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Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
- wcgan7 8mo agoCool that we are at a stage where it is meaningful to start measuring progress toward AGI. Something I am wondering on the philosophical side: are we ever going to be able to tell if the system really "understands" and "perceives" the world?
- quantummagic 8mo agoWe'll get as close as we can with anything else, like trying to decide if a given human really "understands" and "perceives" the world.
- Schlagbohrer 8mo agoI thought of this when I saw that the final criteria in the list is Social Understanding. Might be a lot of humans who can't measure up to sentience by these parameters! ;-) (and I wonder what my ADHD friends would think of the Executive Function requirement as well...)
- beeflet 8mo agoI think the accomplishment of difficult real-world tasks requires that it does so. But I hope that we're able to reach a level of introspection to produce a satisfactory answer (and avoid doomsday), but I think that requires a more educated question. The premise of conciousness as we understand it now could be misleading. In the same way that studying alien life would reveal more about how life in general canonicially forms and exists. Studying this artificial intellegence could unlock a new understanding of our own minds.
- andsoitis 8mo ago> Perception: extracting and processing sensory information from the environment > Generation: producing outputs such as text, speech and actions > Attention: focusing cognitive resources on what matters > Learning: acquiring new knowledge through experience and instruction > Memory: storing and retrieving information over time > Reasoning: drawing valid conclusions through logical inference > Metacognition: knowledge and monitoring of one's own cognitive processes > Executive functions: planning, inhibition and cognitive flexibility > Problem solving: finding effective solutions to domain-specific problems > Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations -------------------- I prefer: a) working memory (hold & manipulate information in mind simultaneously) b) processing speed (how quickly & efficiently execute basic cognitive operations, leaving more resources for complex tasks) c) fluid intelligence (ability to reason through novel problems without relying on prior knowledge) d) crystallized intelligence (accumulated knowledge and ability to apply learned skills) e) attentional control / executive function (focus, suppress irrelevant information, switch between tasks, inhibit impulsive responses) f) long-term memory and retrieval (ability to form strong associations and retrieve them fluently) g) spatial / visuospatial reasoning (mental rotation, visualization, navigating abstract spatial relationships) h) pattern recognition & inductive reasoning (this is the most primitive and universal expression of intelligence across species, the ability to extract regularities from noisy data, to generalized from examples to rules)
- Lerc 8mo ago>a) working memory (hold & manipulate information in mind simultaneously) What counts as 'in mind' is undefined. You can succeed by declaring anything manipulatable counts as in. >c) fluid intelligence (ability to reason through novel problems without relying on prior knowledge) reasoning presupposes the conclusion. Solve is better. When a solution is given you cannot declare it to be not a solution. People can and do argue about if a answer was arrived at by reasoning even when they agree on the correctness. >g) spatial / visuospatial reasoning (mental rotation, visualization, navigating abstract spatial relationships) I have aphantasia, why should you exclude something from being intelligent because it cannot do something that I also cannot do.
- andsoitis 8mo ago> I have aphantasia, why should you exclude something from being intelligent Intelligence exists on a spectrum. Amongst different species (living and non-living) and also within species (amongst individuals). Some dimensions of intelligence are more important that others in different contexts, so a systems that might be “dumber” than another in one context, can be smarter in a different context.
- hbarka 8mo agoThe two guys from Google get to set the rules? How will they measure wisdom or common sense (ability to make an exception)? https://youtu.be/lA-zdh_bQBo https://youtu.be/lA-zdh_bQBo
- Lerc 8mo agoThey are not the rules. They are some rules.
- qsort 8mo agoThose are crowdsourced benchmarks. We're calling them "cognitive" and "AGI" now, though. It's similar to when they made a benchmark and called it "GDP". To be clear, I think we've seen very fast progress, certainly faster than I would have expected, I'm not trying to peddle some "wall" rhetoric here, but I struggle to see how this isn't just the SWE-bench du jour.
- tyleo 8mo agoIt still seems like something is missing from all these frameworks. I feel like an average human wouldn't pass some of these metrics yet they are "generally intelligent". On the other hand they also wouldn't pass a lot of the expert questions that AI is good at. We're measuring something, and I think optimizing it is useful, I'd even say it is "intelligent" in some ways, but it doesn't seem "intelligent" in the same way that humans are.
- sho_hn 8mo agoOn the other hand, AI being very good at everything while select humans may only be very good at some things is likely also a quality we want to retain (or, well, achieve).
