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I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools
- mindcrime 11mo agoTerry Tao is a genius, and I am not. So I probably have no standing to claim to disagree with him. But I find this post less than fulfilling. For starters, I think we can rightly ask what it means to say "genuine artificial general intelligence", as opposed to just "artificial general intelligence". Actually, I think it's fair to ask what "genuine artificial" $ANYTHING would be. I suspect that what he means is something like "artificial intelligence, but that works just like human intelligence". Something like that seems to be what a lot of people are saying when they talk about AI and make claims like "that's not real AI". But for myself, I reject the notion that we need "genuine artificial general intelligence" that works like human intelligence in order to say we have artificial general intelligence. Human intelligence is a nice existence proof that some sort of "general intelligence" is possible, and a nice example to model after, but the marquee sign does say artificial at the end of the day. Beyond that... I know, I know - it's the oldest cliche in the world, but I will fall back on it because it's still valid, no matter how trite. We don't say "airplanes don't really fly" because they don't use the exact same mechanism as birds. And I don't see any reason to say that an AI system isn't "really intelligent" if it doesn't use the same mechanism as human. Now maybe I'm wrong and Terry meant something altogether different, and all of this is moot. But it felt worth writing this out, because I feel like a lot of commenters on this subject engage in a line of thinking like what is described above, and I think it's a poor way of viewing the issue no matter who is doing it.
- npinsker 11mo ago> I suspect that what he means is something like "artificial intelligence, but that works just like human intelligence". I think he means "something that can discover new areas of mathematics".
- dr_dshiv 11mo agoI’d love to take that bet
- mindcrime 11mo agoVery reasonable, given his background! That does seem awfully specific though, in the context of talking about "general" intelligence. But I suppose it could rightly be argued that any intelligence capable of "discovering new areas of mathematics" would inherently need to be fairly general.
- themafia 11mo ago> That does seem awfully specific though It's one of a large set of attributes you would expect in something called "AGI."
- throw310822 11mo agoThen I don't get the distinction between AGI and superintelligence. Is there one?
- AnimalMuppet 11mo agoAGI is human-level. (What human level is a question. High school? College graduate? PhD? Terrence Tao?) Superintelligence is smarter than Terrence Tao, or any other human.
- mindcrime 11mo agoI agree with /u/AnimalMuppet, FWIW. As long as I've been doing this stuff (and I've been doing it for quite some time) AGI has been interpreted (somewhat loosely) as something like "Intelligence equivalent to an average human adult" or just "human level intelligence". But as /u/AnimalMuppet points out, there's quite a bit of variance to human intelligence, and nobody ever really specified in detail exactly which "human intelligence" AGI was meant to correspond to. SuperIntelligence (or ASI), OTOH, has - so far as I can recall - always been even more loosely specified, and translates roughly to "an intelligence beyond any human intelligence". Another term you might hear, although not as frequently, is "Universal Artificial Intelligence". This comes mostly from the work of Marcus Hutter[1] and means something approximately like "an intelligence that can solve any problem that can, in principle, be solved". [1]: https://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm https://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
- metalcrow 11mo agoIn that case, I'm afraid many people, myself included, would not be describable as "general intelligences"!
- fl7305 11mo ago> "something that can discover new areas of mathematics". How many software engineers with a good math education can do this?
- enraged_camel 11mo agoThe airplane analogy is a good one. Ultimately, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, does it really matter if it’s a real duck or an artificial one? Perhaps only if something tries to eat it, or another duck tries to mate with it. In most other contexts though it could be a valid replacement.
- clort 11mo agoJust out of interest though, can you suggest some of these other contexts where you might want a valid replacement for a duck that looked like one, walked like one and quacked like one but was not one?
- alex43578 11mo agoDecoy for duck hunting?
- omnimus 11mo agoAre you suggesting LLMs are decoy for investor hunting?
- heresie-dabord 11mo agoIn the same sly vein of humour, the first rule of Money Club is to never admit that the duck may be lame.
