5 ms·

> and certainly not enough to satisfy users’ growing appetite for AGI There is no AGI. No one is creating Minds from Iain M Banks books. It's the world's best

> and certainly not enough to satisfy users’ growing appetite for AGI There is no AGI. No one is creating Minds from Iain M Banks books. It's the world's best autocomplete. It's if you look at the Earth once from space, and "recreate" it by making a giant disc that looks like that view of the Earth. Nothing behind it is like intelligence as we would think of it. AI is going to do some amazing things still. AGI is just an unbelievably high bar.

glassounds 2y ago
That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. A parrot can produce human sounding speech and associate certain prompts with desired responses, but there's no internal process that actually understands the meaning of either the prompt or the response (other than a shallow connection of sounds to a specific thing, rather than understanding human language). You'll never be able to train a parrot well enough to have that process in the same way a human does. Our current terminology would be like calling parrots "artificial humans". LLMs are still great tools for various tasks, they just shouldn't be categorized as AI.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Both parrots and AI's have intelligence, just not very much of it. AGI is generally defined as super-human intelligence, and neither parrots nor AI's have that.
  - glassounds 2y ago
    I'd argue that LLMs don't have intelligence, they have the ability to match a correct response to a prompt but that's not a product of any internal process that's like what we call intelligence (unless that's used to refer to smart programming / probabilistic models / machine learning). Parrots are closer but I used them for the example since they also mimic instead of understand.
- danielbln 2y ago
  Could you describe a system that would be worthy of the moniker "AI"?
  - glassounds 2y ago
    I'm sure a better philosophical definition exists but off the top of my head: An intelligence should be able to actually understand its input / output (rather than appear to understand), be able to reason about itself recursively*, be able to learn and generally have state, be able to have an internal thought process without being prompted**. Some emotion isn't strictly a requirement but likely a desirable quality for human interaction. * "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" and "I am a Strange Loop" are meant to cover this but I've only started the latter ** A sci-fi book series called Old Man's War features a race of aliens that are intelligent but not sentient due to not having an internal thought process and self awareness, which does raise the question of whether it's possible to have one without the other.
    - yarg 2y ago
      You don't know what artificial means.
      - glassounds 2y ago
        You've made that point three times now, I understand your disagreement and have addressed it
        BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
        Not sufficiently though You're creating a definition that doesn't align with the existing definitions for the words you're using. Which is fine, it happens all the time, though it's less useful.
        glassounds 2y ago
        In your opinion do people mean the same thing when discussing enemy AI in a game engine and LLMs / AGI?
- tivert 2y ago
  > That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. In other words, we're all parroting the marketing (aka propaganda) that was created to mislead us. Maybe we should stop doing that, and refuse to use the term "AI" to refer to the object of this current hype cycle/bubble. Maybe we should call it the autocomplete bubble instead?
  - glassounds 2y ago
    While I agree with the sentiment (this was the case for machine learning before as well), calling it autocomplete is probably an overcorrection since its usefulness as a tool extends beyond that (e.g. summarizing). LLM bubble?
- yarg 2y ago
