6 ms·

A Man Out to Prove How Dumb AI Still Is

64 points by fortran77 2y ago

echelon 2y ago
> When I spoke with him earlier this year, Chollet told me that AI companies have long been “intellectually lazy“ s/intellectually lazy/hype maxing for fundraising/
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I think it's fascinating that his impossible benchmark got defeated, but because the Keras guy doesn't like LLMs, it is possible to mishear algorithmic distaste as saying people shipping this are "lazy" and "hype maxing."
  - artificialprint 2y ago
    Arc agi 1 that "got defeated" was published even before first mainstream llms and still stood the test of time
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      > "got defeated" 1.5 hours with Chollet on "LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution" - Published June 2024, and by December, well...we can all agree there's an ARC AGI 2 now. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    Francois never said he dislike LLMs. In fact, he said he expected them to be part of the solution to ARC. I don’t know where this persistent myth comes from, but it has to go.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      > part of the solution to ARC. I don’t know where this persistent myth comes from, Part of, explicitly, not the, quite 100% explicitly. The TL;DR is "LLMs can't do it alone, program synthesis leveraging LLMs is my bet". Not "Maybe not LLMs but they'll certainly help us get there!", quite the opposite! Hence: well, TFA. And the intellectually lazy quote we are explicitly discussing. And anything Chollet has said on the subject. [^1] [^1]"LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution" - https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet - 1.5 hours with the gent
andersco 2y ago
https://archive.is/7PL2a https://archive.is/7PL2a
j_bum 2y ago
> To hit 87 percent on the original ARC-AGI test, o3 spent roughly 14 minutes per puzzle and, by my calculations, may have required hundreds of thousands of dollars in computing and electricity > the bot came up with more than 1,000 possible answers per grid before selecting a final submission. Yeah, AGI is right around the corner… /s
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  Let's all hope two things: 1) AGI is not near 2) Nobody ever allows it to have physical presence 2b) should that happen, expect the one idiot ask it to make "as many paperclips as possible" :)
- pixl97 2y ago
  I also remember when a computer about as powerful as the watch on my wrist cost millions of dollars and filled multiple large rooms.
  - j_bum 2y ago
    lol point taken. I would be willing to bed we’ll see something rambling natural intelligence created in this century, but I think this brute force approach shows that we’re just not there yet.
i_am_proteus 2y ago
>Chollet, a French computer scientist and one of the industry’s sharpest skeptics I feel like this description really buries the lede on Chollet's expertise. (For those who don't know, he's the creator of and lead contributor[0] to Keras) [0]https://github.com/keras-team/keras/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keras-team/keras/graphs/contributors
some_random 2y ago
Calling Francois Chollet just "A Man" in the title (or "The Man" in the actual article as of writing) is crazy work, he's been deeply involved in ML for ages including creating Keras.
noosphr 2y ago
>Last week, the ARC Prize team released an updated test, called ARC-AGI-2, and it appears to have sent the AIs back to the drawing board. The full o3 model has not yet been tested, but a version of o1 dropped from 32 percent on the original puzzles to just 3 percent on the new version, and a “mini” version of o3 currently available to the public dropped from roughly 30 percent to below 2 percent. (An OpenAI spokesperson declined to say whether the company plans to run the benchmark with o3.) Other flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have achieved roughly 1 percent, if not lower. Human testers average about 60 percent. Arc AGI is the main reason why I don't trust static bench marks. If you don't have an essentially infinite set to draw your validation data from then a large enough model will memorize it as part of its developer teams KPIs. Forget all these fancy benchmarks. If you want to saturate any model today give it a string and a grammar and ask it to generate the string from the grammar. I've had _every_ model fail this on regular grammars with strings of more than 4 characters long. LLMs are the solution to natural language, which is a huge deal. They aren't the solution to reasoning which is still best solved with what used to be called symbolic AI before it started working, e.g. sat solvers.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > I've had _every_ model fail this That seems to be because LLMs don't seem to be able to follow procedures (e.g. reliably counting).
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Show me the results of your symbolic AI on ARC 2.
  - fritzo 2y ago
    ARC 2 is brand new, but neurosymbolic approaches have performed well on the original ARC, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02272 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02272
    - whiplash451 2y ago
      Yet LLMs won on ARC 1. So what’s your point exactly?
mikestew 2y ago