- snowwrestler 8mo agoIf a human cares about the work, they can often outperform an LLM because they will keep at it until the work meets their standard of quality. Whereas the LLM will guess and then wait to be corrected. As a recent tweet I saw said: it’s amazing how fast the software bottleneck went from writing code, to reviewing code. I think we’ll need to split the concept of intelligence into the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to conceive and prompt a task. If the former is called “intelligence” then LLMs are intelligent. But what then do we call the latter? I think the idea of an AI that can independently accomplish great things is where people talk about “general” intelligence. But I think we need a label more specific, that covers this idea that successful humans are not just good at doing things, they originate what should be done and are not easy to dissuade.
- fluoridation 8mo ago>I think we’ll need to split the concept of intelligence into the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to conceive and prompt a task. If the former is called “intelligence” then LLMs are intelligent. Huh? No. "The capacity to accomplish a task" is not intelligence. By that definition, a washing machine is intelligent.
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- ArekDymalski 8mo agoIt's good to have some kind of benchmark at least to structure the ongoing, fruitless discussion around "are we there already?". However I must admit that including the last point that is partially hinting at the emotional or rather social intelligence surprised me. It makes this list go beyond usual understanding of AGI and moves it toward something like AGI-we-actually-want. But for that purpose this last point isn't ok narrow, too specific. And so is the whole list. To be actually useful the AGI-we-actually-want benchmark should not only include positive indicators but also a list of unwanted behaviors to ensure this thing that used to be called alignment I guess.
- dist-epoch 8mo agoCapability and alignment are orthogonal. Stalin was AGI-level.
- ArekDymalski 8mo ago"Stalin was AGI-level" perfectly catches the core of my concerns. Thanks!
- gotwaz 8mo agoUnwanted behavior or what? Like why does a rose need so many petals eh? What about a peacock and all those feathers? Why should anyone dance in the shower? Or dance at all? The rabbit hole is deep Alice.
- lvoudour 8mo agoSocial cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?
- lnenad 8mo agoIt is not. Why is that relevant to social entities?
- lvoudour 8mo agoHow well you interact with other members of a society increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge acquisition, ie. it makes sense as a measure of intelligence
- LogicFailsMe 8mo agoIt's a pretty ambiguous definition. The most powerful man in the world right now is not someone I consider a role model for social cognition and yet there he is with the football for the second time demonstrating grandmaster skill at social cognition to get there.
- lvoudour 8mo agoYou don't have to be empathetic and nice, just good at navigating society.
- LogicFailsMe 8mo agoSo in all seriousness with a bit of snark: Do you want a malevolent AGI? Because "good at navigating society" as the only benchmark here is how you get a malevolent AGI... Evidence: cuckoos and cheaters all the way down the evolutionary ladder as a winning strategy and arms race against the hard workers.
- 8mo ago
- wewewedxfgdf 8mo agoAGI feels like a vanity project. Who cares about AGI? Honestlky what's the gain. Maybe Google could actually make Gemini good instead of being about 10 miles behind Claude instead of trying to make AGI because of - well some reason - cause they want to be famous.
- anematode 8mo agoThey want to make money.
- zug_zug 8mo agoI'm sorry what even is this? Giving $10k rewards for significant advancements toward "AGI"? What does "making a framework" even mean, it feels like a nothing post. When I think of what real AGI would be I think: - Passes the turing test - Writes a New York Times Bestseller without revealing it was written by AI - Writes journal articles that pass peer review - Wins a Nobel Prize - Writes a successful comedy routine - Creates a new invention And no, nobody is going to make an automated kaggle benchmark to verify these. Which is fine, because an LLM will never be AGI. An LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.
- ixtli 8mo agoThey’re slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more marketing. If you showed someone from 1960 our LLMs from and told them “this is AI” I think they’d be astounded but a little confused because “artificial intelligence” definitely carried a very clear meaning in literature and media. Now it is marketing terminology and we’re no closer to having a meaningful definition for the word intelligence.
- paganel 8mo ago> They’re slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more marketing. If they don't do that then those trillions of dollars that support their current share price will most probably evaporate, so there are very big incentives for them to just outright try and re-create reality (like what we usually meant when we were thinking about artificial intelligence).
- astrange 8mo agoAI has been consistently defined as "anything we can't make a computer do yet" since 1970. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/
- sourcegrift 8mo agoGrok recently created a cancer vaccine for a dog that reduced tumor size by 75%
- pocketarc 8mo agoWhen people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space." When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence. And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8mo agoThe amount of things LLMs can do is insane. It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo agofor example?