- catoc 11mo agoI interpret “artificial” in “artificial general intelligence” as “non-biological”. So in Tao’s statement I interpret “genuine” not as an adverb modifying the “artificial” adjective but as an attributive adjective modifying the noun “intelligence”, describing its quality… “genuine intelligence that is non-biological in nature”
- mindcrime 11mo agoSo in Tao’s statement I interpret “genuine” not as an adverb modifying the “artificial” adjective but as an attributive adjective modifying the noun “intelligence”, describing its quality… “genuine intelligence that is non-biological in nature” That's definitely possible. But it seems redundant to phrase it that way. That is to say, the goal (the end goal anyway) of the AI enterprise has always been, at least as I've always understood it, to make "genuine intelligence that is non-biological in nature". That said, Terry is a mathematician, not an "AI person" so maybe it makes more sense when you look at it from that perspective. I've been immersed in AI stuff for 35+ years, so I may have developed a bit of myopia in some regards.
- catoc 11mo agoI agree, it’s redundant. To us humans - to me at least - intelligence is always general (calculator: not; chimpansee: a little), so “general intelligence” can also already be considered redundant. Using “genuine” is more redundancy being heaped on (with the assumed goal of making a distinction between “genuine” AGI and tools that appear smart in limited domains)
- scellus 11mo agoI find it odd that the post above is downvoted to grey, feels like some sort of latent war of viewpoints going on, like below some other AI posts. (Although these misvotes are usually fixed when the US wakes up.) The point above is valid. I'd like to deconstruct the concept of intelligence even more. What humans are able to do is a relatively artificial collection of skills a physical and social organism needs. The so highly valued intelligence around math etc. is a corner case of those abilities. There's no reason to think that human mathematical intelligence is unique by its structure, an isolated well-defined skill. Artificial systems are likely to be able to do much more, maybe not exactly the same peak ability, but adjacent ones, many of which will be superhuman and augmentative to what humans do. This will likely include "new math" in some sense too.
- omnimus 11mo agoWhat everybody is looking for is imagination and invention. Current AI systems can give best guess statistical answer from dataset the've been fed. It is always compression. The problem and what most people intuitively understand is that this compression is not enough. There is something more going on because people can come up with novel ideas/solutions and whats more important they can judge and figure out if the solution will work. So even if the core of the idea is “compressed” or “mixed” from past knowledge there is some other process going on that leads to the important part of invention-progress. That is why people hate the term AI because it is just partial capability of “inteligence” or it might even be complete illusion of inteligence that is nowhere close what people would expect.
- in-silico 11mo ago> Current AI systems can give best guess statistical answer from dataset the've been fed. What about reinforcement learning? RL models don't train on an existing dataset, they try their own solutions and learn from feedback. RL models can definitely "invent" new things. Here's an example where they design novel molecules that bind with a protein: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/39/4/btad157/7085596 https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/39/4/btad157...
- Peteragain 11mo agoExactly! I am going for "glorified auto complete" is far more useful than it seems. In GOFAI terms, it does case-based reasoning.. but better.
- Izikiel43 11mo agoI call it clippy’s revengeance
- heresie-dabord 11mo agoClippy 2: Clippy Goes Nuclear But more seriously, this is ELIZA with network effects. Credulous multitudes chatting with a system that they believe is sentient.
- Davidzheng 11mo agoThe text continues "with current AI tools" which is not clearly defined to me (does it mean current Gen + scaffold? Anything which is llm reasoning model? Anything built with a large llm inside? ). In any case, the title is misleading for not containing the end of the sentence. Please can we fix the title?
- Davidzheng 11mo agoAlso i think the main source of interest is because it is said by Terry, so that should be in the title too.
- blobbers 11mo agoI think what Terry is saying is that with the current set of tools, there are classes of problems requiring cleverness: where you can guess and check (glorified autocomplete), check answer, fail and then add information from failure and repeat. I guess ultimately what is intelligence? We compact our memories, forget things, and try repeatedly. Our inputs are a bit more diverse but ultimately we autocomplete our lives. Hmm… maybe we’ve already achieved this.
- judahmeek 11mo agoSome one recently told me that their definition of intelligence was data-efficient extrapolation & I think that definition is pretty good as it separates intelligence from knowledge, sentience, & sapience.
- blobbers 11mo agoCool. I don't know how data-efficient current LLMs are, in the sense that I don't know what they know and don't know. It certainly seems like in some domains, they can can extrapolate, but I don't know what's in their training data.
- mentalgear 11mo agoSome researchers proposed using, instead of the term "AI", the much more fitting "self-parametrising probabilistic model" or just advanced auto-complete - that would certainly take the hype-inducing marketing PR away.
