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Huh. I haven’t read the paper yet. But, it seems like a weird idea—wouldn’t the standard of “well educated (I assume, modern) adult” preclude the vast majority

Huh. I haven’t read the paper yet. But, it seems like a weird idea—wouldn’t the standard of “well educated (I assume, modern) adult” preclude the vast majority of humans who ever lived from being considered general intelligences?

vidarh 1y ago
And this is indeed a huge problem with a lot of the attacks on LLM even as more limited AI - a lot of them are based on applying arbitrary standards without even trying to benchmark against people, and without people being willing to discuss where they draw the line for stating that a given subset of people do not possess general intelligence... I think people get really uncomfortable trying to even tackle that, and realistically for a huge set of AI tasks we need AI that are more intelligent than a huge subset of humans for it to be useful. But there are also a lot of tasks where AI that is not needed, and we "just" need "more human failure modes".
catlifeonmars 1y ago
I read this as a hypothetical well-educated adult. As in, given the same level of knowledge, the intelligence performs equally well. I do agree that it’s a weird standard though. Many of our AI implementations exceed the level of knowledge of a well-educated adult (and still underperform with that advantage in many contexts). Personally, I don’t think defining AGI is particularly useful. It is just a marketing term. Rather, it’s more useful to just speak about features/capabilities. Shorthand for a specific set of capabilities will arise naturally.
jltsiren 1y ago
You can't measure intelligence directly. Instead, the idea is to measure performance in various tasks and use that as a proxy for intelligence. But human performance depends on other aspects beyond intelligence, including education, opportunities, and motivation, and most humans are far from reaching their true potential. If you compare the performance of the average human to a state-of-the-art AI model trained by top experts with a big budget, you can't make any conclusions about intelligence. For the comparison to make sense, the human should also be trained as well as reasonably possible.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  The bar of "reasonable" is very different though. Is it reasonable to invest $10 million in education of one human? Not really. One human can only do so much. But is it reasonable to invest the same sum in training one AI, which can be replicated and used indefinitely? Or in acquiring high quality training data, which can be used to train every future AI?

vidarh 1y ago

And this is indeed a huge problem with a lot of the attacks on LLM even as more limited AI - a lot of them are based on applying arbitrary standards without even trying to benchmark against people, and without people being willing to discuss where they draw the line for stating that a given subset of people do not possess general intelligence... I think people get really uncomfortable trying to even tackle that, and realistically for a huge set of AI tasks we need AI that are more intelligent than a huge subset of humans for it to be useful. But there are also a lot of tasks where AI that is not needed, and we "just" need "more human failure modes".

catlifeonmars 1y ago

I read this as a hypothetical well-educated adult. As in, given the same level of knowledge, the intelligence performs equally well. I do agree that it’s a weird standard though. Many of our AI implementations exceed the level of knowledge of a well-educated adult (and still underperform with that advantage in many contexts). Personally, I don’t think defining AGI is particularly useful. It is just a marketing term. Rather, it’s more useful to just speak about features/capabilities. Shorthand for a specific set of capabilities will arise naturally.

jltsiren 1y ago

You can't measure intelligence directly. Instead, the idea is to measure performance in various tasks and use that as a proxy for intelligence. But human performance depends on other aspects beyond intelligence, including education, opportunities, and motivation, and most humans are far from reaching their true potential. If you compare the performance of the average human to a state-of-the-art AI model trained by top experts with a big budget, you can't make any conclusions about intelligence. For the comparison to make sense, the human should also be trained as well as reasonably possible.

ACCount37 1y ago
The bar of "reasonable" is very different though. Is it reasonable to invest $10 million in education of one human? Not really. One human can only do so much. But is it reasonable to invest the same sum in training one AI, which can be replicated and used indefinitely? Or in acquiring high quality training data, which can be used to train every future AI?