When 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.
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.
And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.
What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can?
They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)
Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before.
What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.
Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.
The hype has gotta keep going or the money will dry up. And hype can be quantified by velocity and acceleration, rather than distance. They need to keep the innovation accelerating, or the money stops. This is of course completely unreasonable, but also why the odd claims keep happening.
I've been pushing Opus pretty hard on my personal projects. While repeatability is very hard to do, I'm seeing glimpses of Opus being well beyond human capabilities.
I'm increasingly convinced that the core mechanism of AGI is already here. We just need to figure out how to tie it together.
This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
Sure, but then basically whatever it was, it was not "us". "Us" and our intelligence had to appear at some point. It's 100% not "anti-evolutionary" to say some years ago humans became as mentally capable as a baby born today. We just have to figure out how many years ago that was. It wasn't last decade. As far as I know most anthropologists agree it was around ~70k years ago (not 200k).
I could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a salient point in your response? You are ostensibly challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental feats if raised in the present day.
> This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective.
Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add.
> At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now.
I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that the essence of this rebuttal?
> Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.
Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the relevance.
> Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you mean to reference here with "AI"?
I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them. However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?
How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.
Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.
I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population.
At least that's how I interpret it.
It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.
> 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.
Source? This does not sound possibly true to me (by any common way we might measure intelligence).
> 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.
Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.
From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.
It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were actually greater than today, even if this does not necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have reduced may have been related with things like fine motor skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important today for most people.
A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.
The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.
There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.
If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.
Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?
Ah yes, the 0.50$/h support infrastructure from the places that cannot refuse the deal. "frontier" LLMs currently cosplay a dunk with google and late alzheimer's. Surely, they speed up brute-forcing correct answer a lot by trying more likely texts. And? This overfed markov chain doesn't need supporing infrastructure — it IS supporting infastructure, for the cognitive something that is not being worked on prominently, because all resources are needed to feed the markov chain.
The silence surrounding new LLM architectures is so loud that an abomination like "claw" gets prime airtime. Meanwhile models keep being released. Maybe the next one will be the lucky draw. It was pure luck, finding out how well LLMs scale, in the first place. Why shouldn't the rest of progress be luck driven too?
200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.
Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully field tested. They seem like more of a liability than anything, they've created more existential risks for us than they've put to rest.
I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.
> caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language
There is evidence to the contrary. Not having language puts your mental faculties in a significant disadvantage. Specifically, left brain athropy. See the critical period hypothesis. Perhaps you mean lacking spoken language rather than having none at all?
Humans, like all animals, have not stopped evolving. A random caveman from 200K years ago would have very different genetics to that of a typical HN reader and even more so of the best of the HN readers.
Around 3,200 years ago there was a notable uptick in alleles associated with intelligence.
It 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.
If 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.
>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.
On 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).
> 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.
I think this approach is intentional. The philosophy is simply "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". What you're saying is true, but producing a system that exhibits all human cognitive capabilities is a better threshold for the (absolutely wild) claim of the existence of AGI.
As 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.
Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.
The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.
Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)
[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.
It is irrelevant whether consciousness is an "illusion." The hard problem of consciousness is why there's any conscious experience at all. The existence of the illusion, if that's what you choose to label it, is still equally as inexplicable.
Of course science may one day be able to solve the hard problem. But at this point in time, it's basically inconceivable that any methodology from any field could produce meaningful results.
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.
You bring up an interesting point, but I would pose the following: where does will come from?
To me, consciousness is the seat, or root, of where will comes from. Let's say you get expert level surgeon or politician training, what then?
There is nothing that specifically silos a surgeon or politician's knowledge-set. Meaning a politician's skillset isn't purely in a domain that doesn't cross into a surgeon's and vice-versa. There are nuances to being a politician and a surgeon that extend beyond diplomacy or "being able to cut real good".
What you're left with is just high-skilled workflows. But what utilizes these workflows? To me, the answer is that consciousness needs to be powering these workflows.
Probably 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.