  > It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise That's what artificial means (even Pong had AI). If it ever becomes intelligent, it will be a synthetic intelligence (not an AGI). For example, artificial vs synthetic diamonds; the former just looks the part, the latter is the genuine article - but manufactured as opposed to naturally formed.
  - glassounds 2y ago
    That's not the usage I'm familiar with, e.g. sci-fi novels will frequently use AI for actually intelligent and possibly sentient beings that just aren't biological (see Skippy in Expeditionary Force), the intelligence isn't usually a party trick or something that just looks like intelligence. While it's true that people use "AI" to describe e.g. enemy behavior in games, I don't think people fundamentally mean the same thing when they discuss AI in the context of AGI, which some people fully believe LLMs will become. The term is fuzzy though and people mean different things by it. Although your analogy does make sense, but I've never run into "synthetic intelligence" used as a term.
    - yarg 2y ago
      Yes, because our society rampantly abuses language ignoring the actual meanings of words. As far as science fiction goes, it's irrelevant - we live in the real world and have had AI for a long time now (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain).
      - glassounds 2y ago
        My point is that when people say AGI they don't mean a super sophisticated version of a game engine's enemy behavioral mechanics. Sci-fi is many times a speculative guess about the possible future of technology, IMO its not completely irrelevant as an insight into what people mean or expect when they say certain things about future tech.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        No, the meanings are just different. 60 years ago AI was a clever imperfect search of an array. There are multiple meanings. Yours is not the only one.
fsflover 2y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
randomdata 2y ago
> AGI is just an unbelievably high bar. Technically it is an impossible bar as it, like AI, is a forever moving target. When chess was still considered AI, the Turing Test was considered the bar for AGI. Now passing the Turing Test is considered AI and chess is basic computing. Soon GPT and the like will just be basic computing and the AGI bar you can image now will become the next AI, and AGI whatever next forward-looking goal there is at that point. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > the Turing Test was considered the bar for AGI By some measures, PARRY[0] passed this test in 1972. It's a bad test for general intelligence, although I'm not convinced it was meant to be that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY
  - spwa4 2y ago
    One way to look at it is that we've already passed the point where humans can't reliably pass the most famous AGI test ... Ironically the Turing test. After all, the only way for an algorithm to pass it, is for a human to fail that same test. The Turing test is now considered too easy to be a real test of AI. In other words, these days we think that an algorithm that can't beat a human at "being human" is pretty bad.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > In other words, these days we think that an algorithm that can't beat a human at "being human" is pretty bad. No, that's a bad summary. The Turing test is not a great test of being human.
      - spwa4 2y ago
        I think it's the perfect way to answer what it is to be human. It's reversing the question. Moving the question from some abstract weird philosophical or absurd religious argument into a concrete test. It defines what an answer to "can you create a human?" must be. Can an algorithm convince a panel of humans that it is an (to the panel unknown) human, given text communication and 30 minutes? For me, that's the definition of 30 minutes of being human. And yes, it illustrates why being human for 60 minutes, never mind a year, is a more difficult problem than 30 minutes. But it's the same a real human would perform. Would there be extra value in dropping these requirements? Dropping the text-only requirement, do it for a week or two, and maybe even imitate a human known to the panel? Yes, absolutely.

