5 ms·

I'll say what a lot of people seem to be denying. GPT-4 is an AGI, just a very bad one. Even GPT-1 was an AGI. There isn't a hard boundary between non AGI and A

I'll say what a lot of people seem to be denying. GPT-4 is an AGI, just a very bad one. Even GPT-1 was an AGI. There isn't a hard boundary between non AGI and AGI. A lot of people wish there was so they imagine absolutes regarding LLM's like "they cannot create anything new" or something like that. Just think: we consider humans a general intelligence, but obviously wouldn't consider an embryo or infant a general intelligence. So at what point does a human go from not generally intelligent to generally intelligent? And I don't mean an age or brain size, I mean suite of testable abilities. Intelligence is an ability that is naturally gradual and emerges over many domains. It is a collection of tools via which general abstractive principles can be applied, not a singular universally applicable ability to think in abstractions. GPT-4, compared to a human, is a very very small brain trained for the single purpose of textual thinking with some image capabilities. Claiming that ARC is the absolute market of general intelligence fails to account for the big picture of what intelligence is.

theptip 2y ago
This seems to be so broad a definition as to no longer mean anything useful. People in general are interested in capabilities or economic impact, and GPT-2 cleared no notable thresholds in those regards. I prefer the exact opposite approach: let’s use a strict definition, and have levels to make it really explicit what we are talking about. Here is a good one: “Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI” https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  People will never agree on this. We've known about the concept of intelligence for much, much longer than computers have been around and we still don't have a common definition or set of rules to check. That also makes things like consciousness and death pretty hard to define in medicine, leading to inconsistent rules across jurisdictions. For AGI in particular, I guarantee you that no matter which test gets beaten, the majority of humanity will always just move the goalpost and claim it's not "real" AGI because "reasons." Because the opposite would mean they have to admit that they are now the lesser intelligence on the planet.
blharr 2y ago
The "general" part of AGI implies it should be capable across all types of different tasks. I would definitely call it real Artificial Intelligence, but it's not general by any means.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  It's capable of attempting all types of different tasks. That is a novel capability on its own. We're used to GPT's amusing failures at this point, so we forget that there is absolutely no input you could hand to a chess program that would get it to try and play checkers. Not so with GPT. It will try, and fail, but that it tries at all was unimaginable five years ago.
  - dahart 2y ago
    Its amusing to me how the very language used to describe GPT anthropomorphizes it. GPT wont “attempt” or “try” anything on its own without a human telling it what to try, it has no agenda, no will, no agency, no self-reflection, no initiative, no fear, and no desire. It’s all A and no I.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      Do you agree that "there is absolutely no input you could hand to a chess program that would get it to try and play checkers", but there is an input you can hand to GPT-3+ that will get it to try and play pretty much any game imaginable, so long as you agree that its attempt will be very poor? I don't want to get into the weeds on what intelligence is or what "attempt" means or "try" means (you can probably guess I disagree with your position), but do you have a disagreement on pure input/output behavior? Do you disagree that if I put adequate words in, words will come out that will resemble an attempt to do the task, for nearly any task that exists?
      - dahart 2y ago
        You’re trying to avoid addressing my point. What can GPT do that’s interesting without a human in the loop doing the prompting? Lol “very poor”. You’re attempting to argue that if there’s any output at all in response to an input prompt, then GPT is “trying” and showing signs of intelligence, no matter what the output is. By this logic, you contradicted yourself: the chess engine can play checkers, poorly. By this logic, asking the sky to play a game means the sky is trying because it changes, or asking a random number generator to play a game means it resembles an attempt to play because there is “very poor” output. There are lots of games GPT can’t play, like hide-and-seek, tag, and tennis. Playing a game means playing by the rules of the game, giving coherent output, and trying to win. GPT can’t play games it hasn’t seen before, and no I don’t agree that “very poor” output counts. It doesn’t (currently) learn the rules from your prompts; you can’t teach it to play a new game by talking to it, and the “very poor” output from a game it wasn’t trained on will never improve. And, to my actual point, GPT will not play any games at all unless you ask it to.
surfingdino 2y ago
> GPT-4 is an AGI, just a very bad one. Then stop selling it as a tool to replace humans. A fast moving car breaking through a barrier and flying off the cliff could be called "an airborne means of transportation, just a very bad one" yet nobody is suggesting it should replace school busses if only we could add longer wings to it. What the LLM community refuses to see is that there is a limit to the patience and the financing the rest of the world will grant you before you're told, "it doesn't work mate." > So at what point does a human go from not generally intelligent to generally intelligent? Developmental psychology would be a good place to start looking for answers to this question. Also, forgetting scientific approach and going with common sense, we do not allow young humans to operate complex machinery, decide who is allowed to become a doctor, or go to jail. Intelligence is something that is not equally distributed across the human population and some of us never have much of it, yet we function and have a role in society. Our behaviour, choices, preferences, opinions are not just based on our intelligence, but often on our past experiences and circumstances. It is also not the sole quality we use to compare ourselves against each other. A not very intelligent person is capable of making the right choices (an otherwise obedient soldier refusing to press the button and blow up a building full of children); similarly, a highly intelligent person can become a hard-to-find serial criminal (a gynecologist impregnating his patients). What intelligent and creative people hold against LLMs is not that they replace them, but that they replace them with a shit version of them relegating thousands of years of human progress and creativity to the dustbin of the models and layers of tweaks to the output that still produce unreliable crap. I think the person who wrote this sign summed it up best https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1802378022361911711 https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1802378022361911711
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  In response to the sign: then learn to code or make art that is better than AI art. It's an existential complaint. "Why won't the nerds make something for meeeee." Do it yourself. Make that robot. Sucks to think that you're not that special. Most art isn't. Most music isn't. Any honest artist will agree. Most professional artists are graphic designers, not brilliant once in a generation visionaries. It's the new excuse for starving artists. AI or no, they'd still be unsuccessful. That's the way it's always been.
Tepix 2y ago
The definition of AGI that i am familiar with is that it can do all (digital) tasks a human can do at the level of an average human. As long as this level hasn't been achieved in all domains, it isn't AGI.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  This seems like a problematic standard. For one, it's very fuzzy. A human who is top 51% and one who's top 49% are very similar to each other and could probably swap places depending on how they're feeling that day; there's nothing fundamentally different going on in their heads. Even at the further ends of the scale, humans have essentially the same kind of brains and minds as each other, some more capable than others but still all belonging to the same category of thinking things. Your AGI definition bifurcates the human population into those that possess general intelligence and those who don't, but this seems hard to justify. At least, hard to justify when drawn there. If you put the line at profound mental retardation where a person can no longer function in society, that would make more sense. A slightly below average human may not be exceptional in any regard but I think they still possess what must be regarded as general intelligence. Furthermore, you're counting cases where humans do things the computer cannot but ignoring cases where the computer does things humans cannot. For instance, I doubt any human alive, let alone average humans can give reasonable explanations for short snippets of computer code in as many languages as GPT-4o, or formulate poetry in as many styles on arbitrary topics, or rattle off esoteric trivia and opinions about obscure historic topics, .... I think you get the point. It has already surpassed average human abilities in many categories of intellectually challenging tasks, but with your definition if it fails at even one task an average human can do, then it lacks "general intelligence." I suggest that your definition is one for "AHI" (Average Human Intelligence), not one for "AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence.)
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Totally agree. So does Peter Norvig: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
lucianbr 2y ago
"A car is a plane, just a very bad one. It can do the cruising down the runway part, only the flying part is missing".
- Fatalist_ma 2y ago
  Someone could say that, but we know and we can prove that a car is not a plane. An example of a bad plane would be the Wright Flyer.
killerstorm 2y ago
Yes. GPT-3 was a clear AGI signal: "language models are few-shot learners". I.e. they can figure a pattern from few examples to apply it to something useful. That's general intelligence. But people choose to be in denial.

