4 ms·
GPT is insufficient for AGI. It might be part of the solution one day, but it's fundamentally incapable of bridging the gap by itself. Despite what Altman/Open
by rgbrenner 2y ago
GPT is insufficient for AGI. It might be part of the solution one day, but it's fundamentally incapable of bridging the gap by itself.
Despite what Altman/OpenAI says in public, I think he knows this too... That's why they dissolved the Superalignment safety team; and dropping the AGI clause just confirms that.
As time goes on, the "AGI is coming" hype machine gets harder to sustain... and their work/company will begin to be valued on the actual value it produces.
- guluarte 2y agoyep, it is just a glorified markov chain
- bloomingkales 2y agoThis glorified Markov chain educates me better than many things. Why are people so intent on calling bullshit on AI? It might be a disease honestly.
- joshdavham 2y ago> Why are people so intent on calling bullshit on AI? I hate to be an armchair psychologist, but I think it’s insecurity.
- tsunamifury 2y agoAnd preference for deferring to historical authority which I find so laughable in this forum. Everything said here has been said the same about the internet and Wikipedia but now those are the authorities.
- flipthefrog 2y agoAnd flying cars
- tiahura 2y agoI think to most people, AGI means KITT or at least Data. AI via word probability matrices is super cool and well worth $20/mo, but it’s not AGI.
- joshdavham 2y agoI've heard variants of this such as linear algebra isn't AGI and I'm always left thinking 'why not?' When I think of the human brain, I don't feel that electric zaps propagating through pink jello is any more sophisticated.
- tim333 2y ago"Word probability matrices" is definitely lacking something. A lot of human thinking is more along the lines of shape rotating and sounds and smells and other stuff.
- talldayo 2y agoBecause "educating you better than most things" and "unavoidably generating bullshit" are not mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible that AI is better than human conversation on the spectrum of "adhering perfectly to truth" but it's far-and-away less credible than an encyclopedia or even a peer-reviewed paper. Publishers know they cannot publish false information without spoiling their reputation. ChatGPT lies like it's life depends on it. Therefore, me and many others identify ChatGPT by it's willingness to create tangents of pure and unadulterated bullshit.
- r3trohack3r 2y agoI remember many instances in childhood where I began to realize authority figures, parents/teachers/etc., that I had been trusting to teach me the ways of life weren’t all knowing. Moments of “lies” (using your term, really just being incorrect) where the cracks began to show. I treat ChatGPT like a 90th percentile educator across many problem domains. Is it going to be wrong? Yes. Is to going to be very wrong? Yes. Is it capable of generating tangents of pure and unadulterated bullshit? Yes. But that was true of every teacher, professor, and mentor I’ve ever had. Just because my 8th grade algebra teacher wasn’t as accurate as an encyclopedia or a published textbook didn’t prevent them from filling the role I rely on ChatGPT to fill now. Edit: also, peer review isn’t a great example of a system that eliminates bs.
- talldayo 2y ago> Just because my 8th grade algebra teacher wasn’t as accurate as an encyclopedia or a published textbook didn’t prevent them from filling the role I rely on ChatGPT to fill now. Sure - but I also cross-referenced my teacher when I was in math class. You know your teacher is wrong because you're also following the steps and showing your work. When your results digress, you cross-reference the steps and determine where you went wrong. Ultimately that's what I fear people won't do with ChatGPT. When they see an equation up on the digital "whiteboard" they only know how to copy it down, not how to double-check the work. This happens already with code boilerplate, but I see it in HN comments when people have ChatGPT write them a nonsense treatise on whatever the topic-du-jour is. You really cannot "learn" much from a system that has no barriers or alarm system when it's outright fabricating things with no basis in reality.
- grayhatter 2y agoImagine telling on yourself like this...
- bloomingkales 2y agoAre you referring to me? What the hell do you mean lol This is the closest thing you are going to get to say it to my face buddy on HN you are gonna get.
- LPisGood 2y agoI wouldn’t say it’s instant. These kinds of models have been out for at least 6 years (depending on if you think BERT, or GPT-2, or whatever is the first). Their capabilities and short comings, at least in a general sense, are pretty well known.
