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When my friends talked about how AGI is just creating huge enough neural network & feeding it enough data, I have always compared it to: imagine locking a mouse

When my friends talked about how AGI is just creating huge enough neural network & feeding it enough data, I have always compared it to: imagine locking a mouse in a library with all the knowledge in the world & expecting it to come out super intelligent.

ben_w 2y ago
GPT-3 is about the same complexity as a mouse brain; it did better than I expected… … but it's still a brain the size of a mouse's.
- spyhi 2y ago
  To be fair, it’s the horsepower of a mouse, but all devoted to a single task, so not 100% comparable to the capabilities of a mouse, and language is too distributed to make a good comparison of what milestone is human-like. But it’s indeed surprising how much that little bit of horsepower can do.
- dgb23 2y ago
  Mice are fare more impressive though.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    And they can cook. I know it, I have seen it in a movie /s
    - varelse 2y ago
      [dead]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I've yet to see a mouse write even mediocre python, let alone a rap song about life in ancient Athens written in Latin. Don't get me wrong, organic brains learn from far fewer examples than AI, there's a lot organic brains can do that AI don't (yet), but I don't really find the intellectual capacity of mice to be particularly interesting. On the other hand, the question of if mice have qualia, that is something I find interesting.
    - southernplaces7 2y ago
      >but I don't really find the intellectual capacity of mice to be particularly interesting. But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same, much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that. This isn't to even mention the vast cellular complexity that lets the mouse physically act on all these instructions from its brain and nervous system and continue to do so while self-recharging for up to 3 years and fighting off tiny, lethal external invaders 24/7, among other things it does to stay alive. All of that in just a mouse.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible No, why would I? Depending on what you mean by self-direction, that's either an evolved trait (with evolution rather than the mouse itself as the intelligence) for the bigger picture what-even-is-good, or it's fairly easy to replicate even for a much simpler AI. The hard part has been getting them to be able to distinguish between different images, not this kind of thing. > and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm > much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that. Is nice, but again, this is mixing up the intelligence of the animal with the intelligence of the evolutionary process which created that instance. I as a human have no knowledge of the evolutionary process which lets me enjoy the flavour of coriander, and my understanding of the Krebs cycle is "something about vitamin C?" rather than anything functional, and while my body knows these things it is unconventionable to claim that my body knowing it means that I know it.
        GOD_Over_Djinn 2y ago
        Evolution is an abstract concept, and abstract concepts cannot be “intelligent” (whatever that means). This is like saying that gravity or thermodynamics are “intelligent”.
surfingdino 2y ago
The mouse would go mad, because libraries preserve more than just knowledge, they preserve the evolution of it. That evolution is ongoing as we discover more about ourselves and the world we live in, refine our knowledge, disprove old assumptions and theories and, on occasion, admit that we were wrong to dismiss them. Also, over time, we place different levels of importance to knowledge from the past. For example, an old alchemy manual from the middle ages used to record recipes for a cure for some nasty disease was important because it helped whoever had access to it quickly prepare some ointment that sometimes worked, but today we know that most of those recipes were random, non-scientific attempts at coming up with a solution to a medical problem and we have proven that those medicines do not work. Therefore, the importance of the old alchemist's recipe book as a source of scientific truth has gone to zero, but the historic importance of it has grown a lot, because it helps us understand how our knowledge of chemistry and its applications in health care has evolved. LLMs treat all text as equal unless it will be given hints. But those hints are provided by humans, so there is an inherent bias and the best we can hope for is that those hints are correct at the time of training. We are not pursuing AGI, we are pursuing the goal of automating the process of creation of answers that look like they are the right answers to the given question, but without much attention to factual, logical, or contextual correctness.
- immibis 2y ago
  No. The mouse would just be a mouse. It wouldn't learn anything, because it's a mouse. It might chew on some of the books. Meanwhile, transformers do learn things, so there is obviously more to it than just the quantity of data. (Why spend a mouse? Just sit a strawberry in a library, and if the hypothesis holds that the quantity of data is the only thing that matters holds, you'll have a super intelligent strawberry)
  - lgas 2y ago
    No need to waste a strawberry. Just test the furniture in the library. Either you have super intelligent chairs and tables or not.
    - 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

