Comment by stared
9 months ago
My pet peeve: talking about AGI without defining it. There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition. Without that, the discussion may be intellectually entertaining—but ultimately moot.
And we run into the motte-and-bailey fallacy: at one moment, AGI refers to something known to be mathematically impossible (e.g., due to the No Free Lunch theorem); the next, it’s something we already have with GPT-4 (which, while clearly not superintelligent, is general enough to approach novel problems beyond simple image classification).
There are two reasonable approaches in such cases. One is to clearly define what we mean by the term. The second (IMHO, much more fruitful) is to taboo your words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your...)—that is, avoid vague terms like AGI (or even AI!) and instead use something more concrete. For example: “When will it outperform 90% of software engineers at writing code?” or “When will all AI development be in hands on AI?”.
I like chollet's definition: something that can quickly learn any skill without any innate prior knowledge or training.
That seems to rule out most humans. I still can’t cook despite being in the kitchen for thousands of hours.
Then you're not intelligent at cooking (haha!). Maybe my definition is better for "superintelligent" since it seems to imply boundless competence. I think humans are intelligent in that we can rapidly learn a surprising number of things (talk, walk, arithmetic)
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I like Chollet's line of thinking.
Yet, if you take "any" literally, the answer is simple - there will never be one. Not even for practical reasons, but closer to why there isn't "a set of all sets".
Picking a sensible benchmark is the hard part.
I think its more of a measurable quantity than a intelligent/non-intelligent threshold binary. Chollet literally made a paper defining it as something like (skill*generalization)/(experience+priors). I don't think its a flawless model, but also I didn't create keras
>There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition.
That's because of the I part. An actual complete description accepted by different practices in the scientific community.
"Concepts of "intelligence" are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen, somewhat different, definitions"
> There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition
What word or term does?