glassounds 2y ago

That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. A parrot can produce human sounding speech and associate certain prompts with desired responses, but there's no internal process that actually understands the meaning of either the prompt or the response (other than a shallow connection of sounds to a specific thing, rather than understanding human language). You'll never be able to train a parrot well enough to have that process in the same way a human does. Our current terminology would be like calling parrots "artificial humans". LLMs are still great tools for various tasks, they just shouldn't be categorized as AI.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Both parrots and AI's have intelligence, just not very much of it. AGI is generally defined as super-human intelligence, and neither parrots nor AI's have that.
- glassounds 2y ago
  I'd argue that LLMs don't have intelligence, they have the ability to match a correct response to a prompt but that's not a product of any internal process that's like what we call intelligence (unless that's used to refer to smart programming / probabilistic models / machine learning). Parrots are closer but I used them for the example since they also mimic instead of understand.
danielbln 2y ago
Could you describe a system that would be worthy of the moniker "AI"?
- glassounds 2y ago
  I'm sure a better philosophical definition exists but off the top of my head: An intelligence should be able to actually understand its input / output (rather than appear to understand), be able to reason about itself recursively*, be able to learn and generally have state, be able to have an internal thought process without being prompted**. Some emotion isn't strictly a requirement but likely a desirable quality for human interaction. * "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" and "I am a Strange Loop" are meant to cover this but I've only started the latter ** A sci-fi book series called Old Man's War features a race of aliens that are intelligent but not sentient due to not having an internal thought process and self awareness, which does raise the question of whether it's possible to have one without the other.
  - yarg 2y ago
    You don't know what artificial means.
    - glassounds 2y ago
      You've made that point three times now, I understand your disagreement and have addressed it
      - BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
        Not sufficiently though You're creating a definition that doesn't align with the existing definitions for the words you're using. Which is fine, it happens all the time, though it's less useful.
        glassounds 2y ago
        In your opinion do people mean the same thing when discussing enemy AI in a game engine and LLMs / AGI?
tivert 2y ago
> That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. In other words, we're all parroting the marketing (aka propaganda) that was created to mislead us. Maybe we should stop doing that, and refuse to use the term "AI" to refer to the object of this current hype cycle/bubble. Maybe we should call it the autocomplete bubble instead?
- glassounds 2y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment (this was the case for machine learning before as well), calling it autocomplete is probably an overcorrection since its usefulness as a tool extends beyond that (e.g. summarizing). LLM bubble?
yarg 2y ago
> It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise That's what artificial means (even Pong had AI). If it ever becomes intelligent, it will be a synthetic intelligence (not an AGI). For example, artificial vs synthetic diamonds; the former just looks the part, the latter is the genuine article - but manufactured as opposed to naturally formed.
- glassounds 2y ago
  That's not the usage I'm familiar with, e.g. sci-fi novels will frequently use AI for actually intelligent and possibly sentient beings that just aren't biological (see Skippy in Expeditionary Force), the intelligence isn't usually a party trick or something that just looks like intelligence. While it's true that people use "AI" to describe e.g. enemy behavior in games, I don't think people fundamentally mean the same thing when they discuss AI in the context of AGI, which some people fully believe LLMs will become. The term is fuzzy though and people mean different things by it. Although your analogy does make sense, but I've never run into "synthetic intelligence" used as a term.
  - yarg 2y ago
    Yes, because our society rampantly abuses language ignoring the actual meanings of words. As far as science fiction goes, it's irrelevant - we live in the real world and have had AI for a long time now (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain).
    - glassounds 2y ago
      My point is that when people say AGI they don't mean a super sophisticated version of a game engine's enemy behavioral mechanics. Sci-fi is many times a speculative guess about the possible future of technology, IMO its not completely irrelevant as an insight into what people mean or expect when they say certain things about future tech.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      No, the meanings are just different. 60 years ago AI was a clever imperfect search of an array. There are multiple meanings. Yours is not the only one.

fsflover 2y ago

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

randomdata 2y ago

> AGI is just an unbelievably high bar. Technically it is an impossible bar as it, like AI, is a forever moving target. When chess was still considered AI, the Turing Test was considered the bar for AGI. Now passing the Turing Test is considered AI and chess is basic computing. Soon GPT and the like will just be basic computing and the AGI bar you can image now will become the next AI, and AGI whatever next forward-looking goal there is at that point. Lather, rinse, repeat.

robertlagrant 2y ago
> the Turing Test was considered the bar for AGI By some measures, PARRY[0] passed this test in 1972. It's a bad test for general intelligence, although I'm not convinced it was meant to be that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY
- spwa4 2y ago
  One way to look at it is that we've already passed the point where humans can't reliably pass the most famous AGI test ... Ironically the Turing test. After all, the only way for an algorithm to pass it, is for a human to fail that same test. The Turing test is now considered too easy to be a real test of AI. In other words, these days we think that an algorithm that can't beat a human at "being human" is pretty bad.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > In other words, these days we think that an algorithm that can't beat a human at "being human" is pretty bad. No, that's a bad summary. The Turing test is not a great test of being human.
    - spwa4 2y ago
      I think it's the perfect way to answer what it is to be human. It's reversing the question. Moving the question from some abstract weird philosophical or absurd religious argument into a concrete test. It defines what an answer to "can you create a human?" must be. Can an algorithm convince a panel of humans that it is an (to the panel unknown) human, given text communication and 30 minutes? For me, that's the definition of 30 minutes of being human. And yes, it illustrates why being human for 60 minutes, never mind a year, is a more difficult problem than 30 minutes. But it's the same a real human would perform. Would there be extra value in dropping these requirements? Dropping the text-only requirement, do it for a week or two, and maybe even imitate a human known to the panel? Yes, absolutely.