3 ms·

What if it can be Einstein, but can't draw a Pelican, write a solid college-level essay, or fold clothes? The ability to do a ton of book learning in training,

What if it can be Einstein, but can't draw a Pelican, write a solid college-level essay, or fold clothes? The ability to do a ton of book learning in training, and pull in tons of related context at once, is superhuman in some ways, but lags a lot in others.

AareyBaba 1mo ago
Folding clothes is happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZNwgvcWUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZNwgvcWUg AI in math is ongoing. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics
- olmo23 1mo ago
  I can also recommend this channel to get a sense of where AI is in frontier maths. https://www.youtube.com/@easy_riders https://www.youtube.com/@easy_riders
CamperBob2 1mo ago
Pelicans are a solved problem at this point. An open-weight model on my own machine gave me this: https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/ https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/ And the only reason LLMs can't write essays indistinguishable from human output is because they aren't RLHF'ed to write like humans. Folding clothes isn't an LLM's job but if you were to insist, they could certainly do it, as any number of videos from robotics labs will attest. That particular future is already here but definitely not evenly-distributed.
- mcphage 1mo ago
  > Pelicans are a solved problem at this point. An open-weight model on my own machine gave me this That feels kinda like when I remember seeing Ocarina of Time for the first time, and thinking “oh my god, this looks just like real life…”.
  - CamperBob2 1mo ago
    For me it was the wheels. I couldn't stop staring at the wheels... how did it get them so freaking perfect? Mad respect to GLM 5.3.
- pmg101 1mo ago
  That backward kink between the head tube and the front forks would make the pelican's job of keeping the bike upright extremely difficult though.
  - CamperBob2 1mo ago
    LOL. Pelicans may be a solved problem, but being a former Bike Person, I can assure you that bikes never will be.
vel0city 1mo ago
How good was Einstein at drawing pelicans on bicycles by writing SVG code? Checkmate, meatbags.
no-name-here 1mo ago
Adding sibling comments, I think some people may be overestimating how well the median human can draw a pelican, or create an SVG of a pelican (depending if we’re comparing to an image generation model, or SVG generation).
- FabHK 1mo ago
  Most people can't draw a bicycle. There was an artist 10 years ago that asked people to sketch a bike, and then turned these sketches into 3D renders - quite funny. https://mymodernmet.com/gianluca-gimini-velocipedia-bicycles/ https://mymodernmet.com/gianluca-gimini-velocipedia-bicycles... https://qz.com/681345/an-artists-3d-renderings-of-bicycles-drawn-from-memory-show-how-far-our-perceptions-are-from-reality https://qz.com/681345/an-artists-3d-renderings-of-bicycles-d...
  - heavenlyblue 1mo ago
    Drawing of a bicycle is not it's photographic copy though
reasonabl_human 1mo ago
> What if it can be Einstein, but can’t draw a Pelican, write a solid college-level essay, or fold clothes? Then it’s an expert system. Stephen Hawking wasn’t very good at folding clothes. The ‘General’ part of the term ‘AGI’ seems like a trap to me, because there will always be new workflows to master. Can Astra one-shot level completion on some yet-to-be-released video game? If no, does that mean it’s not yet ‘Generally’ intelligent? You won’t get pure ‘general’ intelligence until you find Einstein’s hidden variables and load the state of the entire universe into context. Meanwhile, building a series of expert systems targeting specific valuable workflows is useful today and seems like it’ll continue to scale to cover huge swathes of economically valuable workflows. I think that’s the more interesting thing to be measuring. The surface area of useful economic workflows that can be addressed with expert systems built with today’s tech. Hitting some ‘Artificial Expert Intelligence’ coverage threshold on economically valuable workflows is what will matter for humans well before pure ‘general’ intelligence.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- idiotsecant 1mo ago
  The only important part of 'general' is the ability to learn from experiential data and update your own model. That's what leads to general capability. Humans can't oneshot any task natively, but we can practice for a while until we uncover often novel methods of accomplishing something.
  - zarzavat 1mo ago
    Therefore: the current transformer architecture is fundamentally incapable of AGI because the models have no mutable long-term memory. You only have weights (large immutable memory), or context (small mutable memory). Humans have mutable long-term memory: I can learn a new skill, adapt an old skill to new information, or learn new knowledge today that I couldn't perform/didn't know yesterday. I don't have a training cutoff. Context engineering is an attempt to paper over this limitation. You can get really far with context engineering and huge models, but you will never get to AGI because there are many tasks where humans' mutable long-term memory outperforms. For example, a human can invent a new musical instrument and then learn how to play the instrument they just invented. That's inference (inventing an instrument) leading to training (neuroplasticity). Humans have the ability to train our NNs with considerably fewer training samples. Everything that you can do with transformers is in one causal direction: training -> inference.
klooney 1mo ago
Laundry folding has become a doable demo for startups, and ChatGPT has been spitting out college essays for years.
Mawr 1mo ago
I can't draw a pelican. Literally my only point of reference would be AI pelican drawings from the test. Otherwise I wouldn't know how to draw one at all. I would be able to draw an accurate bicycle, but I'm an outlier on that. Most people could not draw one [1]. [1]: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
kenjackson 1mo ago
Can definitely write college level essays and have for a while. The jobs is that when LLMs first started getting popular, but aren’t quite common professors were that some of the worst students in class started writing the best essays. Now everyone complains because they can detect the slop, but most human writing is so bad. But the really good human writing is still much better.
cma 1mo ago
Which significant practice, how well could Einstein draw a pelican in pure SVG?

