8 ms·
Do we know LLMs are the path to AGI? If they're not, we'll just end up with some neat but eye wateringly expensive LLMs.
by missedthecue 2y ago
Do we know LLMs are the path to AGI? If they're not, we'll just end up with some neat but eye wateringly expensive LLMs.
- andrepd 2y agoI would put no money on the latter.
- foolfoolz 2y agoAGI will arrive like self driving cars. it’s not that you will wake up one day and we have it. cars gained auto-braking, parallel parking, cruise control assist. and over a long time you get to something like waymo, which still is location dependent. i think AGI will take decades but sooner will be some special cases that are effectively the same
- teleforce 2y ago> AGI will arrive like self driving cars The statement is promising as the earth will dissapear sometimes in the future. Actually the earth will dissapear has more bearing than that.
- danpalmer 2y agoInteresting idea. The concept of The Singularity would seem to go against this, but I do feel that seems unlikely and that a gradual transition is more likely. However, is that AGI, or is it just ubiquitous AI? I’d agree that, like self driving cars, we’re going to experience a decade or so transition into AI being everywhere. But is it AGI when we get there? I think it’ll be many different systems each providing an aspect of AGI that together could be argued to be AGI, but in reality it’ll be more like the internet, just a bunch of non-AGI models talking to each other to achieve things with human input. I don’t think it’s truly AGI until there’s one thinking entity able to perform at or above human level in everything.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoThe Singularity is caused by AI being able to design better AI. There's probably some AI startup trying to work on this at the moment, but I don't think any of the big boys are working on how to get an LLM to design a better LLM. I still like the analogy of this being a really smart lawn mower, and we're expecting it to suddenly be able to do the laundry because it gets so smart at mowing the lawn. I think LLMs are going to get smarter over the next few generations, but each generation will be less of a leap than the previous one, while the cost gets exponentially higher. In a few generations it just won't make economic sense to train a new generation. Meanwhile, the economic impact of LLMs in business and government will cause massive shifts - yet more income shifting from labour to capital - and we will be too busy dealing with that as a society to be able to work on AGI properly.
- EGreg 2y agoI think this whole “AGI” thing is so badly defined that we may as well say we already have it. It already passes the Turing test and does well on tons of subjects. What we can start to build now is agents and integrations. Building blocks like panel of experts agents gaming things out, exploring space in a Monte Carlo Tree Search way, and remembering what works. Robots are only constrained by mechanical servos now. When they can do something, they’ll be able to do everything. It will happen gradually then all at once. Because all the tasks (cooking, running errands) are trivial for LLMs. Only moving the limbs and navigating the terrain safely is hard. That’s the only thing left before robots do all the jobs!
- deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago??? how do you know cooking (!) is trivial for an llm. that doesnt make any sense
- sharemywin 2y agothe llm would be be the high level system that runs the simulations to create and optimize the control algos the robotic systems.
- missedthecue 2y agoBut maybe thses LLMs are like building bigger and bigger engines. It's not getting you closer to the self driving car.
- mulmen 2y agoWhen the engine gets large enough you have to rethink the controls. The Model T had manually controlled timing. Modern engines are so sensitive to timing that a computer does this for you. It would be impossible to build a bigger engine without this automation. To a Model T driver it would look like a machine intelligence.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoAnd sometimes you lose the ultrasonic sensors and can't parallel park like last year's model
- dartos 2y agoI don’t think that’s true for AGI. AGI is the holy grail of technology. A technology so advanced that not only does it subsume all other technology, but it is able to improve itself. Truly general intelligence like that will either exist or not. And the instant it becomes public, the world will have changed overnight (maybe the span of a year) Note: I don’t think statistical models like these will get us there.
- worik 2y agoIf that is what AGI looks like. There may well be an upper limit on cognition (we are not really sure what cognition is - even as we do it) and it may be that human minds are close to it.
- coffeemug 2y agoVery unlikely, for the reason that human minds evolved under extremely tight energy constraints. AI has no such limitation.
- dartos 2y agoExcept also energy constraints. But I agree, there’s no reason to believe humans are the universal limit on cognitive abilities
- eru 2y agoThe energy constraints for chips are more about heat dissipation. But we can pump a lot more energy through them per unit volume than through the human brain. Especially if you are willing to pay a lot for active cooling with eg liquid helium.
- dartos 2y agoA constraint is still a constraint
- taneq 2y agoAnd most people will still be bike shedding about whether it’s “real intelligence” and making up increasingly insane justifications for why it’s not.
