AGI skeptic" will soon (if not already) mean "I don't trust AGIs in positions of authority or power" rather than "I don't think the technology is capable of matching our level of cognition."
    • famouswaffles 4y ago
      If you think AGI is artificial, and generally intelligent then yeah it's AGI 100% but some people have such loaded expectations of AGI that a significant chunk of the human population wouldn't even pass lol.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    I hope we can agree that “not completely X” is “not X”.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      Why would we agree on that? Anything "not completely X" surely the attribute of aproaching Xness, else it would just be "not X".
    • pixl97 4y ago
      So if you get your finger cut off, or you go blind, you're not human any more?
• onos 4y ago
  “ We note however that there is no single definition of AGI that is broadly accepted, and we discuss other definitions in the conclusion section.” We know it can do a lot of cool stuff, but without a pinned down definition the headline here is useless.
  • mhh__ 4y ago
    The definition will be narrowed as computational capabilities expand.
• TMWNN 4y ago
  As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics. To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so. I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
• doctoboggan 4y ago
  Does anyone have insight into the GPT-4 model itself? What is the parameter count? Training procedure? I know "Open"AI hasn't released this data but I was hoping someone with inside knowledge would have leaked it by now.
• lsy 4y ago
  This is a pretty fluffy paper, especially for an institution like Microsoft Research. It says it's an "early AGI" in the abstract, but elsewhere says it's merely a "step towards AGI". The basis for this is asking ChatGPT a bunch of stuff, but they don't really present an overarching framework for what questions to ask or why. The paper makes outlandish claims like "GPT-4 has common sense grounding" on the basis of its answers to these questions, but the questions don't show that the model has common sense or grounding. One of their constructed questions involves prompting the model with the equator's exact length—"precisely 24,901 miles"—and then being astonished that the model predicts that you're on the equator ("Equator" being the first result on Wikipedia for the search term "24,901"). It's also the case that while GPT-4 can say a bear at the north pole is "white", it has no way of knowing what "white", or "bear", or "north" actually represent. Are there folks out there doing rigorous research on these topics, who have a framework for developing tests of actual understanding?
  • GaggiX 4y ago
    >it has no way of knowing what "white", or "bear", or "north" actually represent. What does it mean to know what "white", "bear" or "north" actually represent?
  • cjbprime 4y ago
    > It's also the case that while GPT-4 can say a bear at the north pole is "white", it has no way of knowing what "white", or "bear", or "north" actually represent. This is a preposterous claim that you could easily disprove within a few minutes of using it.
• bumbledraven 4y ago
  While [pre-GPT-4 ChatGPT] performs non-trivially on both tasks, there is no comparison with the outputs from GPT-4. These preliminary observations will repeat themselves throughout the paper, on a great variety of tasks. The combination of the generality of GPT-4’s capabilities, with numerous abilities spanning a broad swath of domains, and its performance on a wide spectrum of tasks at or beyond human-level, makes us comfortable with saying that GPT-4 is a significant step towards AGI.
• bumbledraven 4y ago
  GPT-4's proof of the infinitude of primes, as quoted in the paper, is wrong. Yes, I think I can, Though it might take a clever plan. I’ll start by noting Euclid’s proof, Which shows that primes aren’t just aloof. Assume we have a finite list, Of primes, and that none have been missed. Multiply them all together, And add one, just to be clever. The result will be a number, That has no prime factors, oh wonder! Not true. The result may itself be prime. For example, say your finite list of primes is {2,3}. Multiplying them together and adding one yields 2*3 + 1 = 6 + 1 = 7, which is itself prime. Hence it has a prime factor: 7. But every number has a prime, That divides it, it’s just a matter of time. So we’ve found a contradiction, And our finite list needs eviction. There must be infinitely many primes, And that’s the end of my rhyming lines. A correct verison of the proof might say that the result has a prime factor, however, that prime factor is not an element of the supposed finite list, hence the list is incomplete.
  • pama 4y ago
    It was a valid proof by contradiction. If you had a finite list of primes, then you end up constructing a number that has no prime factors.
  • sebzim4500 4y ago
    You missed a line > Assume we have a finite list, > Of primes, and that none have been missed. It's assuming that the finite list contains all primes and then noting that you can construct a new number which has no prime factors, which is a contradiction.