AareyBaba 1mo ago

Folding clothes is happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZNwgvcWUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZNwgvcWUg AI in math is ongoing. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics

olmo23 1mo ago
I can also recommend this channel to get a sense of where AI is in frontier maths. https://www.youtube.com/@easy_riders https://www.youtube.com/@easy_riders

CamperBob2 1mo ago

Pelicans are a solved problem at this point. An open-weight model on my own machine gave me this: https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/ https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/ And the only reason LLMs can't write essays indistinguishable from human output is because they aren't RLHF'ed to write like humans. Folding clothes isn't an LLM's job but if you were to insist, they could certainly do it, as any number of videos from robotics labs will attest. That particular future is already here but definitely not evenly-distributed.

mcphage 1mo ago
> Pelicans are a solved problem at this point. An open-weight model on my own machine gave me this That feels kinda like when I remember seeing Ocarina of Time for the first time, and thinking “oh my god, this looks just like real life…”.
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  For me it was the wheels. I couldn't stop staring at the wheels... how did it get them so freaking perfect? Mad respect to GLM 5.3.
pmg101 1mo ago
That backward kink between the head tube and the front forks would make the pelican's job of keeping the bike upright extremely difficult though.
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  LOL. Pelicans may be a solved problem, but being a former Bike Person, I can assure you that bikes never will be.

vel0city 1mo ago

How good was Einstein at drawing pelicans on bicycles by writing SVG code? Checkmate, meatbags.

no-name-here 1mo ago

Adding sibling comments, I think some people may be overestimating how well the median human can draw a pelican, or create an SVG of a pelican (depending if we’re comparing to an image generation model, or SVG generation).

FabHK 1mo ago
Most people can't draw a bicycle. There was an artist 10 years ago that asked people to sketch a bike, and then turned these sketches into 3D renders - quite funny. https://mymodernmet.com/gianluca-gimini-velocipedia-bicycles/ https://mymodernmet.com/gianluca-gimini-velocipedia-bicycles... https://qz.com/681345/an-artists-3d-renderings-of-bicycles-drawn-from-memory-show-how-far-our-perceptions-are-from-reality https://qz.com/681345/an-artists-3d-renderings-of-bicycles-d...
- heavenlyblue 1mo ago
  Drawing of a bicycle is not it's photographic copy though

reasonabl_human 1mo ago

> What if it can be Einstein, but can’t draw a Pelican, write a solid college-level essay, or fold clothes? Then it’s an expert system. Stephen Hawking wasn’t very good at folding clothes. The ‘General’ part of the term ‘AGI’ seems like a trap to me, because there will always be new workflows to master. Can Astra one-shot level completion on some yet-to-be-released video game? If no, does that mean it’s not yet ‘Generally’ intelligent? You won’t get pure ‘general’ intelligence until you find Einstein’s hidden variables and load the state of the entire universe into context. Meanwhile, building a series of expert systems targeting specific valuable workflows is useful today and seems like it’ll continue to scale to cover huge swathes of economically valuable workflows. I think that’s the more interesting thing to be measuring. The surface area of useful economic workflows that can be addressed with expert systems built with today’s tech. Hitting some ‘Artificial Expert Intelligence’ coverage threshold on economically valuable workflows is what will matter for humans well before pure ‘general’ intelligence.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
idiotsecant 1mo ago
The only important part of 'general' is the ability to learn from experiential data and update your own model. That's what leads to general capability. Humans can't oneshot any task natively, but we can practice for a while until we uncover often novel methods of accomplishing something.
- zarzavat 1mo ago
  Therefore: the current transformer architecture is fundamentally incapable of AGI because the models have no mutable long-term memory. You only have weights (large immutable memory), or context (small mutable memory). Humans have mutable long-term memory: I can learn a new skill, adapt an old skill to new information, or learn new knowledge today that I couldn't perform/didn't know yesterday. I don't have a training cutoff. Context engineering is an attempt to paper over this limitation. You can get really far with context engineering and huge models, but you will never get to AGI because there are many tasks where humans' mutable long-term memory outperforms. For example, a human can invent a new musical instrument and then learn how to play the instrument they just invented. That's inference (inventing an instrument) leading to training (neuroplasticity). Humans have the ability to train our NNs with considerably fewer training samples. Everything that you can do with transformers is in one causal direction: training -> inference.

klooney 1mo ago

Laundry folding has become a doable demo for startups, and ChatGPT has been spitting out college essays for years.

Mawr 1mo ago

I can't draw a pelican. Literally my only point of reference would be AI pelican drawings from the test. Otherwise I wouldn't know how to draw one at all. I would be able to draw an accurate bicycle, but I'm an outlier on that. Most people could not draw one [1]. [1]: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...

kenjackson 1mo ago

Can definitely write college level essays and have for a while. The jobs is that when LLMs first started getting popular, but aren’t quite common professors were that some of the worst students in class started writing the best essays. Now everyone complains because they can detect the slop, but most human writing is so bad. But the really good human writing is still much better.

cma 1mo ago

Which significant practice, how well could Einstein draw a pelican in pure SVG?