theptip 2y ago

This seems to be so broad a definition as to no longer mean anything useful. People in general are interested in capabilities or economic impact, and GPT-2 cleared no notable thresholds in those regards. I prefer the exact opposite approach: let’s use a strict definition, and have levels to make it really explicit what we are talking about. Here is a good one: “Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI” https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

sigmoid10 2y ago
People will never agree on this. We've known about the concept of intelligence for much, much longer than computers have been around and we still don't have a common definition or set of rules to check. That also makes things like consciousness and death pretty hard to define in medicine, leading to inconsistent rules across jurisdictions. For AGI in particular, I guarantee you that no matter which test gets beaten, the majority of humanity will always just move the goalpost and claim it's not "real" AGI because "reasons." Because the opposite would mean they have to admit that they are now the lesser intelligence on the planet.

blharr 2y ago

The "general" part of AGI implies it should be capable across all types of different tasks. I would definitely call it real Artificial Intelligence, but it's not general by any means.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
It's capable of attempting all types of different tasks. That is a novel capability on its own. We're used to GPT's amusing failures at this point, so we forget that there is absolutely no input you could hand to a chess program that would get it to try and play checkers. Not so with GPT. It will try, and fail, but that it tries at all was unimaginable five years ago.
- dahart 2y ago
  Its amusing to me how the very language used to describe GPT anthropomorphizes it. GPT wont “attempt” or “try” anything on its own without a human telling it what to try, it has no agenda, no will, no agency, no self-reflection, no initiative, no fear, and no desire. It’s all A and no I.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    Do you agree that "there is absolutely no input you could hand to a chess program that would get it to try and play checkers", but there is an input you can hand to GPT-3+ that will get it to try and play pretty much any game imaginable, so long as you agree that its attempt will be very poor? I don't want to get into the weeds on what intelligence is or what "attempt" means or "try" means (you can probably guess I disagree with your position), but do you have a disagreement on pure input/output behavior? Do you disagree that if I put adequate words in, words will come out that will resemble an attempt to do the task, for nearly any task that exists?
    - dahart 2y ago
      You’re trying to avoid addressing my point. What can GPT do that’s interesting without a human in the loop doing the prompting? Lol “very poor”. You’re attempting to argue that if there’s any output at all in response to an input prompt, then GPT is “trying” and showing signs of intelligence, no matter what the output is. By this logic, you contradicted yourself: the chess engine can play checkers, poorly. By this logic, asking the sky to play a game means the sky is trying because it changes, or asking a random number generator to play a game means it resembles an attempt to play because there is “very poor” output. There are lots of games GPT can’t play, like hide-and-seek, tag, and tennis. Playing a game means playing by the rules of the game, giving coherent output, and trying to win. GPT can’t play games it hasn’t seen before, and no I don’t agree that “very poor” output counts. It doesn’t (currently) learn the rules from your prompts; you can’t teach it to play a new game by talking to it, and the “very poor” output from a game it wasn’t trained on will never improve. And, to my actual point, GPT will not play any games at all unless you ask it to.