Not to dismiss Chollet’s work, but I’m starting to think he need prove nothing to even the muggles. For example, nearly any endurance athlete stands a good chance of being a Strava user. If you run in those circles, have you heard a single person with anything good to say about Strava’s “Athletic Intelligence”? Garmin is rolling out a beta right now that includes “AI Insights” or summat. Same deal: useless summaries like “you ran 5 miles today, which contributes to your aerobic base”. I could do better with a database and some if/else statements. And Garmin wants a subscription for this. (It’s included in Strava’s subscription, but I suppose you’re still paying for it.) And so now the memes tend toward “dumb AI insight of the day” on many online forums. Seems to me that a lot of folks are enjoying having an LLM rewrite their email or whatever, but I wonder how many are actually buying the rest of it? The companies themselves sure aren’t helping.
- anthomtb 2y ago
  I use Strava for mountain biking and the Athletic Intelligence is just comical. "This ride was longer and harder than usual" - no sh*t, the map, elevation profile and my legs have already informed me. "You set 3 new PRs" - I can see that with one flick of the thumb thank you. "Consider a rest day" - consider? None of my job, spouse, equipment or body is too keen on doing that again for a while.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fabbari 2y ago
  I think some of the AI demos are kind of comedy gems. I have seen the Apple Intelligence presentation a while ago and in the span of five minutes they had someone asking the assistant to expand a one liner into an e-mail and then someone receiving a long e-mail and asking the AI to summarize it. We spun GPUs to expand, then spun them again to summarize. Gold.
- soupfordummies 2y ago
  I'm taking a university course right now and one of the big textbook companies (McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, one of those) has an "AI Tutor" on their homework assignment. It's somehow LESS helpful than just having a pointer to which part of the text to revisit. It basically just restates the question/problem. Even worse than that is that it's an essentially STATIC note for each question yet it appears to be REAL-TIME GENERATED each time. I guess that could just be for appearances but it's just dumb all the way around really.
mdp2021 2y ago
> In 2019, Chollet created the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, or ARC-AGI—an exam designed to show the gulf between AI models’ memorized answers and the “fluid intelligence” that people have There are a number of skill signals we demand from an intelligence. Mind you: some of them are achieved - like the ability to interpret pronouns (Hinton's "the trophy will not enter the case: it's too big" vs "the trophy will not enter the case: it's too small"). Others, we meet occasionally when we are not researching said requirements systematically: one example is that detective game described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284420 - a simple game of logic that intelligences are required to be able to solve (...and yet, again some rebutted that humans would fail etc.). It remains important though that those working modules are not clustered (solving specific tasks and remaining unused otherwise): they must be intellectual keys adapted into use in the most general cases they can be be helpful in. That's important in intelligence. So, even the ability to solve "revealing" tasks is not enough - the way in which the ability works is crucial.
HenryBemis 2y ago
1a) it's not AI, it's LLM. The companies who create/train/operate them may (wink-wink) pitch them as "AI" with half-truths, but we (here) know it's LLMs "all the way down" 1b) just like I disliked the "autopilot" in Teslas because it was never autopilot. 2) I know that I wanted to write some software tools, and I have been successful at this for the past many months, and I got top-shelve tools, that work, do their tasks, send alerts, etc. etc. And I am not the only one. So if the purpose is to "show it's a stupid AI".. well.. it's not AI.. so yeah. If the purpose is "it is not perfect", yes, because it draws a hand with 10 fingers. What else is new? LLMs are a tool, still under development, still early in the curve, they can do A-B-C well but not X-Y-Z well (or at all). Congratulations :)
- dgfitz 2y ago
  > LLMs are a tool, still under development, still early in the curve… I completely agree, they are a tool, and a decently useful tool. They are not early in the curve, they’re about flat at this point.
whiplash451 2y ago
Francois Chollet and his work deserve a better title than this stupid headline. Francois is out to push the boundaries of science and help create models that are truly more intelligent.
mdp2021 2y ago
> A person who scores 30 percent on ARC-AGI-2 is in no sense inferior to someone who scores 90 percent "News just in: journalist for the Atlantic stops reasoning and drifts in a world of feelings after neural hijacking, as he perceives abilities as some kind of threat". > Human cognitive diversity [...] when that diversity is already so abundant, do you really want to? We definitely need intelligence.
Yeul 2y ago
Unfortunately I played Deus Ex religiously when I was a kid so I'll never be impressed with AI. The sequel had a self flying helicopter- good luck with that Tesla and BYD.
sroussey 2y ago
Maybe if AI knew what it was doing I would not end up banging my head like I did here: https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef43f4-3b88-800d-a5a3-e3ffea178fb3 https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef43f4-3b88-800d-a5a3-e3ffea178f... (Me trying to describe a desk top with a fold down hinged top, and it just drawing whatever)
geor9e 2y ago
I made a little viewer to see the dataset. Spoilers, it shows you the answers. It's mainly to see the mistakes they've fixed on GitHub since it was released, and also to make proposing fixes easier. https://9eorge.com/arc https://9eorge.com/arc Supposedly, they validated it upon release by showing each task to at most nine people and only keeping the ones that at least two people got correct in two tries. But still, they have had to subsequently fix more than a dozen of them.

