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AGI -- artificial general intelligence? With the efforts currently getting the most attention in the tech news, are we on the way to AGI? Gee, I worked in art

AGI -- artificial general intelligence? With the efforts currently getting the most attention in the tech news, are we on the way to AGI? Gee, I worked in artificial intelligence the last time. Wrote code, published papers, gave talks. My view at the time and since is the same -- that work had no promise of progress toward AGI. For what I've seen about the current efforts, for whatever utility has been achieved, it appears that the output is based on borrowing, distilling, abstracting from the input of what has already been done and published. Soooo, we could consider questions with no published answers or at least answers rarely published and now not easy to find. Here are three such: (1) I'll return to just a plane geometry puzzle question I encountered as college freshman: By classic Euclidean construction, construct a triangle ABC with point D on AB and point E on BC so that the lengths AD = DE = EC. (2) In the Kuhn-Tucker conditions of nonlinear optimization, are the Kuhn-Tucker and Zangwill constraint qualifications independent? (3) Do the wave functions of quantum mechanics form a Hilbert space? Physics texts commonly claim "Yes" but with the usual pure math definition of a Hilbert space as a "complete inner product space" the answer is "No". In what is published, mostly the physics texts ignore the pure math definition and the pure math texts ignore the quantum mechanics wave function examples -- so a clean answer is not easy to find in the usual published material. More generally, for a good pure mathematician about to publish some good, new results, before publishing, ask that question to current AI. Maybe for an easier source of questions, just pick some of the more difficult exercises from some graduate texts in pure math. Correct solutions have not commonly been published, and some of the exercises require some understanding of the math in the text and some ingenuity. Here's another chance: Once when I was teaching computer science at Georgetown University, as a final exam question I gave the code for quick sort where I had inserted an error -- the question was to find and correct the error. So far that error and its correction may never have been published.

sacrosancty 4y ago
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lordnacho 4y ago
Wait a minute, do people have to be able to solve those problems to be considered intelligent in the AGI sense? My guess is there's about 8B people who wouldn't pass that bar. Also aren't there loads of lower level math questions that are just as unique? A quadratic equation with large random numbers would be easily solved by a high schooler yet not be in the dataset verbatim. Or perhaps a proof of some geometry thing that is a corollary of some well known proof, eg I came across one earlier: it's well known that a cord subtending an angle on the circle has the double angle from the centre. Now prove that if you see two angles where one is the double of the other and they open towards the same line segment, you can draw a circle where the smaller angle is on the circle and the double is at the centre, and the line segment is a cord of the circle. Anyway what exactly is the bar for intelligence? There's lots of people who can't do one task or another, but we don't think of them as not intelligent.
- graycat 4y ago
  > Wait a minute, do people have to be able to solve those problems to be considered intelligent in the AGI sense? My guess is there's about 8B people who wouldn't pass that bar. Maybe 75+% of the "8B people" actually COULD "pass that bar" -- they just need to be a good high school and college math major. That's my judgment after teaching quite a lot of college math, at Indiana University and Ohio State University. Sooo, my guess here, for an effort at some insight into current AI and progress toward AGI, is that commonly humans can read, study, understand, and work exercises in math and "pass that bar" and current AI can read, ..., that math but won't be able to go far enough to "pass that bar". > Anyway what exactly is the bar for intelligence? For an answer, and for AGI we are assuming the context of human intelligence, it would be good but for now too difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions. But a necessary condition would be for the AI to be able to do what humans do or, as you suggest, commonly could do with some study. So, I picked some work with some relatively clear ways to tell, pure math, that commonly humans can do, and we can tell they can do, with some study, and I'm guessing current AI cannot. So, if this is correct, then the current AI fails a necessary condition. Then we have the question, is doing well at the math also a sufficient condition? I haven't been trying to address that question!!! Or, maybe at some time in the past commonly people would have guessed, expected, claimed, some such, that playing a really good game of chess would be a sufficient condition! But now I'd expect that fewer people would so guess!!
mr_toad 4y ago
GPT4 has nowhere near the number of neural connections that a human brain has. It’s hardly surprising that its mental abilities are like those of a well trained pet. Once neural nets approach the complexity of the human brain, along with the right training I don’t see any reason that the ability to solve problems by deduction and logic won’t emerge. And an AI won’t have to devote neural capacity to things like eating and wiping it’s arse, so it will probably get there sooner. Like an idiot savant we’ll probably have AI that are developing new mathematic and physical theories that aren’t even what we’d consider self-aware.
nr2x 4y ago
As somebody who also taught CS at the graduate level what exactly are you testing with such a question? Are you teaching people to be human compilers? Anybody who thinks an exam is a place to prove their own cleverness relative to their students shouldn’t be teaching. How pointless.
- graycat 4y ago
  Right. But the code with the "error" was still legal in the programming language. The "error" was in the logic of the quick sort algorithm. So the question asked for a desk check of the quick sort algorithm. So the question tested understanding of the quick sort algorithm and ability to desk check. Considering the content of the course, that seemed like a reasonable question. I'm fully in agreement that usually humans should not spend their time doing what compilers can do faster and better. Indeed when I was teaching my wife our AI language, I advised her not to try very hard to get all the punctuation, language details, syntax, etc. correct and, instead, just to let our compiler tell her where it wanted to object.
_yb2s 4y ago
I have a physics background, and poised gpt-4 a series of totally new classical physics questions, things like predicting velocity and acceleration in fluids with different shaped objects and forces on it. In most cases it gave a correct approximate answer, could show it’s work, and make reasonable simplifying approximations. There is just no way to do any of that without a correct model of the underlying physics concepts, there is no example data online with solutions to these.