- attendant3446 11mo agoThe term "AI" didn't make sense from the beginning, but I guess it sounded cool and that's why everything is "AI" now. And I doubt it will change, regardless of its correctness.
- chimprich 11mo agoJohn McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in the 1950s. I doubt he was trying to be cool. The whole field of research involved in getting computers to do intelligent things has been referred to as AI for many decades.
- attendant3446 10mo agoOh, I didn't mean the term "Artificial Intelligence" itself. I was talking about referring to what we have now as "AI".
- metalman 11mo agoAI is intermitent wipers, for words, and the two are completly tied, as the perfect test for AI, will be to run intermitent wipers, to everybodys satisfaction.
- pavlov 11mo agoThat’s like arguing that washing machines should be called rapid-rotation water agitators. It’s the result that consumers are interested in, not the mechanics of how it’s achieved. Software engineers are often extraordinarily bad at seeing the difference because they’re so interested in the implementation details.
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- moktonar 11mo agoThere’s a guaranteed path to AGI, but it’s blocked behind computational complexity. Finding an efficient algorithm to simulate Quantum Mechanics should be top priority for those seeking AGI. A more promising way around it is using Quantum Computing, but we’ll have to wait for that to become good enough..
- themafia 11mo agoRequired energy density at the necessary scale will be your next hurdle.
- moktonar 11mo agoOnce you have the efficient algorithm you approximate asymptotically with the energy you have, of course you can’t obtain the same precision
- themafia 11mo agoOr speed. I think Frank Herbert was on to something in Dune. The energy efficiency of the human brain is hard to beat. Perhaps we should invest in discovering "spice." I think it might be more worthwhile. Okay, enough eggnog and posting.
- legulere 11mo agoHow would simulating quantum mechanics help with AGI?
- relistan 11mo agoThese things work well on the extremely limited task impetus that we give them. Even if we sidestep the question of whether or not LLMs are actually on the path to AGI, Imagine instead the amount of computing and electrical power required with current computing methods and hardware in order to respond to and process all the input handled by a person at every moment of the day. Somewhere in between current inputs and handling the full load of inputs the brain handles may lie “AGI” but it’s not clear there is anything like that on the near horizon, if only because of computing power constraints.
- ath3nd 11mo ago[dead]
- trio8453 11mo ago> This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing Useful = great. We've made incredible progress in the past 3-5 years. The people who are disappointed have their standards and expectations set at "science fiction".
- lxgr 11mo agoI think many people are now learning that their definition of intelligence was actually not very precise. From what I've seen, in response to that, goalposts are then often moved in the way that requires least updating of somebody's political, societal, metaphysical etc. worldview. (This also includes updates in favor of "this will definitely achieve AGI soon", fwiw.)
- knallfrosch 11mo agoI remember when the goal posts were set at the "Turing test." That's certainly not coming back.
- rightbyte 11mo agoIf you know the tricks wont you be able to figure out if some chat is done by a LLM?
- mrguyorama 11mo agoThe goal posts were never set at the "Turing test" It's not a real thing. You do not remember the goal posts ever being there. Turing put forth a thought experiment in the early days of some discussions about "artificial" thinking machines on a very philisophical level. Add to that, nobody who claims to have "passed" the turing test has ever done an actual example of that thought experiment, which is about taking two respondents and finding out which is human. It is NOT talking to a single respondent and deciding whether they are an LLM or not. It also has never been considered a valid "test" of "intelligence" as it was obvious from the very very beginning that tricking a person wasn't really meaningful, as most people can be tricked by even simple systems. ELIZA was the end of any thought around "The turing test", as it was able to "trick" tons of people and show how useless the turing thought experience was. Anyone who claims ELIZA is intelligent would be very silly.
- Taek 11mo agoWe seem to be moving the goalposts on AGI, are we not? 5 years ago, the argument that AGI wasn't here yet was that you couldn't take something like AlphaGo and use it to play chess. If you wanted that, you had to do a new training run with new training data. But now, we have LLMs that can reliably beat video games like Pokemon, without any specialized training for playing video games. And those same LLMs can write code, do math, write poetry, be language tutors, find optimal flight routes from one city to another during the busy Christmas season, etc. How does that not fit the definition of "General Intelligence"? It's literally as capable as a high school student for almost any general task you throw it at.