GPT-3 is about the same complexity as a mouse brain; it did better than I expected… … but it's still a brain the size of a mouse's.

spyhi 2y ago
To be fair, it’s the horsepower of a mouse, but all devoted to a single task, so not 100% comparable to the capabilities of a mouse, and language is too distributed to make a good comparison of what milestone is human-like. But it’s indeed surprising how much that little bit of horsepower can do.
dgb23 2y ago
Mice are fare more impressive though.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  And they can cook. I know it, I have seen it in a movie /s
  - varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
- ben_w 2y ago
  I've yet to see a mouse write even mediocre python, let alone a rap song about life in ancient Athens written in Latin. Don't get me wrong, organic brains learn from far fewer examples than AI, there's a lot organic brains can do that AI don't (yet), but I don't really find the intellectual capacity of mice to be particularly interesting. On the other hand, the question of if mice have qualia, that is something I find interesting.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    >but I don't really find the intellectual capacity of mice to be particularly interesting. But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same, much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that. This isn't to even mention the vast cellular complexity that lets the mouse physically act on all these instructions from its brain and nervous system and continue to do so while self-recharging for up to 3 years and fighting off tiny, lethal external invaders 24/7, among other things it does to stay alive. All of that in just a mouse.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > But you should find their self-direction capacity incredible No, why would I? Depending on what you mean by self-direction, that's either an evolved trait (with evolution rather than the mouse itself as the intelligence) for the bigger picture what-even-is-good, or it's fairly easy to replicate even for a much simpler AI. The hard part has been getting them to be able to distinguish between different images, not this kind of thing. > and their ability to instinctively behave in ways that help them survive and propagate themselves. There isn't a machine or algorithm on earth that can do the same, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm > much less with the same minuscule energy resources that a mouse's brain and nervous system use to achieve all of that. Is nice, but again, this is mixing up the intelligence of the animal with the intelligence of the evolutionary process which created that instance. I as a human have no knowledge of the evolutionary process which lets me enjoy the flavour of coriander, and my understanding of the Krebs cycle is "something about vitamin C?" rather than anything functional, and while my body knows these things it is unconventionable to claim that my body knowing it means that I know it.
      - GOD_Over_Djinn 2y ago
        Evolution is an abstract concept, and abstract concepts cannot be “intelligent” (whatever that means). This is like saying that gravity or thermodynamics are “intelligent”.

surfingdino 2y ago

The mouse would go mad, because libraries preserve more than just knowledge, they preserve the evolution of it. That evolution is ongoing as we discover more about ourselves and the world we live in, refine our knowledge, disprove old assumptions and theories and, on occasion, admit that we were wrong to dismiss them. Also, over time, we place different levels of importance to knowledge from the past. For example, an old alchemy manual from the middle ages used to record recipes for a cure for some nasty disease was important because it helped whoever had access to it quickly prepare some ointment that sometimes worked, but today we know that most of those recipes were random, non-scientific attempts at coming up with a solution to a medical problem and we have proven that those medicines do not work. Therefore, the importance of the old alchemist's recipe book as a source of scientific truth has gone to zero, but the historic importance of it has grown a lot, because it helps us understand how our knowledge of chemistry and its applications in health care has evolved. LLMs treat all text as equal unless it will be given hints. But those hints are provided by humans, so there is an inherent bias and the best we can hope for is that those hints are correct at the time of training. We are not pursuing AGI, we are pursuing the goal of automating the process of creation of answers that look like they are the right answers to the given question, but without much attention to factual, logical, or contextual correctness.

immibis 2y ago
No. The mouse would just be a mouse. It wouldn't learn anything, because it's a mouse. It might chew on some of the books. Meanwhile, transformers do learn things, so there is obviously more to it than just the quantity of data. (Why spend a mouse? Just sit a strawberry in a library, and if the hypothesis holds that the quantity of data is the only thing that matters holds, you'll have a super intelligent strawberry)
- lgas 2y ago
  No need to waste a strawberry. Just test the furniture in the library. Either you have super intelligent chairs and tables or not.
  - 2y ago