surfingdino 2y ago

> GPT-4 is an AGI, just a very bad one. Then stop selling it as a tool to replace humans. A fast moving car breaking through a barrier and flying off the cliff could be called "an airborne means of transportation, just a very bad one" yet nobody is suggesting it should replace school busses if only we could add longer wings to it. What the LLM community refuses to see is that there is a limit to the patience and the financing the rest of the world will grant you before you're told, "it doesn't work mate." > So at what point does a human go from not generally intelligent to generally intelligent? Developmental psychology would be a good place to start looking for answers to this question. Also, forgetting scientific approach and going with common sense, we do not allow young humans to operate complex machinery, decide who is allowed to become a doctor, or go to jail. Intelligence is something that is not equally distributed across the human population and some of us never have much of it, yet we function and have a role in society. Our behaviour, choices, preferences, opinions are not just based on our intelligence, but often on our past experiences and circumstances. It is also not the sole quality we use to compare ourselves against each other. A not very intelligent person is capable of making the right choices (an otherwise obedient soldier refusing to press the button and blow up a building full of children); similarly, a highly intelligent person can become a hard-to-find serial criminal (a gynecologist impregnating his patients). What intelligent and creative people hold against LLMs is not that they replace them, but that they replace them with a shit version of them relegating thousands of years of human progress and creativity to the dustbin of the models and layers of tweaks to the output that still produce unreliable crap. I think the person who wrote this sign summed it up best https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1802378022361911711 https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1802378022361911711

bongodongobob 2y ago
In response to the sign: then learn to code or make art that is better than AI art. It's an existential complaint. "Why won't the nerds make something for meeeee." Do it yourself. Make that robot. Sucks to think that you're not that special. Most art isn't. Most music isn't. Any honest artist will agree. Most professional artists are graphic designers, not brilliant once in a generation visionaries. It's the new excuse for starving artists. AI or no, they'd still be unsuccessful. That's the way it's always been.

Tepix 2y ago

The definition of AGI that i am familiar with is that it can do all (digital) tasks a human can do at the level of an average human. As long as this level hasn't been achieved in all domains, it isn't AGI.

lupusreal 2y ago
This seems like a problematic standard. For one, it's very fuzzy. A human who is top 51% and one who's top 49% are very similar to each other and could probably swap places depending on how they're feeling that day; there's nothing fundamentally different going on in their heads. Even at the further ends of the scale, humans have essentially the same kind of brains and minds as each other, some more capable than others but still all belonging to the same category of thinking things. Your AGI definition bifurcates the human population into those that possess general intelligence and those who don't, but this seems hard to justify. At least, hard to justify when drawn there. If you put the line at profound mental retardation where a person can no longer function in society, that would make more sense. A slightly below average human may not be exceptional in any regard but I think they still possess what must be regarded as general intelligence. Furthermore, you're counting cases where humans do things the computer cannot but ignoring cases where the computer does things humans cannot. For instance, I doubt any human alive, let alone average humans can give reasonable explanations for short snippets of computer code in as many languages as GPT-4o, or formulate poetry in as many styles on arbitrary topics, or rattle off esoteric trivia and opinions about obscure historic topics, .... I think you get the point. It has already surpassed average human abilities in many categories of intellectually challenging tasks, but with your definition if it fails at even one task an average human can do, then it lacks "general intelligence." I suggest that your definition is one for "AHI" (Average Human Intelligence), not one for "AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence.)

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Totally agree. So does Peter Norvig: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

lucianbr 2y ago

"A car is a plane, just a very bad one. It can do the cruising down the runway part, only the flying part is missing".

Fatalist_ma 2y ago
Someone could say that, but we know and we can prove that a car is not a plane. An example of a bad plane would be the Wright Flyer.

killerstorm 2y ago

Yes. GPT-3 was a clear AGI signal: "language models are few-shot learners". I.e. they can figure a pattern from few examples to apply it to something useful. That's general intelligence. But people choose to be in denial.