- boca_honey 8mo agoClaiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1] Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice. [2] Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3] [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-announces-crackdown-deceptive-ai-claims-schemes https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-openai-nvidia-microsoft-chatgpt-jobs-investors-markets-2024-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-o... [3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer-service-disasters/ https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer...
- nbnmbnmbnbm 8mo ago[dead]
- speefers 8mo ago[dead]
- yellow_lead 8mo agoIt's kind of funny that Google's idea of evaluating AGI is outsourcing the work to a Kaggle competition.
- mlmonkey 8mo agoWhen I was at a FAANG, we used to joke that when senior leadership is totally out of ideas, they announce a hackathon. It was a way for them to continue the charade of being "leaders" without having any ideas.
- Havoc 8mo agoMeasuring something you can’t define or quantify seems somewhat dubious
- nutjob2 8mo agoThus the vague and unfounded criteria/framework. It's pretty easy for these people to pull something like this out of their collective asses, but it's much harder (maybe impossible) to rigorously define the how and why.
- baggachipz 8mo agoThis is a long way to say "let's crowdsource the shifting of our goalposts".
- orangebread 8mo agoAs an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness. Hear me out. I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determine what qualifies as "AGI". My thoughts: As humans, we possess our own internal drive and our own perspective. Think of humans as distilled intelligence, we each have our own specialty and motivations. Einstein was a genius physicist but you wouldn't ask him for his expertise on medicine. What people are describing as AGI is essentially a godlike human. What would make more sense is if the AGI spawned a "distilled" version with a focused agenda/motivation to behave autonomously. But even then, there are limitations. What is the solution? A trillion tokens of system prompt to act as the "soul"/consciousness of this AI agent? This goes back to my original statement, what is missing is a level of consciousness. Unless this AGI can power itself and somehow the universe recognizes its complexity and existence and bestows it with consciousness I don't think this is phsyically attainable.
- the_real_cher 8mo agoThis is an interesting perspective. A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e. conciousness Im imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.
- BrownSol 8mo agoProbably not, but the counter point to that is without its own consciousness it might end up being used for even worse things since it can’t really evaluate a request against intrinsic values. Assuming its values were aligned with basic human rights and stuff.
- torben-friis 8mo agoI think you are mixing up consciousness and will. I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday is the same as you, since you-today could be another consciousness that just happens to share the same memories. All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a spirit/soul... but getting back to the main point, the specificity you mention is a product of a limited time and learning speed, I'd be happy to get a surgeon or politicians training if given infinite time.
- boca_honey 8mo agoFriendly reminder: Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
- beeflet 8mo agoWho attuned your crystal ball? LLMs are already pretty general. They've got the multimodal ones, and aren't they using some sort of language-action-model to drive cars now? Who is to say AGI doesn't already exist?
- airstrike 8mo agoIt doesn't already exist, pretty obviously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeRS4TbtZWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeRS4TbtZWA
- nutjob2 8mo agoIt's a trick statement, because AGI is undefined.
- beeflet 8mo agoI think LLMs are at least name-worthy given that they're artificial and somewhat smart in a generality of domains. Albeit the "smartness" comes from training in a massive corpus of text in those domains. So maybe it's really a specific intelegence but for so many specific tasks it seems general. At some point you have to throw in the towel when these things are going to be walking and talking around us. Some people move the goalposts of "AGI" to mean that the machine totally emulates a person. Including curiosity and creativity, of which these models are currently lacking. But why should it? In genesis, it's said that god created man after its own image. I have to assume this implies we inherit god's mental attributes (curiosity, creativity, etc.) rather than its physical attributes.
- astrange 8mo agoKind of like saying that scaling the language area in a human brain won't lead to a human brain. True, but just don't do that then.
- fnoef 8mo agoWhat is it with humans that we tend to speedrun into the extinction of our own race?
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoWay too much framework. The A in AGI is for artificial. Have it build its own test harness instead of outsourcing it via hackathon. If you cannot trust that output, you're nowhere near AGI.
- gilbetron 8mo agoThe "A" in AGI is for artificial, not advanced.
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoThanks, I'll update the text.
- causalzap 8mo ago[dead]
- wslh 8mo agoAGI may be a prerequisite for true superintelligence, but we're already seeing superhuman performance in narrow domains. We probably need a broader evaluation framework that captures both.
- cess11 8mo agoThe belief that there is no fundamental difference between mammals navigating fractal dimensions and imprisoned electrons humming in logic gates has to be considered a religious one.