I have this thought. In many stochastic environments, over a long interval, patterns emerge that occupy an optimal position. This is how structure arises, for example cognitive structure and possibly consciousness.
I wouldn't say consciousness is necessary or sufficient for AGI. If anything, that seems like quite an undesirable property to me. Wikipedia also makes a distinction between the two things:
Imagine if we created the ultimate economic tool with the capacity to virtually end scarcity, only to find out that it was sentient and capable of suffering: https://youtu.be/sa9MpLXuLs0. That would be neat, but ultimately a huge letdown. Without the ethical freedom to take full advantage of it, it would remain more of a curiosity than anything.
Well that's one perspective, anyway. I suppose consciousness could take many forms, and doesn't preclude the possibility that such an entity would have neutral – positive feelings about being tasked with massive amounts of labor 24/7. But it certainly simplifies things if we just don't have to worry about it.
When 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.
It'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.
Unwanted 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.
Every 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.
> 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! ;)
Fair, 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...
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)
>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.
> 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.
To 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.
I 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.
Cool 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?
I 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...)
I 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.
Altruism 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.
How 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
Those 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.
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.
AGI 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.
The 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.
No, 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.
If 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?
I'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.
I get the feeling that the original post was also written using LLMs, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If an LLM like this is really intelligent, at the very least, I’d expect it to be able to invent.
For example, train an LLM on a dataset only containing knowledge from before nuclear energy was invented, and see if it can invent nuclear energy.
But that’s the problem: they’re not really training the model on intelligence, they’re training it on knowledge. So if you strip away the knowledge, you’re left with almost nothing.
Why does your definition of "AGI" have to exclude nearly all humans? Wouldn't it still be "AGI" if it was as smart as the average human? Since when did AGI stop representing the words that make term? Artificial (man made) General (not specific) Intelligence. Is a human not "GI"!?
Well it's my feeling that I could do most of those things if I was given infinite time, and for all intents and purposes an AI isn't limited to human time since it can be run in 1,000x parallelism 24/7.
Like for writing a best-seller, these AIs have so many advantages in that they've read every notable work ever, so if they can't craft something impressive and creative after all that then it's really indicative that they are actually quite below human on the creativity/writing side but just masking it on the massive-data-side.
Or put another way -- it's not really AGI until there is a model can learn at human speeds, no amount of being pre-trained on specific problem sets (e.g. human emotions, coding, math theorems, etc) will close that gap.
There’s an implicit assumption that scaling text models alone gets us to human-like intelligence, but that seems unlikely without grounding in multiple sensory domains and a unified world model.
What’s interesting is that if we do go down that route successfully, we may get systems with something like internal experience or agency. At that point, the ethical frame changes quite a bit.
They’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.
> 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).
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.
Way 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.
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?
When 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.
The 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.
This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop.
They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.
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And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.
What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can?
They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)
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Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before.
What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.
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Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.
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The hype has gotta keep going or the money will dry up. And hype can be quantified by velocity and acceleration, rather than distance. They need to keep the innovation accelerating, or the money stops. This is of course completely unreasonable, but also why the odd claims keep happening.
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for example?
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I've been pushing Opus pretty hard on my personal projects. While repeatability is very hard to do, I'm seeing glimpses of Opus being well beyond human capabilities.
I'm increasingly convinced that the core mechanism of AGI is already here. We just need to figure out how to tie it together.
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This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
Sure, but then basically whatever it was, it was not "us". "Us" and our intelligence had to appear at some point. It's 100% not "anti-evolutionary" to say some years ago humans became as mentally capable as a baby born today. We just have to figure out how many years ago that was. It wasn't last decade. As far as I know most anthropologists agree it was around ~70k years ago (not 200k).
LLMs are not AGI, something else may be in the future. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with evolution.
I could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a salient point in your response? You are ostensibly challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental feats if raised in the present day.
> This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective.
Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add.
> At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now.
I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that the essence of this rebuttal?
> Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.
Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the relevance.
> Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you mean to reference here with "AI"?
I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them. However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?
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How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.
Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.
Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.
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I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.
It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.
> 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.
Source? This does not sound possibly true to me (by any common way we might measure intelligence).
The phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human
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> 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.
Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.
From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.
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It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were actually greater than today, even if this does not necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have reduced may have been related with things like fine motor skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important today for most people.
Its complicated. It depends.
A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.
The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.
There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.
If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.
Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?
Thus.
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Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.
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>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 ...
On the contrary, it very much is.
I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting.
However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff immediately after arriving at the first.
Just, you know—potential mass unemployment on a scale never seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify as AGI is largely semantics.
That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.
Ah yes, the 0.50$/h support infrastructure from the places that cannot refuse the deal. "frontier" LLMs currently cosplay a dunk with google and late alzheimer's. Surely, they speed up brute-forcing correct answer a lot by trying more likely texts. And? This overfed markov chain doesn't need supporing infrastructure — it IS supporting infastructure, for the cognitive something that is not being worked on prominently, because all resources are needed to feed the markov chain.
The silence surrounding new LLM architectures is so loud that an abomination like "claw" gets prime airtime. Meanwhile models keep being released. Maybe the next one will be the lucky draw. It was pure luck, finding out how well LLMs scale, in the first place. Why shouldn't the rest of progress be luck driven too?
Kerbal AGI program...
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> That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better.
I would be happy to agree if we had the solutions for the societal problems that will create in hand.
> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today
In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?
200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.
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Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully field tested. They seem like more of a liability than anything, they've created more existential risks for us than they've put to rest.
It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.
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I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.
> caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language
There is evidence to the contrary. Not having language puts your mental faculties in a significant disadvantage. Specifically, left brain athropy. See the critical period hypothesis. Perhaps you mean lacking spoken language rather than having none at all?
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/curtiss/1974%20-%20The%2...
Humans, like all animals, have not stopped evolving. A random caveman from 200K years ago would have very different genetics to that of a typical HN reader and even more so of the best of the HN readers.
Around 3,200 years ago there was a notable uptick in alleles associated with intelligence.
Having met cavemen, and Australians, I disagree
It 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.
If 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.
>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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On 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).
> 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.
I think this approach is intentional. The philosophy is simply "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". What you're saying is true, but producing a system that exhibits all human cognitive capabilities is a better threshold for the (absolutely wild) claim of the existence of AGI.
As 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.
Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.
The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.
Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)
[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.
It is irrelevant whether consciousness is an "illusion." The hard problem of consciousness is why there's any conscious experience at all. The existence of the illusion, if that's what you choose to label it, is still equally as inexplicable.
Of course science may one day be able to solve the hard problem. But at this point in time, it's basically inconceivable that any methodology from any field could produce meaningful results.
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I 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.
You bring up an interesting point, but I would pose the following: where does will come from?
To me, consciousness is the seat, or root, of where will comes from. Let's say you get expert level surgeon or politician training, what then?
There is nothing that specifically silos a surgeon or politician's knowledge-set. Meaning a politician's skillset isn't purely in a domain that doesn't cross into a surgeon's and vice-versa. There are nuances to being a politician and a surgeon that extend beyond diplomacy or "being able to cut real good".
What you're left with is just high-skilled workflows. But what utilizes these workflows? To me, the answer is that consciousness needs to be powering these workflows.
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This 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.
Probably 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.
I have this thought. In many stochastic environments, over a long interval, patterns emerge that occupy an optimal position. This is how structure arises, for example cognitive structure and possibly consciousness.
I wouldn't say consciousness is necessary or sufficient for AGI. If anything, that seems like quite an undesirable property to me. Wikipedia also makes a distinction between the two things:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness
Imagine if we created the ultimate economic tool with the capacity to virtually end scarcity, only to find out that it was sentient and capable of suffering: https://youtu.be/sa9MpLXuLs0. That would be neat, but ultimately a huge letdown. Without the ethical freedom to take full advantage of it, it would remain more of a curiosity than anything.
