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capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? R

by p1esk 1mo ago

capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?

layer8 1mo ago
“General”.
- p1esk 1mo ago
  Sorry, I don’t know what this means when applied to intelligence
drdeca 1mo ago
I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”? They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.
- p1esk 1mo ago
  Ok, but a random educated person will not perform well on vast majority of specialized tasks where professionals operate. A model like Astra probably will beat random educated person performance on majority of specialized tasks. It’s getting close to the level of professionals in many domains, and to genius level on some (e.g. math). I’m just trying to understand the implications of the current frontier model capabilities.
  - drdeca 29d ago
    Current models can do a variety of tasks that requires substantial expertise for people to do, yes. But there are also many cognitive tasks that the typical educated person would do better at than these models. Like, e.g. long-term managing what a vending machine gets stocked with and what prices the items should be sold for. Or, various things like that. When there are essentially no more tasks like that, then we’ve reached AGI.
    - p1esk 29d ago
      Interesting, you think a random educated person would beat Astra on Vending-Bench 2? Honestly I would not make that bet, I think it would be 50/50.
HarHarVeryFunny 26d ago
Intelligence is a capability, not a level of knowledge, and in discussing AI vs human intelligence, or human vs dog, it is perhaps better to regard it as a species-specific capability, not an individual-specific one. Was the genius or dumb person really born with different levels of learning ability, or were they just raised differently: nature vs nurture ? The "intelligence" of one species vs another comes down to differences in cognitive architecture, ultimately reflected in ability to learn and predict/infer. Intelligence, as a capability, not IQ test score, is best regarded as ability to learn from experience and use that learning to accurately predict future outcomes, ranging from passive observation, to the outcome of one's own actions, to the ability to reason. Comparing the intelligence (not knowledge) of different AI system to humans should therefore be assessed by comparing their ability to learn and use what they have learnt. An LLM is what it is - a language model, not a learning system. It's really an expert system of sorts, highly capable in terms of what it can infer based on the knowledge it encodes, but with very limited ability to learn. When you talk of comparing AI to a genius/professional/graduate/etc, you are really talking about comparing level of knowledge, comparing one expert system to another, which is fine and perhaps useful in some contexts, but it is not the same as comparing actual intelligence - learning ability, and especially so if you want to discuss general intelligence which is all about the ability to successfully take on any task (perhaps needing to learn it first), not just do well on some limited set of tasks you are already familiar with. If ability to learn is limited to one modality, such as language, then that indicates a lack of generality. A good test for whether an AI system is in the same ballpark as a human in learning ability, aka intelligence, would be whether it can (at run-time) learn language itself, from a blank slate start, when running in a suitable environment.
- famouswaffles 26d ago
  >If ability to learn is limited to one modality, such as language, then that indicates a lack of generality. A good test for whether an AI system is in the same ballpark as a human in learning ability, aka intelligence, would be whether it can (at run-time) learn language itself, from a blank slate start, when running in a suitable environment. So a transformer ? Run-time? Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me. Because humans function in a certain way, every learning system no matter how capable must function in the same way to be 'truly' intelligent ?

by p1esk 1mo ago

capability to match or surpass human intelligence across all conceivable cognitive tasks What human intelligence do you mean? Genius? Professional? Educated? Random person? “Dumb” person?

layer8 1mo ago

“General”.

p1esk 1mo ago
Sorry, I don’t know what this means when applied to intelligence

drdeca 1mo ago

I think the distinction between these options probably doesn’t matter alll that much if the threshold you’re using is either “random person” or higher? Maybe bump it up to “random educated person”? They are still different concepts of course, but I imagine that once one is achieved, the others aren’t far off.

p1esk 1mo ago
Ok, but a random educated person will not perform well on vast majority of specialized tasks where professionals operate. A model like Astra probably will beat random educated person performance on majority of specialized tasks. It’s getting close to the level of professionals in many domains, and to genius level on some (e.g. math). I’m just trying to understand the implications of the current frontier model capabilities.
- drdeca 29d ago
  Current models can do a variety of tasks that requires substantial expertise for people to do, yes. But there are also many cognitive tasks that the typical educated person would do better at than these models. Like, e.g. long-term managing what a vending machine gets stocked with and what prices the items should be sold for. Or, various things like that. When there are essentially no more tasks like that, then we’ve reached AGI.
  - p1esk 29d ago
    Interesting, you think a random educated person would beat Astra on Vending-Bench 2? Honestly I would not make that bet, I think it would be 50/50.

HarHarVeryFunny 26d ago

Intelligence is a capability, not a level of knowledge, and in discussing AI vs human intelligence, or human vs dog, it is perhaps better to regard it as a species-specific capability, not an individual-specific one. Was the genius or dumb person really born with different levels of learning ability, or were they just raised differently: nature vs nurture ? The "intelligence" of one species vs another comes down to differences in cognitive architecture, ultimately reflected in ability to learn and predict/infer. Intelligence, as a capability, not IQ test score, is best regarded as ability to learn from experience and use that learning to accurately predict future outcomes, ranging from passive observation, to the outcome of one's own actions, to the ability to reason. Comparing the intelligence (not knowledge) of different AI system to humans should therefore be assessed by comparing their ability to learn and use what they have learnt. An LLM is what it is - a language model, not a learning system. It's really an expert system of sorts, highly capable in terms of what it can infer based on the knowledge it encodes, but with very limited ability to learn. When you talk of comparing AI to a genius/professional/graduate/etc, you are really talking about comparing level of knowledge, comparing one expert system to another, which is fine and perhaps useful in some contexts, but it is not the same as comparing actual intelligence - learning ability, and especially so if you want to discuss general intelligence which is all about the ability to successfully take on any task (perhaps needing to learn it first), not just do well on some limited set of tasks you are already familiar with. If ability to learn is limited to one modality, such as language, then that indicates a lack of generality. A good test for whether an AI system is in the same ballpark as a human in learning ability, aka intelligence, would be whether it can (at run-time) learn language itself, from a blank slate start, when running in a suitable environment.

famouswaffles 26d ago
>If ability to learn is limited to one modality, such as language, then that indicates a lack of generality. A good test for whether an AI system is in the same ballpark as a human in learning ability, aka intelligence, would be whether it can (at run-time) learn language itself, from a blank slate start, when running in a suitable environment. So a transformer ? Run-time? Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me. Because humans function in a certain way, every learning system no matter how capable must function in the same way to be 'truly' intelligent ?