  • shmed 4y ago
    You literally just proved it right
  • Nevermark 4y ago
    What does it mean if in demonstrating a potential artificial GI can’t understand a proof, a biological GI actually demonstrates they don’t understand the proof. Joking aside … the approach of dismissing generality of intelligence based on the presence of mistakes seems to be flawed.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I can't help but the hear the distant, very very quiet echo of Clever Hans.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    It would be interesting to figure out how Clever Hans does it, though. Don’t you want to know the tricks? Even when it’s a cheat, it might be a clever one. For example, researchers eventually figured out that image recognition algorithms pay attention to textures.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      Apparently the horse 'knew' the right answer by inferring from the questioner's behaviour: "Pfungst (the debunker) then examined the behaviour of the questioner in detail, and showed that as the horse's taps approached the right answer, the questioner's posture and facial expression changed in ways that were consistent with an increase in tension, which was released when the horse made the final, correct tap. This provided a cue that the horse could use to tell it to stop tapping." [1] However, there are gene regulatory networks that can actually count up to 3, with the mechanism of counting up to 2 being curiously different than the one for counting up to 3. [2] "Every intelligence test is also a test of the questioner" [3]: we don't regard a simple liver cell as intelligent, yet it performs a complex task in a large problem space. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans#:~:text=Pfungst%20then%20examined,to%20stop%20tapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans#:~:text=Pfungst%20.... [2] 2013, Malte Lehmann, "Genetic Regulatory Networks that count to 3", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23567648 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23567648 [3] Michael Levin, "Bioelectric Networks: Taming the Collective Intelligence of Cells for Regenerative Medicine", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41b254BcMJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41b254BcMJM
  • goatlover 4y ago
    Hans was a cyborg sent from the future to test humanity's gullibility.
• reidjs 4y ago
  Well of course Microsoft is going to say something sensational about it, aren’t they in charge of the project somewhat? This is just an advertisement for them, by them.
  • csdvrx 4y ago
    IDK, but Microsoft seems to be now what Google was a many many years ago: a company creating tech I like to use such as Bing, Edge, Windows Terminal, VSCode, etc. Their Surface hardware is nice too (even if I prefer thinkpads) Oh and they're also helping with the linux kernel. Why can't old people let go? Companies aren't people - they respond to market incentices. Yes, Microsoft did bad stuff in the 1990s, but now they're doing good stuff I like and TBH I'm way more afraid of google.
    • KeplerBoy 4y ago
      you like to use stuff like the windows terminal and edge? both are passable, but nothing to write home about, are they?
      • csdvrx 4y ago
        Much to write about actually: thanks to Edge great touchscreen support (and mostly thanks to hyprland and wayland for the environment) 2023 is my year of linux on the "desktop" (laptop!)
    • dns_snek 4y ago
      Not to detract from your overall point, but has Microsoft really done anything innovative when it comes to Edge, aside from painting over the Chromium skin? The only noticeable difference that I've observed is its integration with Bing.
      • EntropyDenied 4y ago
        They made it vastly better in terms of resource utilization, specifically RAM usage. Anytime I restart Chrome to update the browser it's astonishing how much RAM is freed up after all my tabs open up again. Edge seems to have plugged a lot of memory leaks in comparison.
• raincole 4y ago
  My prediction for the top comments of this thread (paraphrased) 1. It's just Microsoft's advertisement 2. No it's just a very effective pattern matching algorithm 3. Please define intelligence first otherwise it's nonsense 4. I welcome our machine overlord 5. Lmao I asked it to do $thing and it failed I'd like to know if GPT-4 can predict the top comments of this thread?
  • cowl 4y ago
    So you predict the top comments For a claim would be: 1. Dismisal 2. Trivialism 3. Non Well Formed Claim 4. I accept the claim 5. Disprove by counter example Are you sure you have not forgotten any tactic of debate to include in you prediction? I predict that you Prediction will result probably in these actions: 1. upvoted 2. downvoted
    • HopenHeyHi 4y ago
      6. Meta comment for karma whoring 7. Like 6, but funnier A. Joke thread pile on B. Reprimands from humorless C. Dejected mods having to clean it all up
      • moi2388 4y ago
        I thoroughly enjoyed point 7.
      • super256 4y ago
        Your unedited comment was funnier
      • jwdunne 4y ago
        Hang on, let me cover B: tHiS sHoUlDn’T bE oN hAcKeRnEws
      • narrator 4y ago
        8. Offensive, but true comment that gets a bunch of upvotes and then gets flagged.
      • 4y ago
• number6 4y ago
  I always thought General Intelligence would be Achieved by IBM or at least Apple, not by Microsoft. Now it will be used to pressure us into Windows Upgrades...
  • irrational 4y ago
    Rename ChatGPT to Clippy.
