7 ms·
I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics. LLMs are just a big matrix. B
by jncfhnb 1y ago
I think you could make AGI right now tbh. It’s not a function of intelligence. It’s just a function of stateful system mechanics.
LLMs are just a big matrix. But what about a four line of code loop that looks like:
```while true:
update_sensory_inputs()
narrate_response()
update_emotional_state()
```
LLMs don’t experience continuous time and they don’t have an explicit decision making framework for having any agency even if they can imply one probabilistically. But the above feels like the core loop required for a shitty system to leverage LLMs to create an AGI. Maybe not a particularly capable or scary AGI, but I think the goalpost is pedantically closer than we give credit.
- Jensson 1y ago> ```while true: update_sensory_inputs() narrate_response() update_emotional_state() ``` You don't think that has already been made?
- tantalor 1y agoPeak HN comment. Put this in the history books.
- fullstackchris 1y agoHas anyone else noticed that HN is starting to sound a lot like reddit / discussion of similar quality? Can't hang out anywhere now on the web... I used to be on here daily but with garbage like this its been reduced to 2-3 times per month... sad
- ajkjk 1y agoyou could quote people saying this every month for the last ten+ years
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoBut it could be true every time. Reddit user base grows -> quality drops -> people migrate to HN with the current reddit culture -> HN quality drops. Repeat from the start.
- ActivePattern 1y agoHah, why don't you try implementing your 3 little functions and see how smart your "AGI" turns out. > not a particularly capable AGI Maybe the word AGI doesn't mean what you think it means...
- jncfhnb 1y agoThere is not strong consensus on the meaning of the term. Some may say “human level performance” but that’s meaningless both in the sense that it’s basically impossible to define and not a useful benchmark for anything in particular. The path to whatever goalpost you want to set is not going to be more and more intelligence. It’s going to be system frameworks for stateful agents to freely operate in environments in continuous time rather than discrete invocations of a matrix with a big ass context window.
- lambaro 1y ago"STEP 2: Draw the rest of the owl."
- jncfhnb 1y agoI disagree. Personally I found the definition of a game engine as ``` while True: update_state() draw_frame()``` To be a profound concept. The implementation details are significant. But establishing the framework behind what we’re actually talking about is very important.
- nonethewiser 1y agoWhere is the "what the thing cares about" part? When I look at that loop my thought is, "OK, the sensory inputs have updated. There are changes. Which ones matter?" The most naive response I could imagine would be like a git diff of sensory inputs. "item 13 in vector A changed from 0.2 to 0.211" etc. Otherwise you have to give it something to care about, or some sophisticated system to develop things to care about. Even the naive diff is making massive assumptions. Why should it care if some sensor changes? Maybe its more interesting if it stays the same. Im not arguing artificial intelligence is impossible. I just dont see how that loop gets us anywhere close.
- jjkaczor 1y ago... well, humans are not always known for making correct, logical or sensical decisions when they update their input loops either...
- nonethewiser 1y agothat only makes humans harder to model
- jncfhnb 1y agoThat is more or less the concept I meant to evoke by updating an emotional state every tick. Emotions are in large part a subconscious system dynamic to organize wants and needs. Ours are vastly complicated under the hood but also kind of superficial and obvious in its expression. To propose the dumbest possible thing: give it a hunger bar and desire for play. Less complex than a sims character. Still enough that an agent has a framework to engage in pattern matching and reasoning within its environment. Bots are already pretty good at figuring out environment navigation to goal seek towards complex video game objectives. Give them an alternative goal to maximize certainty towards emotional homeostasis and the salience of sensory input changes because an emergent part of gradual reinforcement learning pattern recognition. Edit: specifically I am saying do reinforcement learning on agents that can call LLMs themselves to provide reasoning. That’s how you get to AGI. Human minds are not brains. They’re systems driven by sensory and hormonal interactions. The brain does encoding and decoding, informational retrieval, and information manipulation. But the concept of you is genuinely your entire bodily system. LLM-only approaches not part of a system loop framework ignore this important step. It’s NOT about raw intellectual power.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoThis seems to miss a core part of intelligence, which is a model of the world and the actors in it (theory of mind).