sacrosancty 4y ago

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lordnacho 4y ago

Wait a minute, do people have to be able to solve those problems to be considered intelligent in the AGI sense? My guess is there's about 8B people who wouldn't pass that bar. Also aren't there loads of lower level math questions that are just as unique? A quadratic equation with large random numbers would be easily solved by a high schooler yet not be in the dataset verbatim. Or perhaps a proof of some geometry thing that is a corollary of some well known proof, eg I came across one earlier: it's well known that a cord subtending an angle on the circle has the double angle from the centre. Now prove that if you see two angles where one is the double of the other and they open towards the same line segment, you can draw a circle where the smaller angle is on the circle and the double is at the centre, and the line segment is a cord of the circle. Anyway what exactly is the bar for intelligence? There's lots of people who can't do one task or another, but we don't think of them as not intelligent.

graycat 4y ago
> Wait a minute, do people have to be able to solve those problems to be considered intelligent in the AGI sense? My guess is there's about 8B people who wouldn't pass that bar. Maybe 75+% of the "8B people" actually COULD "pass that bar" -- they just need to be a good high school and college math major. That's my judgment after teaching quite a lot of college math, at Indiana University and Ohio State University. Sooo, my guess here, for an effort at some insight into current AI and progress toward AGI, is that commonly humans can read, study, understand, and work exercises in math and "pass that bar" and current AI can read, ..., that math but won't be able to go far enough to "pass that bar". > Anyway what exactly is the bar for intelligence? For an answer, and for AGI we are assuming the context of human intelligence, it would be good but for now too difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions. But a necessary condition would be for the AI to be able to do what humans do or, as you suggest, commonly could do with some study. So, I picked some work with some relatively clear ways to tell, pure math, that commonly humans can do, and we can tell they can do, with some study, and I'm guessing current AI cannot. So, if this is correct, then the current AI fails a necessary condition. Then we have the question, is doing well at the math also a sufficient condition? I haven't been trying to address that question!!! Or, maybe at some time in the past commonly people would have guessed, expected, claimed, some such, that playing a really good game of chess would be a sufficient condition! But now I'd expect that fewer people would so guess!!

mr_toad 4y ago

GPT4 has nowhere near the number of neural connections that a human brain has. It’s hardly surprising that its mental abilities are like those of a well trained pet. Once neural nets approach the complexity of the human brain, along with the right training I don’t see any reason that the ability to solve problems by deduction and logic won’t emerge. And an AI won’t have to devote neural capacity to things like eating and wiping it’s arse, so it will probably get there sooner. Like an idiot savant we’ll probably have AI that are developing new mathematic and physical theories that aren’t even what we’d consider self-aware.

nr2x 4y ago

As somebody who also taught CS at the graduate level what exactly are you testing with such a question? Are you teaching people to be human compilers? Anybody who thinks an exam is a place to prove their own cleverness relative to their students shouldn’t be teaching. How pointless.

graycat 4y ago
Right. But the code with the "error" was still legal in the programming language. The "error" was in the logic of the quick sort algorithm. So the question asked for a desk check of the quick sort algorithm. So the question tested understanding of the quick sort algorithm and ability to desk check. Considering the content of the course, that seemed like a reasonable question. I'm fully in agreement that usually humans should not spend their time doing what compilers can do faster and better. Indeed when I was teaching my wife our AI language, I advised her not to try very hard to get all the punctuation, language details, syntax, etc. correct and, instead, just to let our compiler tell her where it wanted to object.

_yb2s 4y ago

I have a physics background, and poised gpt-4 a series of totally new classical physics questions, things like predicting velocity and acceleration in fluids with different shaped objects and forces on it. In most cases it gave a correct approximate answer, could show it’s work, and make reasonable simplifying approximations. There is just no way to do any of that without a correct model of the underlying physics concepts, there is no example data online with solutions to these.