    • taspeotis 4y ago
      CliPT
    • antibasilisk 4y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if they actually brought back Clippy as a character now that the technology's improved
      • slowmovintarget 4y ago
        They've moved on to Cortana, or Sydney, I suppose.
  • Rapzid 4y ago
    Visual Studio and Azure AD.
  • hallqv 4y ago
    What rock have you been living under for the last decade if you thought IBM would solve AGI? Watson was a complete disaster and they have zero AI talent in the company.
    • number6 4y ago
      Oh, this was a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• beoberha 4y ago
  I know enough about how neural nets work to be absolutely blown away at how good the GPT are. I only skimmed the paper, but even chatGPT showed a lot of these “sparks”, IMO. We are certainly a long way off from any semblance of general intelligence, but for a model that just tries to predict the next word, I’m dumbfounded at how good it is.
  • shivekkhurana 4y ago
    "Long" might not be a long time as humans perceive it. Human perception of time is linear. That doesn't apply to LLMs.
  • otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    Maybe the words we write aren't as smart as we think. I mean, The Akinator can read your thoughts and that thing hasn't even graduated to a neural network from "a bunch of if/then statements".
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    > We are certainly a long way off from any semblance of general intelligence Part of me is starting to think that the only thing we're really missing at this point to start seeing that is to have one of these models that can modify itself with its output and thereby have a mechanism to 'learn' or 'remember' things.
• roschdal 4y ago
  [flagged]
• hislaziness 4y ago
  For whatever reason we seem to have set a very high expectation from AI as compared to NI (Natural Intelligence). I remember reading "There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
  • worrycue 4y ago
    We get our expectations from fiction. AIs in shows like Star Trek are precise and accurate - the perfect complement to the unreliability of humans. That’s what we want.
    • highduc 4y ago
      You'd think, but most humans would rather have "someone" who's lying to them in a very pleasant manner. People don't like objective truth, they go to great lengths to avoid it.
    • pzo 4y ago
      That's true and it's a high bar because it seems many people would expect AI to be at least as the smartest of human ever lived. However if the AI is the same smart as the most dumb human or human with mental disability would we then consider those humans as no intelligent at all or not qualifying as homo sapiens anymore? If AI can be the same as good as even 'dumb' human it's already a big achievement because can still provide some value and because AI can be scaled so you can still have billions of dumb AIs - already millions of users are interacting with chatGPT daily
  • acidioxide 4y ago
    well, even the dumbest intelligence that is, in fact, just a computer, has a great potential. You cannot scale humans horizontally nor vertically :^)
  • ccozan 4y ago
    An AI that is just a chat or some LLM is not going to be too relevant for human life ( thanks, I can google stuff or ask a friend; also writing poems is just fun, but not of any usefulness ). But where are my damn robots that I can assign task and do them reliably ( clean the garden, go get this list of groceries - or , just look in the damn fridge and go buy what is missing , and so on )? Then AI is useful.
• js8 4y ago
  I don't accept that something is AGI unless it can solve general instances of SAT (satisfiability problem, not the school test). Also recognizing (formulating from the task) an instance in the first place would help too. To me, these are hallmarks of reason, and not available in LLMs, in fact probably impossible just with pattern recognition.
  • sterlind 4y ago
    can you solve general instances of SAT? can the average person?
    • js8 4y ago
      With enough patience, yes. For example: You have a goat, a wolf, a cabbage and you want to cross a river...
      • pillefitz 4y ago
        How would you do it, tree search? If yes, I tend to agree with your initial statement that one should be able to teach LLMs to apply simple heuristics before considering it AGI.
        • js8 4y ago
          I don't know the answer to your question "how to build AGI". Although if I had to guess, the AGI will probably have a supervisor algorithm (trained by RL), which will issue internal commands to pattern matchers (like GPT-4), to drive them to solve the problem. The supervisor algorithm will only have a little tacit knowledge about any specific problem (like language or world facts), only tacit knowledge about learning and reasoning, and how to do it economically. So the supervisor algorithm will do the tree search if needed.
      • blueorange8 4y ago
        That Goat wolf cabbage problem gpt-4 can solve already
• gwoolhurme 4y ago
  From the intro: "we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system." What does that mean? If we take it as fact, so if it is an early version of AGI, Microsoft is using this thing to push subscriptions to all their services? This thing that is potentially the greatest thing humanity has made, an artificial living thing, and it's used to sell CoPilot and 365 subscriptions. Paint me as really sad then. Instead of sharing the research with other entities, or anything that could further help or push us... we get subscriptions? Fuck me, the future sucks.
  • throw310822 4y ago
    It's a product, and it's not that far away from that of their competitors. And there are a lot. Just a few weeks ago, Yann LeCun said that llms are not particularly interesting or innovative from the research point of view.