64 points by fortran77 2y ago

> When I spoke with him earlier this year, Chollet told me that AI companies have long been “intellectually lazy“ s/intellectually lazy/hype maxing for fundraising/

refulgentis 2y ago
I think it's fascinating that his impossible benchmark got defeated, but because the Keras guy doesn't like LLMs, it is possible to mishear algorithmic distaste as saying people shipping this are "lazy" and "hype maxing."
- artificialprint 2y ago
  Arc agi 1 that "got defeated" was published even before first mainstream llms and still stood the test of time
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    > "got defeated" 1.5 hours with Chollet on "LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution" - Published June 2024, and by December, well...we can all agree there's an ARC AGI 2 now. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Francois never said he dislike LLMs. In fact, he said he expected them to be part of the solution to ARC. I don’t know where this persistent myth comes from, but it has to go.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    > part of the solution to ARC. I don’t know where this persistent myth comes from, Part of, explicitly, not the, quite 100% explicitly. The TL;DR is "LLMs can't do it alone, program synthesis leveraging LLMs is my bet". Not "Maybe not LLMs but they'll certainly help us get there!", quite the opposite! Hence: well, TFA. And the intellectually lazy quote we are explicitly discussing. And anything Chollet has said on the subject. [^1] [^1]"LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution" - https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/francois-chollet - 1.5 hours with the gent

andersco 2y ago

https://archive.is/7PL2a https://archive.is/7PL2a

j_bum 2y ago

> To hit 87 percent on the original ARC-AGI test, o3 spent roughly 14 minutes per puzzle and, by my calculations, may have required hundreds of thousands of dollars in computing and electricity > the bot came up with more than 1,000 possible answers per grid before selecting a final submission. Yeah, AGI is right around the corner… /s

HenryBemis 2y ago
Let's all hope two things: 1) AGI is not near 2) Nobody ever allows it to have physical presence 2b) should that happen, expect the one idiot ask it to make "as many paperclips as possible" :)
pixl97 2y ago
I also remember when a computer about as powerful as the watch on my wrist cost millions of dollars and filled multiple large rooms.
- j_bum 2y ago
  lol point taken. I would be willing to bed we’ll see something rambling natural intelligence created in this century, but I think this brute force approach shows that we’re just not there yet.

i_am_proteus 2y ago

>Chollet, a French computer scientist and one of the industry’s sharpest skeptics I feel like this description really buries the lede on Chollet's expertise. (For those who don't know, he's the creator of and lead contributor[0] to Keras) [0]https://github.com/keras-team/keras/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keras-team/keras/graphs/contributors

some_random 2y ago

Calling Francois Chollet just "A Man" in the title (or "The Man" in the actual article as of writing) is crazy work, he's been deeply involved in ML for ages including creating Keras.

noosphr 2y ago

>Last week, the ARC Prize team released an updated test, called ARC-AGI-2, and it appears to have sent the AIs back to the drawing board. The full o3 model has not yet been tested, but a version of o1 dropped from 32 percent on the original puzzles to just 3 percent on the new version, and a “mini” version of o3 currently available to the public dropped from roughly 30 percent to below 2 percent. (An OpenAI spokesperson declined to say whether the company plans to run the benchmark with o3.) Other flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have achieved roughly 1 percent, if not lower. Human testers average about 60 percent. Arc AGI is the main reason why I don't trust static bench marks. If you don't have an essentially infinite set to draw your validation data from then a large enough model will memorize it as part of its developer teams KPIs. Forget all these fancy benchmarks. If you want to saturate any model today give it a string and a grammar and ask it to generate the string from the grammar. I've had _every_ model fail this on regular grammars with strings of more than 4 characters long. LLMs are the solution to natural language, which is a huge deal. They aren't the solution to reasoning which is still best solved with what used to be called symbolic AI before it started working, e.g. sat solvers.

mdp2021 2y ago
> I've had _every_ model fail this That seems to be because LLMs don't seem to be able to follow procedures (e.g. reliably counting).
whiplash451 2y ago
Show me the results of your symbolic AI on ARC 2.
- fritzo 2y ago
  ARC 2 is brand new, but neurosymbolic approaches have performed well on the original ARC, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02272 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02272
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    Yet LLMs won on ARC 1. So what’s your point exactly?

mikestew 2y ago

Not to dismiss Chollet’s work, but I’m starting to think he need prove nothing to even the muggles. For example, nearly any endurance athlete stands a good chance of being a Strava user. If you run in those circles, have you heard a single person with anything good to say about Strava’s “Athletic Intelligence”? Garmin is rolling out a beta right now that includes “AI Insights” or summat. Same deal: useless summaries like “you ran 5 miles today, which contributes to your aerobic base”. I could do better with a database and some if/else statements. And Garmin wants a subscription for this. (It’s included in Strava’s subscription, but I suppose you’re still paying for it.) And so now the memes tend toward “dumb AI insight of the day” on many online forums. Seems to me that a lot of folks are enjoying having an LLM rewrite their email or whatever, but I wonder how many are actually buying the rest of it? The companies themselves sure aren’t helping.

