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It seems to me that some nerds with a thousand GPUs have clearly made a machine think. State-of-the-art AI models are better than me at a significant number of

It seems to me that some nerds with a thousand GPUs have clearly made a machine think. State-of-the-art AI models are better than me at a significant number of intellectual tasks; what would it mean, precisely, to say that I'm thinking when I write a bad poem but GPT-4o is not thinking when it writes a better one? The specific term "AGI" has always referred to a program that strictly matches to human intelligence, with no significant areas where it's worse than a typical human. I agree that we're not there and not obviously close to there. But the idea that it's all a parlor trick and LLMs have no cognition at all seems obviously false to me.

mingus88 2y ago
It was not that long ago that solving a maze was thought of as AI. Or a bot in a video game adapting to your play style was AI. Today, LLMs being trained to output text, images and video equal to or better than any human is now what we consider to be AI. There is a semantic game we play to move the goalposts at every new tick of these technologies so that humans are still on top. Maybe the next big trick is to define AGI as having a system that was not trained on the entire corpus of human output available on the internet, and train it with nothing. Can an AI be “born” with no model like a baby and learn to speak, walk, function in society without being primed for success with a state of the art model? Could you drop this AI into any human society, regardless of culture, and have it seamlessly integrate? What precisely we consider “cognition” feels like a philosophical debate, one where we have no single true answer. And doesn’t really matter?
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  "AGI" has always referred to something a lot closer to your "next big trick" than an LLM. An AGI is a program that can slot into anywhere a human fits and do as well as a human would; GPT-4 or Claude can't do that. I do think it's true that anyone a decade ago would have predicted their capabilities are impossible without AGI, which suggests that the entire conceptual framework is less useful than we thought. The eventual debate about whether we've "reached AGI" will probably have a lot more to do with the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft than any real paradigm shift in capabilities.
- fdsjgfklsfd 2y ago
  > It was not that long ago that solving a maze was thought of as AI. Or a bot in a video game adapting to your play style was AI. That is AI. AI ≠ AGI.
betaby 2y ago
> State-of-the-art AI models are better than me at a significant number of intellectual tasks Literally millions or billions of people are better than me at a significant number of intellectual tasks
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I guess I'm not sure what your point is. If you understand "thinking" to be a highly advanced capability that millions or billions of people can't do, sure, perhaps it's true that GPT-4 is not "thinking" in that sense. Most people understand the term to be more broad than that. If a four year old tries really hard to compute 4 + 16, I'd definitely say they're "thinking" about it, even if they don't get the right answer or make some silly mistake I can easily point out.
giardini 2y ago
"nerds with a thousand GPUs" - Sounds like the title of a Cole Porter tune: "Nerds with a thousand GPUs, Nerds with a thousand streams, with you only I experience, the love, the chat of my dreams!" "So prompt me, and list me, index me, repeat me, I'm yours till I elide, so in love, so in love, so in love with you, my GPT, am I. " -With apologies to Cole Porter and anyone blinded by reading this post. https://youtu.be/qdeM24FFpvM https://youtu.be/qdeM24FFpvM

mingus88 2y ago

It was not that long ago that solving a maze was thought of as AI. Or a bot in a video game adapting to your play style was AI. Today, LLMs being trained to output text, images and video equal to or better than any human is now what we consider to be AI. There is a semantic game we play to move the goalposts at every new tick of these technologies so that humans are still on top. Maybe the next big trick is to define AGI as having a system that was not trained on the entire corpus of human output available on the internet, and train it with nothing. Can an AI be “born” with no model like a baby and learn to speak, walk, function in society without being primed for success with a state of the art model? Could you drop this AI into any human society, regardless of culture, and have it seamlessly integrate? What precisely we consider “cognition” feels like a philosophical debate, one where we have no single true answer. And doesn’t really matter?

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
"AGI" has always referred to something a lot closer to your "next big trick" than an LLM. An AGI is a program that can slot into anywhere a human fits and do as well as a human would; GPT-4 or Claude can't do that. I do think it's true that anyone a decade ago would have predicted their capabilities are impossible without AGI, which suggests that the entire conceptual framework is less useful than we thought. The eventual debate about whether we've "reached AGI" will probably have a lot more to do with the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft than any real paradigm shift in capabilities.
fdsjgfklsfd 2y ago
> It was not that long ago that solving a maze was thought of as AI. Or a bot in a video game adapting to your play style was AI. That is AI. AI ≠ AGI.

betaby 2y ago

> State-of-the-art AI models are better than me at a significant number of intellectual tasks Literally millions or billions of people are better than me at a significant number of intellectual tasks

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I guess I'm not sure what your point is. If you understand "thinking" to be a highly advanced capability that millions or billions of people can't do, sure, perhaps it's true that GPT-4 is not "thinking" in that sense. Most people understand the term to be more broad than that. If a four year old tries really hard to compute 4 + 16, I'd definitely say they're "thinking" about it, even if they don't get the right answer or make some silly mistake I can easily point out.

giardini 2y ago

"nerds with a thousand GPUs" - Sounds like the title of a Cole Porter tune: "Nerds with a thousand GPUs, Nerds with a thousand streams, with you only I experience, the love, the chat of my dreams!" "So prompt me, and list me, index me, repeat me, I'm yours till I elide, so in love, so in love, so in love with you, my GPT, am I. " -With apologies to Cole Porter and anyone blinded by reading this post. https://youtu.be/qdeM24FFpvM https://youtu.be/qdeM24FFpvM