    • gwoolhurme 4y ago
      Oh I personally agree I am just following this article to it's logical conclusion. IF it is even the start of an AGI, it's just used as a product? Ouch... It's literally the meme from rick and morty with the butter passing robot.
      • throw310822 4y ago
        Yes, it is the start of AGI, it is not far ahead of its competitors (even the open source ones) and it's already a product. That's kind of surprising but also should make you question your assumptions about how this kind of change would have arrived (and where these assumptions come from).
  • kerpotgh 4y ago
    [dead]
• hallqv 4y ago
  Been pair-coding with gpt4 for the last week, it's definitely AGI..
  • atleastoptimal 4y ago
    No it's a Chinese room but instead of Chinese it's stack overflow snippets
    • hallqv 4y ago
      So what? If it writes novels like an AGI, codes like an AGI and explains complex topics like an AGI, then it's probably an AGI...
      • slowmovintarget 4y ago
        That's just it. It doesn't.
        • hallqv 4y ago
          How much have you tried gpt4?
  • number6 4y ago
    How do you pair program with ChatGPT?
    • hallqv 4y ago
      Depends on the task but some combination of asking it for skeleton code for new tasks and sending it my written code or error messages and asking for corrections or potential solutions. It's very effective, if you are atleast semi-new to technology you are using it will explain and teach you things you didn't know before, and if you know the tech by heart it saves you from having to type it out. For example, yesterday I had to make a custom container with some pretty involved dependiencies that also had to be be runnable on AWS Lambda (which I haven't used much before), me and gpt4 went back and forth with Dockerfile code and error messages for a few hours and then it ran like charm. Would probably have taken me 1-2 days of regular coding and googling otherwise.
• satoshiiii 4y ago
  If they remove the guardrails, then we can truly assess its intelligence. Currently, humans are directly interfering with a certain aspect of it. If it can provide a response without Microsoft's stock being affected by removing these human-imposed limitations, then I would be genuinely impressed.
• blarg1 4y ago
  All this GPT stuff feels reminiscent of Frank Herbert's novel: Destination Void ...
• IanCal 4y ago
  I'm increasingly convinced you can build an agi system with gpt4. People are trying to get it to solve everything up front but I've had GPT3 do much better by taking it through a problem asking it questions. Then I realised it was good at asking those questions too so just hooked it up to talk to itself with different roles. Gpt4 seems much better overall and is very good at using tools if you just tell it how and what it has available. With a better setup than reAct, better memory storage and recall, I think it'd be an agi. I'm not hugely convinced it isn't anyway - it's better than most people at most tasks I've thrown at it. Oh, and gpt came up with better roles for the "voices in the head" than I did too.
  • pottspotts 4y ago
    I am surprised by how many, even among the tech community, wholesale disregard GPT as a glorified auto-complete, or "a statistical model on human information". What, then, is the human brain if not a trained statistical model? Granted it is considerably more sophisticated in some ways, but in many other ways it is less sophisticated and less capable.
    • cjbprime 4y ago
      I wonder if the same reaction would have happened if ChatGPT had waited and released with GPT-4. It's very different.
  • SanderNL 4y ago
    I agree. There is something special about layering these guys. To me this is like we are looking at a static combustion engine without the vehicle. “How is this useful?” It’s that I’m not sure what the best approach is here. Waiting for other smarter folks to put the pieces together.
    • SanderNL 4y ago
      I'm taking the liberty to spread my most recent words of visionary wisdom here. (/s) One of my main issues with these guys is their context window. Their memory. It's hard to see a LLM working on a code-base a few thousand tokens at a time and still being precise about it. To do that you need summary techniques. Feeding prompt with incrementally compressed summaries and hoping it will maintain cohesion. That sounds a lot like trying to let the CEO of a company do all the grunt work by feeding him summaries. "Mr Gates, here's a 2 paragraph summary of our codebase. Should we name the class AnalogyWidgetProducer or FactoryWidgetAnalogyReporter?" I don't think that's going to work. My gut feeling is that what we call corporations are actually already a form of AI, but running on meat. I saw someone call Coca Cola a "paper clip maximizer", obviously for drinks instead of paper clips, but it actually - kind of - is. FWIW, I'm having a hard time thinking of it as anything else. Who controls it? What is it anyway? CEOs have the same context window problem, which to my knowledge is mainly solved through delegation. The army might be another example. Generals, officers, privates. How do you expect a general to make sensible statements about nitty-gritty operational details? It is not possible, but that does not mean the system as-a-whole cannot make progress towards a goal. Maybe we need to treat LLMs like employees inside a company (which in its totality is the AI, not the individual agents). If we have unfettered access to low-cost LLMs this might be easier to experiment with. I'm thinking like spinning up an LLM for every "class" or even every "method" in your codebase and letting it be a representative of that and only that piece of code. You can even call it George and let it join in on meetings to talk about it. George needs some "management" too, so there you go. Soon you'll have a veritable army of systems ready to talk about your code from their point-of-view. Black box the son of a gun and you're done. Clippy 2.0. My body is ready.
