3 ms·

IMO, there are fundamental structural barriers that preclude transformers from "superintelligence". In simple terms, I think it's far-fetched to assume that "su

IMO, there are fundamental structural barriers that preclude transformers from "superintelligence". In simple terms, I think it's far-fetched to assume that "superintelligence" can emerge from a bunch of text and images. The absurd statistical power of using every available super computer for quadratic time brute force on the entire public internet produces incredibly impressive (and useful) results, but there's only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone considering that the fidelity of reality is, far and away, inconceivably more complex than a textual substrate. Further, I don't see strong evidence of "regular" intelligence. LLMs are like calculators for text, they have a lot of practical utility, but they don't understand anything, their output is the result of rote mechanical steps that could be executed by hand in principle. I've been using SOTA LLMs daily for years and to this day they still reliably produce nonsense and get things confidently wrong that an intelligent person generally wouldn't. Of course, intelligent people make mistakes, but if they start to hallucinate we immediately lose trust in them. Most people use LLMs in a touch and go manner, and the impressive statistical power fools us into believing we're interacting with something akin to a being, but the facade quickly breaks down the longer you try to engage with it in a manner where coherency matters. With all that stated, I'm not saying AGI isn't possible, but I don't see language models as a path to AGI no matter how much better we can get them to model language.

kadushka 2y ago
I’ve been using o1, and most recently gpt-4.5, and I haven’t encountered a single case of hallucinations. Could you provide an example of one?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
accrual 2y ago
This is a good argument. While models for producing useful text and images will continue to improve and create evermore convincing outputs, they lack some fundamental aspects of lived experience. Imagine if we could record all (or many) aspects of our daily experience from 1M+ viewpoints over many years - that would lead to a revolutionary model and would be unfathomably expensive to train. The sounds heard waiting for a train. The experience of going on a date or hiking or swimming. The tastes and sensation of biting into some fruit. They each hold such a rich multi-modal experience that feels impossible to replicate in a model at at this time. An LLM can describe it but it cannot experience it. Not that such experience is required to do what an AGI might be asked to do, but how could something reach AGI or higher without that level of experiential detail?
- singularity2001 2y ago
  multi-modal models trained on videos and text already learn through 3 senses. google and others already connected these to arms (with very limited tactile information though). we wouldn't deny intelligence to people with disabilities. a model which was force-fed more than any human can ever experience is an alien intelligence, but the model it creates internally seems sufficient in many ways. if you accept the ability to do 'cold reasoning' as intelligence I'd say we are pretty close.

kadushka 2y ago

I’ve been using o1, and most recently gpt-4.5, and I haven’t encountered a single case of hallucinations. Could you provide an example of one?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

accrual 2y ago

This is a good argument. While models for producing useful text and images will continue to improve and create evermore convincing outputs, they lack some fundamental aspects of lived experience. Imagine if we could record all (or many) aspects of our daily experience from 1M+ viewpoints over many years - that would lead to a revolutionary model and would be unfathomably expensive to train. The sounds heard waiting for a train. The experience of going on a date or hiking or swimming. The tastes and sensation of biting into some fruit. They each hold such a rich multi-modal experience that feels impossible to replicate in a model at at this time. An LLM can describe it but it cannot experience it. Not that such experience is required to do what an AGI might be asked to do, but how could something reach AGI or higher without that level of experiential detail?

singularity2001 2y ago
multi-modal models trained on videos and text already learn through 3 senses. google and others already connected these to arms (with very limited tactile information though). we wouldn't deny intelligence to people with disabilities. a model which was force-fed more than any human can ever experience is an alien intelligence, but the model it creates internally seems sufficient in many ways. if you accept the ability to do 'cold reasoning' as intelligence I'd say we are pretty close.