- lxgr 11mo agoI think we're noticing that our goalposts for AGI were largely "we'll recognize it when we see it", and now as we are getting to some interesting places, it turns out that different people actually understood very different things by that.
- oidar 11mo agoI think the games tasks are worth exploring more. If you look at that recent Pokemon post - it's not as capable as a high school student - it took a long, long time. I have a private set of tests, that any 8 year old could easily solve that any LLM just absolutely fails on. I suspect that plenty of the people claiming AGI isn't here yet have similar personal tests.
- krackers 11mo agoArc-Agi 3 is coming soon, I'm very excited for that because it's a true test of multimodality, spatial reasoning, and goal planning. I think there was some preliminary post somewhere that did show that current models basically try to brute-force their way through and don't actually "learn the rules of the game" as efficiently as humans do.
- oidar 11mo agoHow do you think they are training for the spatial part of the tests? It doesn’t seem to lend itself well to token based “reasoning”. I wonder if they are just synthetically creating training data and hope a new emergent spatial reason ability appears.
- keyle 11mo agoI am quite happy with LLM being more and more available 24/7 to be useful to human kind ... than some sentient being that never sleep and is more intelligent than me, with its own agenda.
- netsharc 11mo agoThere might not be a set agenda, but it might lead to the domination of a particular type of knowledge and the destruction of others: https://aeon.co/essays/generative-ai-has-access-to-a-small-slice-of-human-knowledge https://aeon.co/essays/generative-ai-has-access-to-a-small-s...
- brador 11mo agoRemember when your goal posts were Turing test? The only question remaining is what is the end point of AGI capability. What’s the final IQ we’ll hit, and more importantly why will it end there? Power limits? Hardware bandwidth limit? Storage limits? the AI creation math scales to infinity so that’s not an issue. Source data limits? Most likely. We should have recorded more. We should have recorded more.
- lostmsu 11mo agoLast I checked the Turing test stands. I've only seen reports of LLMs winning under some weird conditions. Interestingly, these were a year or two ago, and nobody seem to have tried Turing tests lately with newer LLMs.
- zahlman 11mo ago> Remember when your goal posts were Turing test? No. You are misrepresenting the test's purpose, the argument made around it and the results people have gotten. Turing was explicit that the question was ill-posed in the first place, and proposed a test of useful capability. But even then, hypothetical imagining of what a "passing" agent's responses might look like, was radically different from what we get today. And the supposed "passes" we've seen recently are highly suspect.
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- vivzkestrel 11mo agoAGI would be absolutely terrifying and that is how you'll know AGI is here - You would prompt "Ok AGI, read through the last 26978894356 research papers on cancer and tell me what are some unexplored angles" and it would tell you - You would prompt "Show me the last 10 emails on Sam Altman's inbox" and it would actually show you - You would prompt "Give me a list of people who have murdered someone in the USA and havent been caught yet" and it would give you a list of suspects that fit the profile You really dont want AGI
- throwaway127482 11mo agoYou're describing ASI, not AGI.
- smartbit 11mo agoANI Artificial Narrow Intelligence AGI Artificial General Intelligence ASI Artificial Super Intelligence Source https://www.ediweekly.com/the-three-different-types-of-artificial-intelligence-ani-agi-and-asi/ https://www.ediweekly.com/the-three-different-types-of-artif...
- delfines 11mo agoWhy are game creators creating AI? https://x.com/_sakamoro/status/2002016273484714050?s=46&t=RkRCDsc6ruHOvNj62JHdkQ https://x.com/_sakamoro/status/2002016273484714050?s=46&t=Rk...
- johnnienaked 11mo agoTao is obviously a smart guy but he's really lost the plot on this AI stuff
- AndrewKemendo 11mo agoThe term Artificial Intelligence was coined in 1955 for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. The Gods of AI all got together: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. They defined the entire concept of Artificial Intelligence in a single sentence: The conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. The only AI explainer youll need: https://kemendo.com/Understand-AI.html https://kemendo.com/Understand-AI.html
- cashsterling 11mo agoI too doubted, from the beginning, that neural networks will be the basis of AGI. As impressive and useful as LLM's are, they are still a long, long way from AGI.
- keernan 11mo agoOn a more practical level, I would be interested in Terry's thoughts on the open letter Sam Altman co-signed stating that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority," alongside risks like pandemics and nuclear war. Do current AI tools genuinely pose such risks?