• namaria 4y ago
  Well it took us just about 65 years and a couple of AI winters to get convincing NLP going. And it takes about 1 TB of RAM... So either AGI is around the corner or a generation away. Same as positive yield fusion reactors?
• atleastoptimal 4y ago
  To me it's really crazy that there is a public UI (ChatGPT) that lets people use GPT-4. If OpenAI had the attitude of Google they would have just gone "Yeah we created a language model that's light years ahead of anything else, look how cool it is, but sorry due to public safety you will never get to use it. Bye now!" I feel that the public accessibility of these large language models is a fluke. Being able to use it for almost free feels like cheating reality.
  • jpeter 4y ago
    I think they learned their lesson after Dalle-Mini and Stable Diffusion killed the interest in Dalle2.
• notShabu 4y ago
  You know the "you pass butter" scene from Rick & Morty? I'm imagining humans being told "you complete thought sentences"
  • adt 4y ago
    Under-rated comment...
• ilitirit 4y ago
  GPT AI systems remind me of Chinese Room thought experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room This is also similar to the Duck Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test Depending on the context, there are generally two takes: "It is (or is not) a duck", and "It doesn't (or does) matter whether or not it's a duck". These aren't mutually exclusive.
• templeosenjoyer 4y ago
  Unless they somehow cured GPT-3's schizophrenia and this model is a significant upgrade I'm not buying it - no matter how good it is at proving trivial mathematics theorems in the style of Eliot or whoever. Too often I have dealt with "The answer to your question is X. Oh, sorry, you are right, the answer is actually Y. Oh, it is good of you to ask for a proof, sure I can prove the answer is Y, I used this (hallucinated) method described in this (hallucinated) paper. Oh, sorry, you are right, I cannot find any evidence that the method and paper I mentioned earlier actually exist, oops!".
• neilellis 4y ago
  [This is in reply to the comments not the article!] It's just a statistical model is the logical equivalent of human beings are just a bunch of atoms. The amount of reductionist thinking that goes on in tech is hilarious. First define AGI then challenge an AI to meet those requirements. If it meets them it is AGI. Put aside your preconceptions of what technology you think is required to achieve the goals and stay empirical. Note previous definitions of AI have been thrown away as AI passes through them one by one :-) What goes on inside its 'head' is irrelevant. We still don't know what actually goes on inside our heads and we were damn sure we were intelligent long before we had a clue how our heads worked at all. Also sentience != AGI. We can't even agree what sentience is in humans and other living beings so I'd stay clear of that one for now :-)
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >It's just a statistical model is the logical equivalent of human beings are just a bunch of atoms. Not exactly. One says "human beings are just a bunch of atoms" referring to the low level constituans (in a reductionistic way), but not making an accessment about the abilities emerging from those atoms in their interactions when in the form of a human. But when one says that GPT is "just a statistical model" they're implying a capacity cap of statistical models, that makes modelling certain thinking behavior impossible (regarless of how impressive the current results are, they might very well be capped to go beyond some limit because of the method -statistically model- involved). So, you can consider "GPT is just a statistical model" analogous to: "This engine can't parse a context senstive language because it's just a regular expression engine". >First define AGI then challenge an AI to meet those requirements. If it meets them it is AGI. Put aside your preconceptions of what technology you think is required to achieve the goals and stay empirical. The problem is definitions can be slippery, and even famous tests (like the Turing Test) might be found lacking in practice, as we discover that, yes, it can pass this test, but there's still ways off what we consider human-like performance in many areas. So, we should also stay empirical about the definitions, tests, and goals too.
    • yed 4y ago
      > But when one says that GPT is "just a statistical model" they're implying a capacity cap of statistical models Except there is no “capacity cap” on statistical models, we have no idea what they are or are not capable of yet.
• wildermuthn 4y ago
  It’s already smarter than 50% of us, and more knowledgeable than 99% of us. It no longer matters what label we give it, and we’re only a few years away from it giving labels to us.
• undert0wn 4y ago
  Good find. I am reading through this now.