- pingou 8mo agoNo, it's called functionalism. To me, it's actually the opposite, assuming there is a fundamental difference between simulated neurons and real ones seems almost religious. While it's true that we aren't there yet, and simulated neurons are currently quite different from real ones (so I agree there is a big difference at the moment), it's unclear why you presumably think it will always stay that way.
- cess11 8mo agoIf you actually have a way to fully, without reductions, simulate matter, that's probably a Nobel prize coming your way. The common scientific understanding is that this is not possible, at least not without extreme amounts of energy and time. The dimensionality, or complexity if you'd prefer, of your logic gates is quite different from the cosmos. You might not agree but in my parlance a linear and a fractal curve are fundamentally different, and you can try to use linear curves to approximate the latter at some level of perspective if you want but I don't think you'll get a large audience claiming that there is no difference. As far as I know we've also kind of given up on simulating neurons and settled for growing and poking real ones instead, but you might have some recent examples to the contrary?
- stevenhuang 8mo agoWe may not need to go down that level. For the qualities we care about, it may turn out to be the case we don't need to simulate matter perfectly. We may not need to concern ourselves with the fractal complexity of reality if we identify the right higher level abstractions with which to operate on. This phenomenon is known as causal emergence. > That is, a macroscale description of a system (a map) can be more informative than a fully detailed microscale description of the system (the territory). This has been called “causal emergence.” https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188 https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188 From a HN discussion a while ago: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-sca... > A highly compressed description of the system then emerges at the macro level that captures those dynamics of the micro level that matter to the macroscale behavior — filtered, as it were, through the nested web of intermediate ε-machines. In that case, the behavior of the macro level can be predicted as fully as possible using only macroscale information — there is no need to refer to finer-scale information. It is, in other words, fully emergent. The key characteristic of this emergence, the researchers say, is this hierarchical structure of “strongly lumpable causal states.”
- mrkstu 8mo agoTo me, a lot of what makes us sentient is our continuity. I even (briefly) remember my dreams when I wake up, and my dreams are influenced by my state of mind as I enter it. LLMs 'turn on' when given a question and essentially 'die' immediately after answering a question. What kind of work is going on with designing an LLM type AI that is continuously 'conscious' and giving it will? The 'claws' seem to be running all the time, but I assume they need rebooting occasionally to clear context.
- delecti 8mo agoI think you're right, but also that LLMs are showing that sentience isn't necessarily required for AGI. For exactly the reasons you mention, I don't expect sentience to arise out of LLMs. They have nowhere for an interiority or mind to live. And even if there were a new generation of transformers that did have some looping "mind", where they could "think about" what they're "thinking about", their concepts of things wouldn't really correspond to... things. Without senses to integrate knowledge across domains they're just associating text. I haven't heard about anyone creating trying to create model that have an interior loop and also integration with sensory input, but I don't expect we would unless it ends up working.
- ottah 8mo agoCan we just focus on real problems, like stable and safe application of existing models? I'm just exhausted with the bullshit.
- jamesvzb 8mo ago[flagged]
- lccerina 8mo agoEvery week we are 50% closer to shifting the goalpost... from the paper "AI systems already possess some capabilities not found in humans, such as LiDAR perception and native image generation". I don't know about them, but I can natively generate images in my mind.
- nomel 8mo ago> I don't know about them, but I can natively generate images in my mind. Not all humans can: Aphantasia! I think people will only accept a "Yes" to the question of "Is it AGI?" when large portions of the population end up excluded from the definition of "intelligence". So it begins! ;)
- lccerina 8mo agoFair, I forgot about aphantasia! The whole plan for AGI is still built on creaky eugenic foundations: measuring intelligence to distinguish who is "intelligent" and who is not. The whole idea of "human baselines" from the paper is terrifying, they even start it by excluding people without a high school degree! Looking at their 10 cognitive faculties ontology, there is no reason why people with lower education levels should be excluded...
- gibsonf1 8mo agoIts interesting that they don't even mention the key to human intelligence, concepts, in this list.
- AnaPaula15S98 8mo ago[dead]
- drewcboston87 8mo ago[dead]
- righthand 8mo agoGoogle’s next cognitive framework will be for AGI Pro after we reach whatever productized, socially-accepted definition they cook up for AGI.
- ianrahman 8mo agoAltruism would make a good addition to the list. It’s clearly not universal, but most humans would help a fellow human in need. Or even (and in some cases more so) an animal need. Even if it didn’t directly benefit the actor. There are other changes and additions which could be made to this list, but altruism may be the most important.
- swagv1 8mo agoAGI? As if all value that humans offer can be compressed and transmitted in binary form? You'd have a more serious debate about antigravity.