5 ms·

Not only do I not think it is right around the corner. I'm not even convinced it is even possible or at the very least I don't think it is possible using conven

Not only do I not think it is right around the corner. I'm not even convinced it is even possible or at the very least I don't think it is possible using conventional computer hardware. I don't think being able to regurgitate information in an understandable form is even an adequate or useful measurement of intelligence. If we ever crack artificial intelligence it's highly possible that in its first form it is of very low intelligence by humans standards, but is truly capable of learning on its own without extra help.

kachapopopow 1y ago
There is something easy you can always do to tell if something is just hype: we will never be able to make something smarter than a human brain on purpose. It effectively has to happen either naturally or by pure coincidence. The amount of computing power we are putting in only changes that luck by a tiny fraction.
- echoangle 1y ago
  > we will never be able to make something smarter than a human brain on purpose. It effectively has to happen either naturally or by pure coincidence. Why is that? We can build machines that are much better than humans in some things (calculations, data crunching). How can you be certain that this is impossible in other disciplines?
  - kachapopopow 1y ago
    that's just a tiny fraction of what a human brain can do, sure we can get something better in very narrow subjects, but something as being able to recognize patterns apply that to solve problems is something way beyond anything we can even think of right now.
    - echoangle 1y ago
      Ok, but how does that mean that we will never be able to do it? Imagine telling people 500 years ago that you will build a machine that can bring the to the moon. Maybe AGI is like that, maybe it’s really impossible. But how can people be confident that AGI is something humans can’t create?
      - kachapopopow 1y ago
        What we have right now with llms is bruteforcing our way to create something 'smarter' than a human, of course it can happen, but it's not something that can be 'created' by a human. An llm as small as 3b already performed more calculations than all the calculations done in the entire human history.
navels 1y ago
why not?
- izzydata 1y ago
  I'm not an expert by any means, but everything I've seen of LLMs / machine learning looks like mathematical computation no different than what computers have always been doing at a fundamental level. If computers weren't AI before than I don't think they are now just because the maths they are doing has changed. Maybe something like the game of life is more in the right direction. Where you set up a system with just the right set of rules with input and output and then just turn it on and let it go and the AI is an emergent property of the system over time.
  - hackinthebochs 1y ago
    Why do you have a preconception of what an implementation of AGI should look like? LLMs are composed of the same operations that computers have always done. But they're organized in novel ways that have produced novel capabilities.
    - izzydata 1y ago
      I am expressing doubt. I don't have any preconceptions. I am open to being convinced of anything that makes more sense.
      - tempusalaria 1y ago
        Even as someone who is skeptical about LLMs, I’m not sure how anyone can look at what was achieved in AlphaGo and not at least consider the possibility that NNs could be superhuman in basically every domain at some point
ActorNightly 1y ago
Exactly. Ive said this from the start. AGI is being able to simulate reality in high enough accuracy, faster than reality (which includes being able to simulate human brains), which so far doesn't seem to be possible (due to computational irreducebility)
agumonkey 1y ago
Then there's the other side of the issue. If your tool is smarter than you.. how do you handle it ? People are joking online that some colleagues use chatgpt to answer questions from other teammates made by chatgpt, nobody knows what's going on anymore.
colechristensen 1y ago
>I don't think being able to regurgitate information in an understandable form is even an adequate or useful measurement of intelligence. Measuring intelligence is hard and requires a really good definition of intelligence, LLMs have in some ways made the definition easier because now we can ask the concrete question against computers which are very good at some things "Why are LLMs not intelligent?" Given their capabilities and deficiencies, answering the question about what current "AI" technology lacks will make us better able to define intelligence. This is assuming that LLMs are the state of the art Million Monkeys and that intelligence lies on a different path than further optimizing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
baxtr 1y ago
I think the same. How do you call people like us? AI doomers? AI boomers?!
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Realists.
- npteljes 1y ago
  "AI skeptics", like here: https://www.techopedia.com/the-skeptics-who-believe-ai-is-a-bubble-could-they-be-right https://www.techopedia.com/the-skeptics-who-believe-ai-is-a-...
  - izzydata 1y ago
    This article is about being skeptical that what people currently call AI that is actually LLMs is going to be a transformative technology. Myself and many others are skeptical that LLMs are even AI. LLMs / "AI" may very well be a transformative technology that changes the world forever. But that is a different matter.
- paulpauper 1y ago
  There is a middle ground of people believe AI will lead to improvements in some respects of life, but will not liberate people from work or anything grandiose like that.
  - baxtr 1y ago
    I am big fan of AI tools. I just don’t see how AGI is possible in the near future.
Waterluvian 1y ago
I think the only way that it’s actually impossible is if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence. Otherwise we’re just machines, after all. A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe. Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.
- frizlab 1y ago
  > if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence It’s called a soul for the believers.
- andy99 1y ago
  If by "something magical" you mean something we don't understand, that's trivially true. People like to give firm opinions or make completely unsupported statements they feel should be taken seriously ("how do we know humans intelligence doesn't work the same way as next token prediction") about something nobody understand.
  - Waterluvian 1y ago
    I mean something that’s fundamentally not understandable. “What we don’t yet understand” is just a horizon.
- somewhereoutth 1y ago
  Our silicon machines exist in a countable state space (you can easily assign a unique natural number to any state for a given machine). However, 'standard biological mechanisms' exist in an uncountable state space - you need real numbers to properly describe them. Cantor showed that the uncountable is infinitely more infinite (pardon the word tangle) than the countable. I posit that the 'special sauce' for sentience/intelligence/sapience exists beyond the countable, and so is unreachable with our silicon machines as currently envisaged. I call this the 'Cardinality Barrier'
dinkumthinkum 1y ago
I think you are very right to be skeptical. It’s refreshing to see another such take as it is so strange to see so many supposedly technical people just roll down the track of assuming this is happening when there are some fundamental problems with this idea. I understand why non-technical are ready to marry and worship it or whatever but for serious people I think we need to think more critically.
breuleux 1y ago
I think the issue is going to turn out to be that intelligence doesn't scale very well. The computational power needed to model a system has got to be in some way exponential in how complex or chaotic the system is, meaning that the effectiveness of intelligence is intrinsically constrained to simple and orderly systems. It's fairly telling that the most effective way to design robust technology is to eliminate as many factors of variation as possible. That might be the only modality where intelligence actually works well, super or not.
- airstrike 1y ago
  What does "scale well" mean here? LLMs right now aren't intelligent so we're not scaling from that point on. If we had a very inefficient, power hungry machine that was 1:1 as intelligent as a human being but could scale it very inefficiently to be 100:1 a human being it might still be worth it.
paulpauper 1y ago
I agree. There is no define or agreed upon consensus of what AGI even means or implies. Instead, we will continue to see incremental improvements at the sort of things AI is good at, like text and image generation, generating code, etc. The utopia dream of AI solving all of humanity's problems as people just chill on a beach basking in infinite prosperity are unfounded.
- hyperbovine 1y ago
  > There is no define or agreed upon consensus of what AGI even means or implies. Agreed, however defining ¬AGI seems much more straightforward to me. The current crop of LLMs, impressive though they may be, are just not human level intelligent. You recognize this as soon as you spend a significant amount of time using one. It may also be that they are converging on a type of intelligence that is fundamentally not the same as human intelligence. I’m open to that.