- afavour 2y agoYour position assumes an answer to OPs question: that yes, LLMs are the path to AGI. But the question still remains, what if they’re not? We can be reasonably confident that the components we’re adding to cars today are progress toward full self driving. But AGI is a conceptual leap beyond an LLM.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoTo buttress your point, reason and human language are not the same thing. This fact is not fully and widely appreciated as it deserves to be.
- 015a 2y agoI feel that one challenge this comparison space has is: Self-driving cars haven't made the leap yet to replace humans. In other words, saying AGI will arrive like self-driving cars have arrived is incorrectly concluding that self-driving cars have arrived, and thus it instead (maybe correctly, maybe not) asserts that, actually, neither will arrive. This is especially concerning because many top minds in the industry have stated with high confidence that artificial intelligence will experience an intelligence "explosion", and we should be afraid of this (or, maybe, welcome it with open arms, depending on who you ask). So, actually, what we're being told to expect is being downgraded from "it'll happen quickly" to "it will happen slowly" to, as you say, "it'll happen similarly to how these other domains of computerized intelligence have replaced humans, which is to say, they haven't yet". Point being: We've observed these systems ride a curve, and the linear extrapolation of that curve does seem to arrive, eventually, at human-replacing intelligence. But, what if it... doesn't? What if that curve is really an asymptote?
- stravant 2y agoI disagree because AI only has to get good enough at doing a single thing: AI research. From there things will probably go very fast. Self driving cars can't design themselves, once AI gets good enough it can
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoIt’s possible (maybe even likely) that “AI research” is “AGI-hard” in that any intelligence that can do it is already an AGI.
- vlovich123 2y agoIt’ll probably sit in the human hybrid phase for longer than with chess where the AGI tools make the humans better and faster. But as long as the tools keep getting better at that there’s a strong flywheel effect
- stravant 2y agoIt's also possible it isn't AGI hard and all you need is the ability to experiment with code along with a bit of agentic behavior. An AI doesn't need embodiment, understanding of physics / nature, or a lot of other things. It just needs to analyze and experiment with algorithms and get us that next 100x in effective compute. The LLMs are missing enough of the spark of creativity for this to work yet but that could be right around the corner.
- palata 2y agoWhat makes you believe that AGI will happen, as opposed to all the beliefs that other people have had in history? Tons of people have "predicted" the next evolution of technology, and most of the time it ends up not happening, right?
- weatherlite 2y agoTo me (not OP) it's ChatGPT 4 , it at least made me realize it's quite possible and even quite soon that we reach AGI. Far from guaranteed, but seems quite possible.
- palata 2y agoRight. So ChatGPT 4 has impressed you enough that it created a belief that AGI is possible and close. It's fine to have beliefs, but IMHO it's important to realise that they are beliefs. At some point in the 1900s people believed that by 2000, cars would fly. It seemed quite possible then.
- weatherlite 2y agoSure, I (and more importantly - many many experts in the field such as Hinton, Bengio, Lecun, Musk, Hasabis etc etc) could be believing something that might not materialize. I'd actually be quite happy if it stalls a few decades, would like to remain employed.
- palata 2y ago> many many experts One thing that is pretty sure is that Musk is not an expert in the field. > and more importantly The beliefs of people you respect are not more important than the beliefs of the others. It doesn't make sense to say "I can't prove it, and I don't know about anyone who can prove it, so I will give you names of people who also believe and it will give it more credit". It won't. They don't know.
- 2y ago
- vbezhenar 2y agoAGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously. At this point singularity occurs and nobody knows what will happen. When human started to improve himself, we built the civilisation, we became a super-predator, we dried out seas and changed climate of the entire planet. We extinguished entire species of animals and adapted other species for our use. Huge changes. AI could bring changes of greater amplitude.
- fooker 2y ago> we dried out seas When did we do this ?
- steveoscaro 2y agoWe’re in fact adding more water to the seas, not drying them out.
- bubaumba 2y ago> AGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously AGI can be sub-human, right? That's probably how it will start. The question will be is it already AGI or not yet, i.e. where to set the boundary. So, at first that will be humans improving AGI, but then... I'm afraid it can get so much better that humans will be literally like macaques in comparison.
- swyx 2y agowaymos are locaiton dependent mostly because of regulations not tech right
- LarsDu88 2y agoThe autoregressive transformer LLMs aren't even the only way to do text generation. There are now diffusion based LLMs, StripedHyena based LLMs, and float matching based LLMs. There's a wide amount of research into other sorts of architectures.
