3 ms·

> Could this be an experiment to show how likely LLMs are to lead to AGI, or at least intelligence well beyond our current level? You'd have to be specific wha

by ben_w 10mo ago

> Could this be an experiment to show how likely LLMs are to lead to AGI, or at least intelligence well beyond our current level? You'd have to be specific what you mean by AGI: all three letters mean a different thing to different people, and sometimes use the whole means something not present in the letters. > If you could only give it texts and info and concepts up to Year X, well before Discovery Y, could we then see if it could prompt its way to that discovery? To a limited degree. Some developments can come from combining existing ideas and seeing what they imply. Other things, like everything to do with relativity and quantum mechanics, would have required experiments. I don't think any of the relevant experiments had been done prior to this cut-off date, but I'm not absolutely sure of that. You might be able to get such an LLM to develop all the maths and geometry for general relativity, and yet find the AI still tells you that the perihelion shift of Mercury is a sign of the planet Vulcan rather than of a curved spacetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

markab21 10mo ago
Basically looking for emergent behavior.
grimgrin 10mo ago
An example of why you need to explain what you mean by AGI is: https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/agi-is-here/ https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/agi-is-here/
opponent4 10mo ago
> You'd have to be specific what you mean by AGI Well, they obviously can't. AGI is not science, it's religion. It has all the trappings of religion: prophets, sacred texts, origin myth, end-of-days myth and most importantly, a means to escape death. Science? Well, the only measure to "general intelligence" would be to compare to the only one which is the human one but we have absolutely no means by which to describe it. We do not know where to start. This is why you scrape the surface of any AGI definition you only find circular definitions. And no, the "brain is a computer" is not a scientific description, it's a metaphor.
- strbean 10mo ago
  > And no, the "brain is a computer" is not a scientific description, it's a metaphor. Disagree. A brain is turing complete, no? Isn't that the definition of a computer? Sure, it may be reductive to say "the brain is just a computer".
  - opponent4 10mo ago
    Not even close. Turing complete does not apply to the brain plain and simple. That's something to do with algorithms and your brain is not a computer as I have mentioned. It does not store information. It doesn't process information. It just doesn't work that way. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
    - anthonypasq 10mo ago
      ive gotta say this article was not convincing at all.
    - mistermann 10mo ago
      [dead]
    - Closi 10mo ago
      A human is effectively turning complete if you give the person paper and pen and the ruleset, and a brain clearly stores information and processes it to some extent, so this is pretty unconvincing. The article is nonsense and badly written. > But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever. Really? Humans don't ever develop memories? Humans don't gain information?
    - strbean 10mo ago
      > Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog. This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.

by ben_w 10mo ago

markab21 10mo ago

Basically looking for emergent behavior.

grimgrin 10mo ago

An example of why you need to explain what you mean by AGI is: https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/agi-is-here/ https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/agi-is-here/

opponent4 10mo ago

> You'd have to be specific what you mean by AGI Well, they obviously can't. AGI is not science, it's religion. It has all the trappings of religion: prophets, sacred texts, origin myth, end-of-days myth and most importantly, a means to escape death. Science? Well, the only measure to "general intelligence" would be to compare to the only one which is the human one but we have absolutely no means by which to describe it. We do not know where to start. This is why you scrape the surface of any AGI definition you only find circular definitions. And no, the "brain is a computer" is not a scientific description, it's a metaphor.

strbean 10mo ago
> And no, the "brain is a computer" is not a scientific description, it's a metaphor. Disagree. A brain is turing complete, no? Isn't that the definition of a computer? Sure, it may be reductive to say "the brain is just a computer".
- opponent4 10mo ago
  Not even close. Turing complete does not apply to the brain plain and simple. That's something to do with algorithms and your brain is not a computer as I have mentioned. It does not store information. It doesn't process information. It just doesn't work that way. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
  - anthonypasq 10mo ago
    ive gotta say this article was not convincing at all.
  - mistermann 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - Closi 10mo ago
    A human is effectively turning complete if you give the person paper and pen and the ruleset, and a brain clearly stores information and processes it to some extent, so this is pretty unconvincing. The article is nonsense and badly written. > But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever. Really? Humans don't ever develop memories? Humans don't gain information?
  - strbean 10mo ago
    > Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog. This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.