anthomtb 2y ago
I use Strava for mountain biking and the Athletic Intelligence is just comical. "This ride was longer and harder than usual" - no sh*t, the map, elevation profile and my legs have already informed me. "You set 3 new PRs" - I can see that with one flick of the thumb thank you. "Consider a rest day" - consider? None of my job, spouse, equipment or body is too keen on doing that again for a while.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fabbari 2y ago
I think some of the AI demos are kind of comedy gems. I have seen the Apple Intelligence presentation a while ago and in the span of five minutes they had someone asking the assistant to expand a one liner into an e-mail and then someone receiving a long e-mail and asking the AI to summarize it. We spun GPUs to expand, then spun them again to summarize. Gold.
soupfordummies 2y ago
I'm taking a university course right now and one of the big textbook companies (McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, one of those) has an "AI Tutor" on their homework assignment. It's somehow LESS helpful than just having a pointer to which part of the text to revisit. It basically just restates the question/problem. Even worse than that is that it's an essentially STATIC note for each question yet it appears to be REAL-TIME GENERATED each time. I guess that could just be for appearances but it's just dumb all the way around really.

mdp2021 2y ago

> In 2019, Chollet created the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, or ARC-AGI—an exam designed to show the gulf between AI models’ memorized answers and the “fluid intelligence” that people have There are a number of skill signals we demand from an intelligence. Mind you: some of them are achieved - like the ability to interpret pronouns (Hinton's "the trophy will not enter the case: it's too big" vs "the trophy will not enter the case: it's too small"). Others, we meet occasionally when we are not researching said requirements systematically: one example is that detective game described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284420 - a simple game of logic that intelligences are required to be able to solve (...and yet, again some rebutted that humans would fail etc.). It remains important though that those working modules are not clustered (solving specific tasks and remaining unused otherwise): they must be intellectual keys adapted into use in the most general cases they can be be helpful in. That's important in intelligence. So, even the ability to solve "revealing" tasks is not enough - the way in which the ability works is crucial.

HenryBemis 2y ago

1a) it's not AI, it's LLM. The companies who create/train/operate them may (wink-wink) pitch them as "AI" with half-truths, but we (here) know it's LLMs "all the way down" 1b) just like I disliked the "autopilot" in Teslas because it was never autopilot. 2) I know that I wanted to write some software tools, and I have been successful at this for the past many months, and I got top-shelve tools, that work, do their tasks, send alerts, etc. etc. And I am not the only one. So if the purpose is to "show it's a stupid AI".. well.. it's not AI.. so yeah. If the purpose is "it is not perfect", yes, because it draws a hand with 10 fingers. What else is new? LLMs are a tool, still under development, still early in the curve, they can do A-B-C well but not X-Y-Z well (or at all). Congratulations :)

dgfitz 2y ago
> LLMs are a tool, still under development, still early in the curve… I completely agree, they are a tool, and a decently useful tool. They are not early in the curve, they’re about flat at this point.

whiplash451 2y ago

Francois Chollet and his work deserve a better title than this stupid headline. Francois is out to push the boundaries of science and help create models that are truly more intelligent.

mdp2021 2y ago

> A person who scores 30 percent on ARC-AGI-2 is in no sense inferior to someone who scores 90 percent "News just in: journalist for the Atlantic stops reasoning and drifts in a world of feelings after neural hijacking, as he perceives abilities as some kind of threat". > Human cognitive diversity [...] when that diversity is already so abundant, do you really want to? We definitely need intelligence.

Yeul 2y ago

Unfortunately I played Deus Ex religiously when I was a kid so I'll never be impressed with AI. The sequel had a self flying helicopter- good luck with that Tesla and BYD.

sroussey 2y ago

Maybe if AI knew what it was doing I would not end up banging my head like I did here: https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef43f4-3b88-800d-a5a3-e3ffea178fb3 https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef43f4-3b88-800d-a5a3-e3ffea178f... (Me trying to describe a desk top with a fold down hinged top, and it just drawing whatever)

geor9e 2y ago

I made a little viewer to see the dataset. Spoilers, it shows you the answers. It's mainly to see the mistakes they've fixed on GitHub since it was released, and also to make proposing fixes easier. https://9eorge.com/arc https://9eorge.com/arc Supposedly, they validated it upon release by showing each task to at most nine people and only keeping the ones that at least two people got correct in two tries. But still, they have had to subsequently fix more than a dozen of them.