kachapopopow 1y ago

There is something easy you can always do to tell if something is just hype: we will never be able to make something smarter than a human brain on purpose. It effectively has to happen either naturally or by pure coincidence. The amount of computing power we are putting in only changes that luck by a tiny fraction.

echoangle 1y ago
> we will never be able to make something smarter than a human brain on purpose. It effectively has to happen either naturally or by pure coincidence. Why is that? We can build machines that are much better than humans in some things (calculations, data crunching). How can you be certain that this is impossible in other disciplines?
- kachapopopow 1y ago
  that's just a tiny fraction of what a human brain can do, sure we can get something better in very narrow subjects, but something as being able to recognize patterns apply that to solve problems is something way beyond anything we can even think of right now.
  - echoangle 1y ago
    Ok, but how does that mean that we will never be able to do it? Imagine telling people 500 years ago that you will build a machine that can bring the to the moon. Maybe AGI is like that, maybe it’s really impossible. But how can people be confident that AGI is something humans can’t create?
    - kachapopopow 1y ago
      What we have right now with llms is bruteforcing our way to create something 'smarter' than a human, of course it can happen, but it's not something that can be 'created' by a human. An llm as small as 3b already performed more calculations than all the calculations done in the entire human history.

navels 1y ago

why not?

izzydata 1y ago
I'm not an expert by any means, but everything I've seen of LLMs / machine learning looks like mathematical computation no different than what computers have always been doing at a fundamental level. If computers weren't AI before than I don't think they are now just because the maths they are doing has changed. Maybe something like the game of life is more in the right direction. Where you set up a system with just the right set of rules with input and output and then just turn it on and let it go and the AI is an emergent property of the system over time.
- hackinthebochs 1y ago
  Why do you have a preconception of what an implementation of AGI should look like? LLMs are composed of the same operations that computers have always done. But they're organized in novel ways that have produced novel capabilities.
  - izzydata 1y ago
    I am expressing doubt. I don't have any preconceptions. I am open to being convinced of anything that makes more sense.
    - tempusalaria 1y ago
      Even as someone who is skeptical about LLMs, I’m not sure how anyone can look at what was achieved in AlphaGo and not at least consider the possibility that NNs could be superhuman in basically every domain at some point