- NBJack 2y agoNo. But it won't stop the industry from trying. LLMs have no real sense of truth or hard evidence of logical thinking. Even the latest models still trip up on very basic tasks. I think they can be very entertaining, sure, but not practical for many applications.
- apsec112 2y agoWhat do you think, if we saw it, would constitute hard evidence of logical thinking or a sense of truth?
- EGreg 2y agoWe have it, it’s called Cyc But it is far behind the breadth of LLMs
- NBJack 2y agoConsistent, algorithmic performance on basic tasks. A great example is the simple 'count how many letters' problem. If I prompt it with a word or phrase, and it gets it wrong, me pointing out the error should translate into a consistent course correction for the entire session. If I ask it to tell me how long President Lincoln will be in power after the 2024 election, it should have a consistent ground truth to correct me (or at least ask for clarification of which country I'm referring to). If facts change, and I can cite credible sources, it should be able to assimilate that knowledge on the fly.
- arthurcolle 2y agoLLMs are a key piece of understanding that token sequences can trigger actions in the real world. AGI is here. You can trivially spin up a computer using agent to self improve itself to being a competent office worker
- arthurcolle 2y agoTokens don't need to be text either, you can move to higher level "take_action" semantics where "stream back 1 character to session#117" as every single function call. Training cheap models that can do things in the real world is going to change a huge amount of present capabilities over the next 10 years
- icpmacdo 2y agocan you share learning resources on this topic
- arthurcolle 2y agoNo but if you want to join the Distributed Systems Corporation, you should email arthur@distributed.systems
- jazzyjackson 2y agoIf agents can self improve why hasn't gpt4 improved itself into gpt5 yet
- arthurcolle 2y agoAgents can trivially self improve. I'd be happy to show you - contact me at arthur@distributed.systems Why wouldn't you hand me 35 million dollars right now if I can clearly illustrate to you that I have technology you haven't seen? Edge. Maybe you know something I don't, or maybe you just haven't seen it. While loops go hard ;) They don't need to release their internal developments to you to show that they can scale their plan - they can show incremental improvements to benchmarks. We can instruct the AI over time to get it to be superhuman, no need for any fundamental innovations anymore
- beefnugs 2y agoLLMs will end up being the good human-machine interface that lets us talk to whatever AGI really looks like (whoops expensive... will be hard pushes to make all further layers even more expensive though, capitalism will crash before this happens)
- vixen99 2y agoAnd then what?
- twobitshifter 2y agoYes because we are at AGI, bu the definition 5 years ago, goal posts are moving to ASI at this point, better than all humans.
- Sharlin 2y agoLLMs are almost certainly not the path to AGI, that much has become clear. I doubt any expert believes they are.
- Culonavirus 2y ago> Do we know LLMs are the path to AGI? Asking this question on HN is like asking a bunch of wolves about the health effects of eating red meat. OpenAI farts and the post about the fart has 1000-1500 upvotes with everyone welcoming our new super intelligent overlords. (Meanwhile nothing actually substantially useful or groundbreaking has happened.)
- iLoveOncall 2y agoIt's rather that we know LLMs are NOT a path to AGI. The simple fact that AGI's definition has been twisted so much by OpenAI and other LLM providers since the release of GenAI models proves this.
- zild3d 2y ago> we'll just end up with some neat but eye wateringly expensive LLMs Prices have been falling drastically though, not even just e.g. 4o pricing at launch in May vs now (50% lower) but also models getting distilled
- SkyBelow 2y agoWill AGI be built on top of LLMs? Well beyond the simple "nobody knows", my intuition says no because LLMs don't have great ability to modify their knowledge real time. I can think of a few ways around this, but they all avoid modifying the model as it runs. The cost in hardware, power, and data are all incompatible with AGI. The first two can be solved with more advanced tech (well maybe, computation hitting physical limits and all that aside), but the latter seems an issue with the design itself and I think an AGI would learn more akin to a human, needing far fewer examples. That said, I think LLMs are a definite stepping stone and they will better empower humans to be more productive, which will be of use for eventually reaching AGI. This is not to say we are optimizing our use of that productivity increase and this is also ignoring any chance of worst case scenarios that stop humanity's advancement.
- madethisnow 2y agoAGI is nebulous and gets more nebulous as time goes on. When we can answer for ourselves as humans what being conscious IS, then maybe we can prescribe it to another entity