6 ms·

> The goal of AGI is to make programs that can do lots of things. What do Genie and GPT have to do with AGI? I'm sure the people who stand to make billions lov

> The goal of AGI is to make programs that can do lots of things. What do Genie and GPT have to do with AGI? I'm sure the people who stand to make billions love to squint and see their LLM as only steps away from an AGI. Or that guy at Google who fell in love with one. But the rest of us know better.

throwup238 1y ago
Ostensibly a model like Genie3 probably encodes physical laws into the weights like LLMs encode language. That's generally considered a prerequisite for true AGI to have an intuitive grasp of physics as part of their "world model." It's a minor but significant step towards AGI (assuming Genie3 plays out successfully).
dsadfjasdf 1y ago
The rest of us still can't prove we our conscious, either.. remember?
therein 1y ago
Neither are even close to AGI. Here is something they can't do and won't be able to do for a very long time: If you're inferring in English and ask it a question, it will never be able to pull from the knowledge it has ingested in another language. Humans are able to do this without relying on a neurotic inner voice spinning around in circles and doing manual translations. This should be enough to arrive at the conclusion that there is no real insights in the model. It has no model of the world.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > If you're inferring in English and ask it a question, it will never be able to pull from the knowledge it has ingested in another language. Humans are able to do this without relying on a neurotic inner voice spinning around in circles and doing manual translations. This is not true, this is the biggest strength of LLM that they are very language agnostic since they can parse things down to more general concepts. There are many things they are bad at but using things from other languages is not one of them.
  - therein 1y ago
    It is true, and LLMs do no such things. You are getting that impression not because they are language agnostic across training and inference but because they are throwing multi-language text at it during training. Try asking it about nanomaterials in Chewa language.
jaredklewis 1y ago
The debate over whether something is or is not AGI is entirely semantic and basically uninteresting. Let’s talk about what LLM agents demonstrably can or cannot do. That’s an interesting discussion and we can design experiments to validate the claims. Comparing how LLMs perform versus humans in various tasks is also interesting and verifiable. But trying to decide whether LLM agents have crossed over some amorphous, imaginary line with no quantitative definition is just a waste of time. It’s about equally productive as debating the question: “which is more human, an ant eater or a tree shrew?” Like why is there any value in that discussion?
- milesrout 1y ago
  [dead]
- tim333 1y ago
  Most people seem to have a definition of AGI something like being able to think as well as a human in all regards. The debates on current stuff doing that are dull because the answer is no, but the future may be interesting.
  - jaredklewis 1y ago
    Right but “being able to think as a human in all regards” is a miserably vague definition that can’t be tested. To start, define think and specify which human. The best human? The average? Average or best by what metric? Without a quantitative definition, all views are basically valid and non-falsifiable.
    - tim333 1y ago
      I'm not so sure. Like at the moment AI robots can't fix your plumbing hence the hypothesis we have AGI is falsified. I suspect when it comes, AI will blast through the "the best human? The average? Average or best by what metric?" thing fairly rapidly like it did with chess, go and the like.
      - 1y ago

throwup238 1y ago

Ostensibly a model like Genie3 probably encodes physical laws into the weights like LLMs encode language. That's generally considered a prerequisite for true AGI to have an intuitive grasp of physics as part of their "world model." It's a minor but significant step towards AGI (assuming Genie3 plays out successfully).

dsadfjasdf 1y ago

The rest of us still can't prove we our conscious, either.. remember?

therein 1y ago

Neither are even close to AGI. Here is something they can't do and won't be able to do for a very long time: If you're inferring in English and ask it a question, it will never be able to pull from the knowledge it has ingested in another language. Humans are able to do this without relying on a neurotic inner voice spinning around in circles and doing manual translations. This should be enough to arrive at the conclusion that there is no real insights in the model. It has no model of the world.

Jensson 1y ago
> If you're inferring in English and ask it a question, it will never be able to pull from the knowledge it has ingested in another language. Humans are able to do this without relying on a neurotic inner voice spinning around in circles and doing manual translations. This is not true, this is the biggest strength of LLM that they are very language agnostic since they can parse things down to more general concepts. There are many things they are bad at but using things from other languages is not one of them.
- therein 1y ago
  It is true, and LLMs do no such things. You are getting that impression not because they are language agnostic across training and inference but because they are throwing multi-language text at it during training. Try asking it about nanomaterials in Chewa language.

jaredklewis 1y ago

The debate over whether something is or is not AGI is entirely semantic and basically uninteresting. Let’s talk about what LLM agents demonstrably can or cannot do. That’s an interesting discussion and we can design experiments to validate the claims. Comparing how LLMs perform versus humans in various tasks is also interesting and verifiable. But trying to decide whether LLM agents have crossed over some amorphous, imaginary line with no quantitative definition is just a waste of time. It’s about equally productive as debating the question: “which is more human, an ant eater or a tree shrew?” Like why is there any value in that discussion?

milesrout 1y ago
[dead]
tim333 1y ago
Most people seem to have a definition of AGI something like being able to think as well as a human in all regards. The debates on current stuff doing that are dull because the answer is no, but the future may be interesting.
- jaredklewis 1y ago
  Right but “being able to think as a human in all regards” is a miserably vague definition that can’t be tested. To start, define think and specify which human. The best human? The average? Average or best by what metric? Without a quantitative definition, all views are basically valid and non-falsifiable.
  - tim333 1y ago
    I'm not so sure. Like at the moment AI robots can't fix your plumbing hence the hypothesis we have AGI is falsified. I suspect when it comes, AI will blast through the "the best human? The average? Average or best by what metric?" thing fairly rapidly like it did with chess, go and the like.
    - 1y ago