ActorNightly 1y ago

Exactly. Ive said this from the start. AGI is being able to simulate reality in high enough accuracy, faster than reality (which includes being able to simulate human brains), which so far doesn't seem to be possible (due to computational irreducebility)

agumonkey 1y ago

Then there's the other side of the issue. If your tool is smarter than you.. how do you handle it ? People are joking online that some colleagues use chatgpt to answer questions from other teammates made by chatgpt, nobody knows what's going on anymore.

colechristensen 1y ago

>I don't think being able to regurgitate information in an understandable form is even an adequate or useful measurement of intelligence. Measuring intelligence is hard and requires a really good definition of intelligence, LLMs have in some ways made the definition easier because now we can ask the concrete question against computers which are very good at some things "Why are LLMs not intelligent?" Given their capabilities and deficiencies, answering the question about what current "AI" technology lacks will make us better able to define intelligence. This is assuming that LLMs are the state of the art Million Monkeys and that intelligence lies on a different path than further optimizing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

baxtr 1y ago

I think the same. How do you call people like us? AI doomers? AI boomers?!

Mistletoe 1y ago
Realists.
npteljes 1y ago
"AI skeptics", like here: https://www.techopedia.com/the-skeptics-who-believe-ai-is-a-bubble-could-they-be-right https://www.techopedia.com/the-skeptics-who-believe-ai-is-a-...
- izzydata 1y ago
  This article is about being skeptical that what people currently call AI that is actually LLMs is going to be a transformative technology. Myself and many others are skeptical that LLMs are even AI. LLMs / "AI" may very well be a transformative technology that changes the world forever. But that is a different matter.
paulpauper 1y ago
There is a middle ground of people believe AI will lead to improvements in some respects of life, but will not liberate people from work or anything grandiose like that.
- baxtr 1y ago
  I am big fan of AI tools. I just don’t see how AGI is possible in the near future.

Waterluvian 1y ago

I think the only way that it’s actually impossible is if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence. Otherwise we’re just machines, after all. A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe. Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.

frizlab 1y ago
> if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence It’s called a soul for the believers.
andy99 1y ago
If by "something magical" you mean something we don't understand, that's trivially true. People like to give firm opinions or make completely unsupported statements they feel should be taken seriously ("how do we know humans intelligence doesn't work the same way as next token prediction") about something nobody understand.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  I mean something that’s fundamentally not understandable. “What we don’t yet understand” is just a horizon.
somewhereoutth 1y ago
Our silicon machines exist in a countable state space (you can easily assign a unique natural number to any state for a given machine). However, 'standard biological mechanisms' exist in an uncountable state space - you need real numbers to properly describe them. Cantor showed that the uncountable is infinitely more infinite (pardon the word tangle) than the countable. I posit that the 'special sauce' for sentience/intelligence/sapience exists beyond the countable, and so is unreachable with our silicon machines as currently envisaged. I call this the 'Cardinality Barrier'

dinkumthinkum 1y ago

I think you are very right to be skeptical. It’s refreshing to see another such take as it is so strange to see so many supposedly technical people just roll down the track of assuming this is happening when there are some fundamental problems with this idea. I understand why non-technical are ready to marry and worship it or whatever but for serious people I think we need to think more critically.

breuleux 1y ago

I think the issue is going to turn out to be that intelligence doesn't scale very well. The computational power needed to model a system has got to be in some way exponential in how complex or chaotic the system is, meaning that the effectiveness of intelligence is intrinsically constrained to simple and orderly systems. It's fairly telling that the most effective way to design robust technology is to eliminate as many factors of variation as possible. That might be the only modality where intelligence actually works well, super or not.

airstrike 1y ago
What does "scale well" mean here? LLMs right now aren't intelligent so we're not scaling from that point on. If we had a very inefficient, power hungry machine that was 1:1 as intelligent as a human being but could scale it very inefficiently to be 100:1 a human being it might still be worth it.

paulpauper 1y ago

I agree. There is no define or agreed upon consensus of what AGI even means or implies. Instead, we will continue to see incremental improvements at the sort of things AI is good at, like text and image generation, generating code, etc. The utopia dream of AI solving all of humanity's problems as people just chill on a beach basking in infinite prosperity are unfounded.

hyperbovine 1y ago
> There is no define or agreed upon consensus of what AGI even means or implies. Agreed, however defining ¬AGI seems much more straightforward to me. The current crop of LLMs, impressive though they may be, are just not human level intelligent. You recognize this as soon as you spend a significant amount of time using one. It may also be that they are converging on a type of intelligence that is fundamentally not the same as human intelligence. I’m open to that.