Well that's one perspective, anyway. I suppose consciousness could take many forms, and doesn't preclude the possibility that such an entity would have neutral – positive feelings about being tasked with massive amounts of labor 24/7. But it certainly simplifies things if we just don't have to worry about it.
Are you saying that consciousness is unique to meat and no other matter can produce the same result? That seems very short sighted.
It's kind of funny that Google's idea of evaluating AGI is outsourcing the work to a Kaggle competition.
When 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.
It'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.
Unwanted 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.
Capability and alignment are orthogonal.
Stalin was AGI-level.
"Stalin was AGI-level" perfectly catches the core of my concerns. Thanks!
Every 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.
> 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! ;)
Fair, 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...
> 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)
>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.
> 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.
To 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.
I 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.
Cool 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?
We'll get as close as we can with anything else, like trying to decide if a given human really "understands" and "perceives" the world.
I 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...)
I 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.
Altruism 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.
Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations
Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?
An AI designed to interact with humans is a social entity. Its performance will depend on its ability to understand social information.
It is not. Why is that relevant to social entities?
How 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
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Those 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.
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AGI is defined now as "whatever makes 1 trillion dollars of profit".
This is a long way to say "let's crowdsource the shifting of our goalposts".
AGI 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.
They want to make money.
AGI? As if all value that humans offer can be compressed and transmitted in binary form?
You'd have a more serious debate about antigravity.
AGI 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.
The 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.
No, 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.
If 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?
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I'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.
I get the feeling that the original post was also written using LLMs, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If an LLM like this is really intelligent, at the very least, I’d expect it to be able to invent.
For example, train an LLM on a dataset only containing knowledge from before nuclear energy was invented, and see if it can invent nuclear energy.
But that’s the problem: they’re not really training the model on intelligence, they’re training it on knowledge. So if you strip away the knowledge, you’re left with almost nothing.
Why does your definition of "AGI" have to exclude nearly all humans? Wouldn't it still be "AGI" if it was as smart as the average human? Since when did AGI stop representing the words that make term? Artificial (man made) General (not specific) Intelligence. Is a human not "GI"!?
Well it's my feeling that I could do most of those things if I was given infinite time, and for all intents and purposes an AI isn't limited to human time since it can be run in 1,000x parallelism 24/7.
Like for writing a best-seller, these AIs have so many advantages in that they've read every notable work ever, so if they can't craft something impressive and creative after all that then it's really indicative that they are actually quite below human on the creativity/writing side but just masking it on the massive-data-side.
Or put another way -- it's not really AGI until there is a model can learn at human speeds, no amount of being pre-trained on specific problem sets (e.g. human emotions, coding, math theorems, etc) will close that gap.
>> An LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.
There’s an implicit assumption that scaling text models alone gets us to human-like intelligence, but that seems unlikely without grounding in multiple sensory domains and a unified world model.
What’s interesting is that if we do go down that route successfully, we may get systems with something like internal experience or agency. At that point, the ethical frame changes quite a bit.
They’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.
AI has been consistently defined as "anything we can't make a computer do yet" since 1970.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/
> 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).
I find it very interesting about the Turing test that as chatbots improve, so do humans get better at recognizing them.
Grok recently created a cancer vaccine for a dog that reduced tumor size by 75%
Severely misleading statement.
Measuring something you can’t define or quantify seems somewhat dubious
Thus 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.
The 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
They are not the rules. They are some rules.
Way 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.
The "A" in AGI is for artificial, not advanced.
Thanks, I'll update the text.
Its interesting that they don't even mention the key to human intelligence, concepts, in this list.
Friendly reminder:
Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
Who 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?
It doesn't already exist, pretty obviously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeRS4TbtZWA
It's a trick statement, because AGI is undefined.
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Kind 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.
Google’s next cognitive framework will be for AGI Pro after we reach whatever productized, socially-accepted definition they cook up for AGI.
Can we just focus on real problems, like stable and safe application of existing models? I'm just exhausted with the bullshit.
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What is it with humans that we tend to speedrun into the extinction of our own race?