- ctoth 2y agoA Stochastic parrot, you stochastically parrot.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danielbln 2y agoFor every hype there is the anti-hype, as can be seen in the parent comment. I suppose it's just the way things go, until we've arrived at a more measured place.No, LLMs aren't AGI, not by a long shot. And yes, they are significantly more powerful than Markov chains.
- skepticATX 2y agoWhat frustrates me the most about OpenAI is that as recently as this summer they were talking non-stop about how gigantic $100 billion models are all you need for AGI and that it’s just a matter of time until we reach this scale. And if you didn’t see this you’re a simpleton who doesn’t understand how exponential curves work. And then all of the sudden o1 comes out and the narrative from them has shifted entirely. “Obviously massive models aren’t enough to get to AGI, but all we have to do is scale up inference time compute and we’ll get there!” And if you don’t see this you’re just a simpleton. I wish that OpenAI was called out for this shift more often. Because I haven’t heard even one of their employees acknowledge this. At some point you have to just ignore them until they start actually publishing science that supports their beliefs, but that won’t happen because it doesn’t generate revenue.
- iterance 2y ago> that won’t happen because it doesn’t generate revenue. OpenAI made real progress towards a computational understanding of human language and cognition. I'm sorry they have become a for-profit entity (the paperwork lags behind reality, of course). A fiduciary duty does not serve humanity. The quality and credibility of their communications have fallen dramatically.
- tim333 2y agoI don't remember them saying "$100 billion models are all you need for AGI." Don't suppose you have a link?
- skepticATX 2y agoIt’s not an exact figure, but plenty of employees claimed that after we train a model with 2-3 orders of magnitude of compute over GPT-4 we’d reach AGI, which puts us at $10-$100 billion. See Situational Awareness for one example of this.
- BoiledCabbage 2y agoTwo years ago Altman made clear that progress needs more than model scale / parameter count to scale. https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/12mktym/sam_altman_size_of_llms_wont_matter_as_much/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/12mktym/sam_altm... This summer he made a comment saying "we can make GPTs 5,6,7 more powerful" and someone editorialized it as being "via parameter count/scale" which he didn't say.
- tim333 2y agoThere are other AI models already existing that they could splice on. Bit like they've done with o1. I'm not sure that'll get to AGI but it's hard to say it definitely won't either.
- lolinder 2y agoYep. The current wave of "AI" startups are going to totally burn through the terms "AI" and "AGI", with one of two possible outcomes: * We enter another "AI Winter" of sorts. People will continue to work on LLMs and other deep learning applications because they're legitimately useful in moderation, but they'll distance themselves from the label "AI" or "AGI" because it will start sounding like "I work on blockchain" does today. * Both terms will end up completely watered down, with "AI"/"AGI" becoming a catch-all to mean "a computer algorithm of some kind does some magic the user doesn't fully understand"—the new, hipper word for "software". OpenAI will declare victory and we'll have to come up with a new term for an artificial intelligence that can actually do the stuff that AGI was supposed to do.
- RaftPeople 2y agoI'm already working on AGI++
- tim333 2y agoI don't really see that myself. The exponential growth in computing will continue and while AGI is not very defined, people mostly think of it as human like or better intelligence, and it'll probably happen regardless of the startups. Though maybe spread over a period of time, for different abilities.
- rlupi 2y agoWhat you describe are two different speeds at which AI/AGI goes through Gartner's hype cycle. An interesting question is: why do we need hype cycles? Both in general, and what's peculiar about AI and AGI... most ideas don't go through multiple hype cycles. Wasn't one "AI Winter" enough? Tech hype is a always a kind of hyper-stition, it aims to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, tech hype is directed mostly toward those that can decide to invest in tech development to make it fulfill its bright future vision, achieve its destiny. But with AI/AGI, I think it's different. The impact of tech hype on the now is as important as the bright future that this hype foretell. AGI tech hype sells future marvels of productivity to the employers and executives, it creates fear for employment in employees and thus it is a form of social control and curbs HR costs and demands in the present moment; and it also has socio-political function as a way for USA, and to a lesser extend to the West at large, to reassert its manifest destiny as the center of world, both in tech prowess but also in terms of cultural hegemony. The enormous AI datacenter build up in USA creates both first-mover advantages and a first-mover disadvantages. We'll see how it plays out in the next few years.