Comment by pocketarc

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.

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.

for example?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.