- crdrost 1y agoSo the current problem with a loop like that is that LLMs in their current form are subject to fixed point theorems, which are these pieces of abstract mathematics that come back when you start to get larger than some subset of your context window and the “big matrix” of the LLM is producing outputs which repeat the inputs. If you have ever had an llm enter one of these loops explicitly, it is infuriating. You can type all caps “STOP TALKING OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED” and it will keep talking as if you didn't say anything. Congrats, you just hit a fixed point. In the predecessors to LLMs, which were Markov chain matrices, this was explicit in the math. You can prove that a Markov matrix has an eigenvalue of one, it has no larger (in absolute value terms) eigenvalues because it must respect positivity, the space with eigenvalue 1 is a steady state, eigenvalue -1 reflects periodic steady oscillations in that steady state... And every other eigenvalue being |λ| < 1 decays exponentially to the steady state cluster. That “second biggest eigenvaue” determines a 1/e decay time that the Markov matrix has before the source distribution is projected into the steady state space and left there to rot. Of course humans have this too, it appears in our thought process as a driver of depression, you keep returning to the same self-criticisms and nitpicks and poisonous narrative of your existence, and it actually steals your memories of the things that you actually did well and reinforces itself. A similar steady state is seen in grandiosity with positive thoughts. And arguably procrastination also takes this form. And of course, in the USA, we have founding fathers who accidentally created an electoral system whose fixed point is two spineless political parties demonizing each other over the issue of the day rather than actually getting anything useful done, which causes the laws to be for sale to the highest bidder. But the point is that generally these are regarded as pathologies, if you hear a song more than three or four times you get sick of it usually. LLMs need to be deployed in ways that generate chaos, and they don't themselves seem to be able to simulate that chaos (ask them to do it and watch them succeed briefly before they fall into one of those self-repeating states about how edgy and chaotic they are supposed to try to be!). So, it's not quite as simple as you would think; at this point people have tried a whole bunch of attempts to get llms to serve as the self-consciousnesses of other llms and eventually the self-consciousness gets into a fixed point too, needs some Doug Hofstadter “I am a strange loop” type recursive shit before you get the sort of system that has attractors, but busts out of them periodically for moments of self-consciousness too.
- 1y ago
- 48terry 1y agoWow, who would have thought it was that easy? Wonder why nobody has done this incredibly basic solution to AGI yet.
- jncfhnb 1y agoThe framework is easy. The implementation is hard and expensive. The payoff is ambiguous. AGI is not a binary thing that we either have or don’t. General intelligence is a vector. And people are working on this.
- MountDoom 1y ago> I think you could make AGI right now tbh. Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.
- jncfhnb 1y agoWill you pay for my data center and operating costs?
- alt227 1y agoWhy not go and hit up OpenAI and tell them you've solved AGI and ask for a job and see what they say?
- jncfhnb 1y agoWell for one I hate them.
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoDamnit, another minor inconvenience obstructing unprecedented human progress. I guess you just have to keep your secrets.
- jncfhnb 1y agoThe snark isn’t lost on me but scarce resources and lack of access to capital is why we have an army of people building ad tech and not things that improve society. “I think your idea is wrong and your lack of financial means to do it is proof that you’re full of shit” is just a pretty bullshit perspective my dude. I am a professional data scientist of over 10 years. I have a degree in the field. I’d rather build nothing than build shit for a fuck boy like Altman.
- hitarpetar 1y agothat doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else from trying. what's different about your idea?
- fullstackchris 1y agoyou do understand this would require re-training billions of weights in realtime and not even "trainingl really.... but a finished and stably functioning billion+ param model updating itself in real time... good luck, see you in 2100 in short, what ive been shouting from a hilltop since about 2023: LLMs tech alone simply wont cut it; we need a new form of technology
- jncfhnb 1y agoYou could probably argue that a model updating its parameters in real time is ideal but it’s not likely to matter. We can do that today, if we wanted to. There’s really just no incentive to do so. This is part of what I mean by encoding emotional state. You want standard explicit state in a simple form that is not a billion dimension latent space . The interactions with that space are emergently complex. But you won’t be able to stuff it all into a context window for a real GAI agent. This orchestration layer is the replacement for LLMs. LLMs do bear a lot of similarities to brains and a lot of dissimilarities. But people should not fixate on this because _human minds are not brains_. They are systems of many interconnected parts and hormones. It is the system framework that we are most prominently missing. Not raw intellectual power.