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This is what we used to call an "AGI" back in 2013-2014. Generalized artificial intelligence. An AI which is general enough to be used for diverse tasks in mult

This is what we used to call an "AGI" back in 2013-2014. Generalized artificial intelligence. An AI which is general enough to be used for diverse tasks in multiple fields, unlike specialized AIs of that time (e.g. for image recognition or self-driving cars). Nothing more than that. Now the goalposts are moved way forward, and now "AGI" is something that have conscious, with superhuman intelligence, and probably evil intent. But back in a day, AGI was just what we have today -- an universal chat bot. We live in the magic land.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> But back in a day, AGI was just what we have today -- an universal chat bot. I don't know anybody that used AGI to mean that. I've always thought of AGI as an AI that can learn how to perform tasks with very simple instructions, rather than spending weeks training a neural network on a data center full of GPGPUs. Basically, my idea of AGI has always been what you're calling the "new" definition of AGI.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Aren't you effectively describing few-shot learning in LLMs? Teach the model a new task by describing it and maybe give a few examples?
- Kerb_ 3y ago
  Remember that people have decades of generalized training before becoming able to perform tasks with very simple instructions. I would consider years of pre-training to be acceptable if the model is usable and trainable quickly in practice as well
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Mostly “training” to do abstract things, not really for survival or fun. I could catch fish since a fairly early age, mostly because I enjoyed it. At about age 12 I used to drive stolen cars around without any training at all except observation. It too me decades to become a corporate robot though :) I think training is a weird word, life is an experience, not just training. I think your comment demonstrated the limitations of language to describe things.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      We are pre-trained by billions of years of evolution.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        To use a fishing rod and drive a car ?
        Kerb_ 3y ago
        To have the social and physical capabilities to create and pass on the concepts of "fishing rod" and "car" as well as how to use them. We did start from scratch, after all. But I think the learning of simple, complex, abstract, and nuanced concepts throughout a person's development as their brain grows is more than enough to compare to an artificial general intelligence without taking into account development of a species, considering we're the ones building the chips the AI is running on.
        ChatGTP 3y ago
        Nothing starts from scratch...
        Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
        This is true. People think newborn babies know nothing. But even from birth, there are certain instincts and skills they already know, such as the ability to recognize faces. Heck, our ability to think, analyze, etc. has come from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Even dogs, which we consider to be intelligent, often fail at simple tasks like trying to bring a stick through a doorway when the stick is wider than the doorway. Sure, sometimes they figure it out, but not all can.
  - andrewprock 3y ago
    It only takes like 5 minutes to teach someone to play Fluxx, not decades.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
e_y_ 3y ago
I would call a chat bot a specialized application. And I dispute that a chat bot was ever considered the end goal of AGI. The idea is that if we had AGI, we could build a chat bot with it to test/demonstrate its general reasoning capabilities. Simply being effective at chatting is not sufficient to be called an AGI. And today's chatbots are quite stupid. Sure we're starting to give chat bots the ability to query information and even interpret user-provided images, but AFAIK the image interpretation is done using a different model rather than being an extension of the LLM.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  LLMs aren't chatbots. That's just a nice consequence of what they can do. Their prediction abilities stretch beyond just language even if they're only trained on it. https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ There's nothing specialized about being able to predict meaningful completions from arbitrary token sequences. There's a whole lot that can be done with that even if they were constrained to language. https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ There's nothing stupid about GPT-4. There's no testable definition of general intelligence GPT-4 would fail that a chunk of humans also wouldn't. Vision understanding does not have to be a separate model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14824 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14824
danpalmer 3y ago
This doesn't match what I've seen of usage of the term AGI since ~2010. I think we've "solved" chatbots more than was imagined at the time, and that involves being able to produce readable and arguably useful answers about a range of topics, but we haven't got game playing sorted yet, we don't have proactive models, and there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics (which until recently has been considered an important necessary step). We have taken a noticeable step forwards towards AGI in the last few years, but AGI is still a long way off.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  "there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics" You should read the article. It talks about exactly this use case, using an LLM as part of robotics control systems.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  But at that point neural networks started to dominate AI research already to the point that "AI" started to become synonymous with them... what about 1950(?)-2010 ?
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  It's not just about language. https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ >but we haven't got game playing sorted yet 4 can play chess, Minecraft fine. So I imagine a lot of games fall down to data. >and there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics The point is that there doesn't need to be. There are many projects using LLMs to pilot robots off text prediction ability. https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://www.deepmind.com/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action https://www.deepmind.com/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-visi... I think most from the 2000s would be calling what we have today AGI.
  - dr-detroit 3y ago
    [dead]

