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Ah, the AI hype is now entering the "let's be real" phase. Haven't seen a frenzied post on alignment in a while now.

Culonavirus 3y ago
The hype is insane. Listen, I think LLMs still have a lot of room to grow and they're already very useful, but like some excellent researchers say, they're not the holy grail. If we want AGI, LLMs are not it. A lot of people seem to think this is an engineering issue and that LLMs can get us there, but they can't, because it is not an engineering issue.
- hnfong 3y ago
  Do you have evidence to back your claims up besides "the hype is overblown"? Because hype only indicates that the precise hyped up claims are wrong, it doesn't imply the opposite extreme (i.e. LLMs can never achieve AGI) must be true.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mistermann 3y ago
  What kind(s) of an issue do you think it is fundamentally?
- PopePompus 3y ago
  I don't think you can say with confidence that the LLM approach will not lead to AGI, unless you understand in detail how human intelligence operates, and can show that no modification to current LLM architectures can achieve the same or superior results. I think the fact that adding "attention" to LLMs made a huge difference means that we are probably still in the low hanging fruit stage of LLM architecture development, and a few more design improvements on a par with "attention" might lead to something that could legitimately be called AGI. Many people, myself included, believe that LLMs are now exhibiting emergent behavior properties. If that's true, then saying that LLMs are not intelligent because they just predict the next token of output is like saying collections of neurons cannot be intelligent because they just stimulate other neurons chemically.
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    Well, both the cognitive scientists and linguists seem very doubtful we can apply this model to human cognition and yield much of value, so I'd say the idea that this model can yield behavior analogous to human cognition without other mechanisms seems rather far-fetched. Of course, we should absolutely pursue better understanding of both as to not throw the baby out with the bath water, but I'm not personally placing much hope in finding AGI any time soon.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  I'm going to take the exact opposite take and claim that "some excellent researchers" support it. "AGI" is practically already here, you just don't want to admit it: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/ https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
  - ben_w 3y ago
    All three letters of the initialism AGI mean different things to different people; to me, the Codex model was what made me think "this is it, it's here"… at least, it was when I saw the Two Minute Papers video on it — I didn't get a chance to play with the model itself when it was new, and "only" got API access about 6 months before ChatGPT came out. https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex

The hype is insane. Listen, I think LLMs still have a lot of room to grow and they're already very useful, but like some excellent researchers say, they're not the holy grail. If we want AGI, LLMs are not it. A lot of people seem to think this is an engineering issue and that LLMs can get us there, but they can't, because it is not an engineering issue.

hnfong 3y ago
Do you have evidence to back your claims up besides "the hype is overblown"? Because hype only indicates that the precise hyped up claims are wrong, it doesn't imply the opposite extreme (i.e. LLMs can never achieve AGI) must be true.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mistermann 3y ago
What kind(s) of an issue do you think it is fundamentally?
PopePompus 3y ago
I don't think you can say with confidence that the LLM approach will not lead to AGI, unless you understand in detail how human intelligence operates, and can show that no modification to current LLM architectures can achieve the same or superior results. I think the fact that adding "attention" to LLMs made a huge difference means that we are probably still in the low hanging fruit stage of LLM architecture development, and a few more design improvements on a par with "attention" might lead to something that could legitimately be called AGI. Many people, myself included, believe that LLMs are now exhibiting emergent behavior properties. If that's true, then saying that LLMs are not intelligent because they just predict the next token of output is like saying collections of neurons cannot be intelligent because they just stimulate other neurons chemically.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Well, both the cognitive scientists and linguists seem very doubtful we can apply this model to human cognition and yield much of value, so I'd say the idea that this model can yield behavior analogous to human cognition without other mechanisms seems rather far-fetched. Of course, we should absolutely pursue better understanding of both as to not throw the baby out with the bath water, but I'm not personally placing much hope in finding AGI any time soon.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
I'm going to take the exact opposite take and claim that "some excellent researchers" support it. "AGI" is practically already here, you just don't want to admit it: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/ https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
- ben_w 3y ago
  All three letters of the initialism AGI mean different things to different people; to me, the Codex model was what made me think "this is it, it's here"… at least, it was when I saw the Two Minute Papers video on it — I didn't get a chance to play with the model itself when it was new, and "only" got API access about 6 months before ChatGPT came out. https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex