3 ms·

Very cool to see more small open models being worked on! One nit: I've seen on this homepage, and many others, this notion that the people behind the models ar

by gslepak 6mo ago

Very cool to see more small open models being worked on! One nit: I've seen on this homepage, and many others, this notion that the people behind the models are "working towards AGI". I get that this is marketing speak, but transformers are not AGI, and they will never be AGI, so it'd be great if people stopped saying that as it sort of wears out the meaning of "working towards AGI".

altruios 6mo ago
What does AGI mean to you? Transformers have approximate knowledge of many things. Is this not 'general'? Where is the goalpost here?
- gslepak 6mo ago
  > Transformers have approximate knowledge of many things. Is this not 'general'? Of course not. That's like saying the Encyclopedia Britannica is AGI. > What does AGI mean to you? I would define AGI as human-like machine intelligence (or superior). This is difficult for some people to understand because they don't understand what "human-like" means in the first place. Neuroscientists would be able to set some of these wayward computer scientists straight on this question.
  - altruios 6mo ago
    > human-like But is that a hard requirement? Can a machine have Rat-like intelligence? Is all intelligence human-like (human-centric-mind-blindness-much?)? > Of course not. That's like saying the Encyclopedia Britannica is AGI. Well, I'd classify that as GK, general knowledge. Not artificial or intelligent. Let's consider a definition of intelligence as the act of 'manipulating data', have you a better general definition of intelligence?
    - gslepak 6mo ago
      > But is that a hard requirement? Yes. > Can a machine have Rat-like intelligence? Yes, and that would be closer to AGI than today's LLMs, because the fundamental principles and architecture is there.
      - altruios 6mo ago
        Okay. So to be clear, you believe that replicating/templating a brain is the ONLY way to make an intelligent machine? What makes you think that? That there are no other patterns of intelligence?
        gslepak 6mo ago
        I can see how that would be implied by my comments so you're right to question that. The principles that are found in the brain are what gives qualification to "AGI", not the brain itself, so it's possible there are other architectures that would qualify. A few observations on LLMs that give the game away: - They require releases. You get a single binary blob and that blob is forever stuck at its so-called "intelligence" level. It never learns anything new. - They're stuck approaching the limit of human intelligence. This is because the technique cannot exceed human intelligence. I realize that OpenAI has made claims to the contrary, saying things like "oh our model found out some proof that was never proven before" — this doesn't count. It's a side effect of training on the Internet. In fact that proof probably did exist (in pieces) somewhere on the Internet, it just wasn't widely publicized. So, you'll know it's AGI when you no longer see companies releasing new models. AGI won't require new models because the architecture will be what matters as whatever models you have will be constantly updating themselves in real-time, just like the human brain does (and every other brain). And, you'll start to see the AIs actually outsmarting the smartest humans on the planet in every subject.
        altruios 6mo ago
        > - They require releases. You get a single binary blob and that blob is forever stuck at its so-called "intelligence" level. It never learns anything new. True. But learning isn't the same thing as intelligence. My father who has dementia and is unable to learn anything new due to memory issues is still 'intelligent'. > - They're stuck approaching the limit of human intelligence. Is general intelligence > human intelligence then? Is there some static 'human level' that I should be measuring myself against? There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human. same is true with LLM's and humans how. What you seem to be describing isn't AG(eneral)I, but artificial greater intelligence.
  - chabes 6mo ago
    Agreed. The widespread anthropomorphizing is getting so tiring. I blame it on the big companies in the space, but seeing intelligent folks regularly attributing intelligence to a complex autocomplete system is disappointing.
liuliu 6mo ago
> but transformers are not AGI, and they will never be AGI Like the claim "transformers are AGI", this needs proof, otherwise should be prefixed "I think". And honestly, positive proof is easier than negative proof (you just need to make one transformer model that is a AGI, whereas the never claim requires you to enumerated all possibilities).
- gslepak 6mo ago
  That's like saying we should wait for positive proof of AGI from combustion engines. That'll never happen, no matter how much you tweak the engine. It's just not possible. The negative proof is there in the definition itself. Transformers are not AGI, they're frozen human intelligence of the autocomplete variety. That can never be AGI and anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand transformers or AGI.
  - refulgentis 6mo ago
    Oh! would you mind explaining that out a bit? :)
    - gslepak 6mo ago
      See the adjacent thread with @altruios.
  - xscott 6mo ago
    This kind of proof isn't really as water tight as you claim. It's a lot like saying state machines are limited to processing regular expressions, and then completely ignoring how easy it is to add a stack or linear memory to a state machine to make it a PDA or Turing machine. So yes, the LLMs can be trivialized as just randomized autocomplete, but if you add a database or memory to the side very basic MLPs can become a Turing machine. It's going to take a lot more proof to say a Turing machine could never be intelligent. And you can do more than just give the LLM side memory - you can have them invoked recursively, use message passing as coroutines, and so on... You might be technically correct if you ignore anything other than the very restrictive definitions you're using, but even there I'm not certain. If you had a LLM with a trillion token window, is that good enough to act as a memory? Human brains aren't infinite either.
ElFitz 6mo ago
These people worked on applying ML to code and towards producing code using ML before the transformers paper even came out (2017). https://web.archive.org/web/20170629103718/https://blog.sourced.tech/post/our-roadmap/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170629103718/https://blog.sour...

by gslepak 6mo ago

altruios 6mo ago

What does AGI mean to you? Transformers have approximate knowledge of many things. Is this not 'general'? Where is the goalpost here?

gslepak 6mo ago
> Transformers have approximate knowledge of many things. Is this not 'general'? Of course not. That's like saying the Encyclopedia Britannica is AGI. > What does AGI mean to you? I would define AGI as human-like machine intelligence (or superior). This is difficult for some people to understand because they don't understand what "human-like" means in the first place. Neuroscientists would be able to set some of these wayward computer scientists straight on this question.
- altruios 6mo ago
  > human-like But is that a hard requirement? Can a machine have Rat-like intelligence? Is all intelligence human-like (human-centric-mind-blindness-much?)? > Of course not. That's like saying the Encyclopedia Britannica is AGI. Well, I'd classify that as GK, general knowledge. Not artificial or intelligent. Let's consider a definition of intelligence as the act of 'manipulating data', have you a better general definition of intelligence?
  - gslepak 6mo ago
    > But is that a hard requirement? Yes. > Can a machine have Rat-like intelligence? Yes, and that would be closer to AGI than today's LLMs, because the fundamental principles and architecture is there.
    - altruios 6mo ago
      Okay. So to be clear, you believe that replicating/templating a brain is the ONLY way to make an intelligent machine? What makes you think that? That there are no other patterns of intelligence?
      - gslepak 6mo ago
        I can see how that would be implied by my comments so you're right to question that. The principles that are found in the brain are what gives qualification to "AGI", not the brain itself, so it's possible there are other architectures that would qualify. A few observations on LLMs that give the game away: - They require releases. You get a single binary blob and that blob is forever stuck at its so-called "intelligence" level. It never learns anything new. - They're stuck approaching the limit of human intelligence. This is because the technique cannot exceed human intelligence. I realize that OpenAI has made claims to the contrary, saying things like "oh our model found out some proof that was never proven before" — this doesn't count. It's a side effect of training on the Internet. In fact that proof probably did exist (in pieces) somewhere on the Internet, it just wasn't widely publicized. So, you'll know it's AGI when you no longer see companies releasing new models. AGI won't require new models because the architecture will be what matters as whatever models you have will be constantly updating themselves in real-time, just like the human brain does (and every other brain). And, you'll start to see the AIs actually outsmarting the smartest humans on the planet in every subject.
        altruios 6mo ago
        > - They require releases. You get a single binary blob and that blob is forever stuck at its so-called "intelligence" level. It never learns anything new. True. But learning isn't the same thing as intelligence. My father who has dementia and is unable to learn anything new due to memory issues is still 'intelligent'. > - They're stuck approaching the limit of human intelligence. Is general intelligence > human intelligence then? Is there some static 'human level' that I should be measuring myself against? There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human. same is true with LLM's and humans how. What you seem to be describing isn't AG(eneral)I, but artificial greater intelligence.
- chabes 6mo ago
  Agreed. The widespread anthropomorphizing is getting so tiring. I blame it on the big companies in the space, but seeing intelligent folks regularly attributing intelligence to a complex autocomplete system is disappointing.

liuliu 6mo ago

> but transformers are not AGI, and they will never be AGI Like the claim "transformers are AGI", this needs proof, otherwise should be prefixed "I think". And honestly, positive proof is easier than negative proof (you just need to make one transformer model that is a AGI, whereas the never claim requires you to enumerated all possibilities).

gslepak 6mo ago
That's like saying we should wait for positive proof of AGI from combustion engines. That'll never happen, no matter how much you tweak the engine. It's just not possible. The negative proof is there in the definition itself. Transformers are not AGI, they're frozen human intelligence of the autocomplete variety. That can never be AGI and anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand transformers or AGI.
- refulgentis 6mo ago
  Oh! would you mind explaining that out a bit? :)
  - gslepak 6mo ago
    See the adjacent thread with @altruios.
- xscott 6mo ago
  This kind of proof isn't really as water tight as you claim. It's a lot like saying state machines are limited to processing regular expressions, and then completely ignoring how easy it is to add a stack or linear memory to a state machine to make it a PDA or Turing machine. So yes, the LLMs can be trivialized as just randomized autocomplete, but if you add a database or memory to the side very basic MLPs can become a Turing machine. It's going to take a lot more proof to say a Turing machine could never be intelligent. And you can do more than just give the LLM side memory - you can have them invoked recursively, use message passing as coroutines, and so on... You might be technically correct if you ignore anything other than the very restrictive definitions you're using, but even there I'm not certain. If you had a LLM with a trillion token window, is that good enough to act as a memory? Human brains aren't infinite either.

ElFitz 6mo ago

These people worked on applying ML to code and towards producing code using ML before the transformers paper even came out (2017). https://web.archive.org/web/20170629103718/https://blog.sourced.tech/post/our-roadmap/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170629103718/https://blog.sour...