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> But back in a day, AGI was just what we have today -- an universal chat bot. I don't know anybody that used AGI to mean that. I've always thought of AGI as an AI that can learn how to perform tasks with very simple instructions, rather than spending weeks training a neural network on a data center full of GPGPUs. Basically, my idea of AGI has always been what you're calling the "new" definition of AGI.

danielbln 3y ago
Aren't you effectively describing few-shot learning in LLMs? Teach the model a new task by describing it and maybe give a few examples?
Kerb_ 3y ago
Remember that people have decades of generalized training before becoming able to perform tasks with very simple instructions. I would consider years of pre-training to be acceptable if the model is usable and trainable quickly in practice as well
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Mostly “training” to do abstract things, not really for survival or fun. I could catch fish since a fairly early age, mostly because I enjoyed it. At about age 12 I used to drive stolen cars around without any training at all except observation. It too me decades to become a corporate robot though :) I think training is a weird word, life is an experience, not just training. I think your comment demonstrated the limitations of language to describe things.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    We are pre-trained by billions of years of evolution.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      To use a fishing rod and drive a car ?
      - Kerb_ 3y ago
        To have the social and physical capabilities to create and pass on the concepts of "fishing rod" and "car" as well as how to use them. We did start from scratch, after all. But I think the learning of simple, complex, abstract, and nuanced concepts throughout a person's development as their brain grows is more than enough to compare to an artificial general intelligence without taking into account development of a species, considering we're the ones building the chips the AI is running on.
        ChatGTP 3y ago
        Nothing starts from scratch...
        Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
        This is true. People think newborn babies know nothing. But even from birth, there are certain instincts and skills they already know, such as the ability to recognize faces. Heck, our ability to think, analyze, etc. has come from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Even dogs, which we consider to be intelligent, often fail at simple tasks like trying to bring a stick through a doorway when the stick is wider than the doorway. Sure, sometimes they figure it out, but not all can.
- andrewprock 3y ago
  It only takes like 5 minutes to teach someone to play Fluxx, not decades.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

e_y_ 3y ago

I would call a chat bot a specialized application. And I dispute that a chat bot was ever considered the end goal of AGI. The idea is that if we had AGI, we could build a chat bot with it to test/demonstrate its general reasoning capabilities. Simply being effective at chatting is not sufficient to be called an AGI. And today's chatbots are quite stupid. Sure we're starting to give chat bots the ability to query information and even interpret user-provided images, but AFAIK the image interpretation is done using a different model rather than being an extension of the LLM.

famouswaffles 3y ago
LLMs aren't chatbots. That's just a nice consequence of what they can do. Their prediction abilities stretch beyond just language even if they're only trained on it. https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ There's nothing specialized about being able to predict meaningful completions from arbitrary token sequences. There's a whole lot that can be done with that even if they were constrained to language. https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ There's nothing stupid about GPT-4. There's no testable definition of general intelligence GPT-4 would fail that a chunk of humans also wouldn't. Vision understanding does not have to be a separate model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14824 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14824

danpalmer 3y ago

This doesn't match what I've seen of usage of the term AGI since ~2010. I think we've "solved" chatbots more than was imagined at the time, and that involves being able to produce readable and arguably useful answers about a range of topics, but we haven't got game playing sorted yet, we don't have proactive models, and there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics (which until recently has been considered an important necessary step). We have taken a noticeable step forwards towards AGI in the last few years, but AGI is still a long way off.

lucubratory 3y ago
"there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics" You should read the article. It talks about exactly this use case, using an LLM as part of robotics control systems.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
But at that point neural networks started to dominate AI research already to the point that "AI" started to become synonymous with them... what about 1950(?)-2010 ?
famouswaffles 3y ago
It's not just about language. https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ https://general-pattern-machines.github.io/ >but we haven't got game playing sorted yet 4 can play chess, Minecraft fine. So I imagine a lot of games fall down to data. >and there's nothing in these models for movement or robotics The point is that there doesn't need to be. There are many projects using LLMs to pilot robots off text prediction ability. https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://tidybot.cs.princeton.edu/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://innermonologue.github.io/ https://www.deepmind.com/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action https://www.deepmind.com/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-visi... I think most from the 2000s would be calling what we have today AGI.
- dr-detroit 3y ago
  [dead]