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Excellent article and analysis. Surprised I missed it. It is very hard to argue with Norvig’s arguments that AGI has been around since at least 2023.

littlestymaar 2y ago
It's not: whatever the way you define AGI, you cannot just ignore the key letter of the three letters acronym: G stands for “General”. You can argue that for the first time in the history we have an AI that deserves its name (unlike Deep blue or AlphaGo which aren't really about intelligence at all) but you cannot call that Artificial GENERAL Intelligence before it overcomes the “jagged intelligence” syndrome.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  It sounds like you have a different definition of "general" in the context of intelligence from the one I shared. What is it?
  - Jensson 2y ago
    General intelligence means it can do the same intellectual tasks as humans can, including learning to do different kinds of intellectual jobs. Current AI can't learn to do most jobs like a human kid can, so its not AGI. This is the original definition of AGI. Some data scientists try to move the goalposts to something else and call something that can't replace humans "AGI". This is a very simple definition that is easy to see when it is fulfilled because then companies can operate without humans.
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      What intellectual tasks can humans do that language models can't? Particularly agentic language model frameworks.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        A normal software engineering job? You have access to email and can send code etc. No current model manages anything close to that. Even much simpler jobs can't be automated like that by them. So basically any form of longer term tasks cannot be done by them currently. Short term tasks with constant supervision is about the only things they can do, and that is very limited, most tasks are long term tasks.
        Zambyte 2y ago
        > You have access to email and can send code etc. No current model manages anything close to that. This is an issue of tooling, not intelligence. Language models absolutely have the power to process email and send (push?) code, should you give them the tooling to do so (also true of human intelligence). > So basically any form of longer term tasks cannot be done by them currently. Short term tasks with constant supervision is about the only things they can do, and that is very limited, most tasks are long term tasks. Are humans that have limited memory due to a condition not capable of general intelligence, xor does intelligence exist on a spectrum? Also, long term tasks can be decomposed into short term tasks. Perhaps automatically, by a language model. Have you actually tried agentic LLM based frameworks that use tool calling for long term memory storage and retrieval, or have you decided that because these tools do not behave perfectly in a fluid environment where humans do not behave perfectly either, that it's "impossible"?
        elevatortrim 2y ago
        Why would it be a tooling issue? AI has access to email, IDEs, and all kinds of systems. It still cannot go and build software on its own by speaking to stakeholders, taking instructions from a PM, understanding it needs to speak to DevOps to release its code, suggesting to product team that feature is better developed as part of core product, objecting to SA about the architecture, and on and on… (If it was a tooling issue, AGI could build the missing tools)
        raducu 2y ago
        > Have you actually tried agentic LLM based frameworks that use tool calling for long term memory storage and retrieval, or have you decided that because these tools do not behave perfectly in a fluid environment where humans do not behave perfectly either, that it's "impossible"? i.e. "Have you tried this vague, unnamed thing that I alude to that seems to be the answer that contradicts your point, but actually doesn't?" AGI = 90% of software devs, psychotherapists, lawyers, teachers lose their jobs, we are not there. Once LLMs can fork themselves, reflect and accumulate domain specific knowledge and transfer the whole context back to the model weights, once that knowledge can become more important than the pre-pretrained information, once they can form new neurons related to a project topic, then yes, we will have AGI (probably not that far away). Once LLM's can keep trying to find a bug for days and weeks and months, go through the debugger, ask people relevant questions, deploy code with new debugging traces, deploy mitigations and so on, we will have AGI. Otherwise, AI is stuck in this groundhog day type scenario, where it's forever the brightest intern that any company has ever seen, but he's forever stuck at day 0 on the job, forever not that usefull, but full of potential.

littlestymaar 2y ago

It's not: whatever the way you define AGI, you cannot just ignore the key letter of the three letters acronym: G stands for “General”. You can argue that for the first time in the history we have an AI that deserves its name (unlike Deep blue or AlphaGo which aren't really about intelligence at all) but you cannot call that Artificial GENERAL Intelligence before it overcomes the “jagged intelligence” syndrome.

Zambyte 2y ago
It sounds like you have a different definition of "general" in the context of intelligence from the one I shared. What is it?
- Jensson 2y ago
  General intelligence means it can do the same intellectual tasks as humans can, including learning to do different kinds of intellectual jobs. Current AI can't learn to do most jobs like a human kid can, so its not AGI. This is the original definition of AGI. Some data scientists try to move the goalposts to something else and call something that can't replace humans "AGI". This is a very simple definition that is easy to see when it is fulfilled because then companies can operate without humans.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    What intellectual tasks can humans do that language models can't? Particularly agentic language model frameworks.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      A normal software engineering job? You have access to email and can send code etc. No current model manages anything close to that. Even much simpler jobs can't be automated like that by them. So basically any form of longer term tasks cannot be done by them currently. Short term tasks with constant supervision is about the only things they can do, and that is very limited, most tasks are long term tasks.
      - Zambyte 2y ago
        > You have access to email and can send code etc. No current model manages anything close to that. This is an issue of tooling, not intelligence. Language models absolutely have the power to process email and send (push?) code, should you give them the tooling to do so (also true of human intelligence). > So basically any form of longer term tasks cannot be done by them currently. Short term tasks with constant supervision is about the only things they can do, and that is very limited, most tasks are long term tasks. Are humans that have limited memory due to a condition not capable of general intelligence, xor does intelligence exist on a spectrum? Also, long term tasks can be decomposed into short term tasks. Perhaps automatically, by a language model. Have you actually tried agentic LLM based frameworks that use tool calling for long term memory storage and retrieval, or have you decided that because these tools do not behave perfectly in a fluid environment where humans do not behave perfectly either, that it's "impossible"?
        elevatortrim 2y ago
        Why would it be a tooling issue? AI has access to email, IDEs, and all kinds of systems. It still cannot go and build software on its own by speaking to stakeholders, taking instructions from a PM, understanding it needs to speak to DevOps to release its code, suggesting to product team that feature is better developed as part of core product, objecting to SA about the architecture, and on and on… (If it was a tooling issue, AGI could build the missing tools)
        raducu 2y ago
        > Have you actually tried agentic LLM based frameworks that use tool calling for long term memory storage and retrieval, or have you decided that because these tools do not behave perfectly in a fluid environment where humans do not behave perfectly either, that it's "impossible"? i.e. "Have you tried this vague, unnamed thing that I alude to that seems to be the answer that contradicts your point, but actually doesn't?" AGI = 90% of software devs, psychotherapists, lawyers, teachers lose their jobs, we are not there. Once LLMs can fork themselves, reflect and accumulate domain specific knowledge and transfer the whole context back to the model weights, once that knowledge can become more important than the pre-pretrained information, once they can form new neurons related to a project topic, then yes, we will have AGI (probably not that far away). Once LLM's can keep trying to find a bug for days and weeks and months, go through the debugger, ask people relevant questions, deploy code with new debugging traces, deploy mitigations and so on, we will have AGI. Otherwise, AI is stuck in this groundhog day type scenario, where it's forever the brightest intern that any company has ever seen, but he's forever stuck at day 0 on the job, forever not that usefull, but full of potential.