Very well said. It absolutely drives me crazy - the focus on the model architecture for autoregressive text generation as the “key” (or blocker) to AGI seems so

Very well said. It absolutely drives me crazy - the focus on the model architecture for autoregressive text generation as the “key” (or blocker) to AGI seems so misguided as a debate. It seems clear to me (and maybe I’m wrong!) that a much larger system of modules interacting is essential (actuators, sensors, short term and long term memory, working memory, etc), and I completely fail to understand why it feels like the debate revolves around neural network architectures as opposed to the larger system architecture for agency. The language and decision making component is obviously extremely important and necessary, but it feels to me like it will always just be a necessary but not sufficient component for AGI. The fact that we have already obviously developed a technology which has an excellent grasp of language, can select between tools, perform knowledge retrieval from external databases, perform some form of simplistic reasoning and planning… it really feels (again, only intuitively!) like everything outside the perimeter of LLMs is where the actual frontier of AGI will be. It feels like with enough sensorimotor affordances and mechanisms for saving and accessing memory, all that is left is the (obviously complex) framework for connecting all of these together, with potentially many instances of each module working together… especially when you consider that one such system can potentially use human actors as tools (eg “hello fellow human, please complete this captcha for me, as I am low-vision”). I guess more succinctly - I do not believe that GPT-4 et al are remotely close to AGI on their own, but I do feel (again, this is just “vibes,” and obviously people smarter than me disagree!) that GPT-4 could be a component combined with lots of other tech we already have to essentially achieve AGI already. Perhaps what I am describing would just be a pale imitation of what others mean by AGI and be reductively called another mechanical Turk. I am probably the misguided one, but nonetheless, I can’t escape the feeling that “the one model to rule them all” is a red herring vis-a-vis a complex network (ha) of modules interacting together to achieve meaningful agency. Maybe it’s just that I am more interested in “meaningful agency” as a guiding principle over “AGI.”