Comment by zug_zug

But this is assuming the model is the entire story. The original comment you were replying to pointed out that the harness is just as important.

The hardware of human intelligence is not a singular thing that is uniform throughout. You cannot take the prefrontal cortex white matter out of someone's head and say you are holding a person. Much of the parts of our brains that enable much of our intelligence, is made of different specialized stuff. The visual cortex and sensorimotor regions aren't only there for input and output, they are used by the more thinky parts of the brain to do visualization and spatial reasoning. The cerebellum contains billions of neurons making little oscillator circuits and PID-like self-regulation machines that help make muscles do what they're supposed to, but also provide attention and time perception.

Heck, our brains contain language models, that train themselves up based on a glut of data over a span of about 10 years, and then they become more or less set in stone for the rest of our lives. Of course we can learn languages, but the "Critical Period" is a very real thing that produces a permanent architecture for some grammatical structures, or things like the ability to partition a lexicon by gender for faster lexical access which cannot be learned as an adult if your native language did not have gender.

I'm not trying to make a direct analogy, the point is that the language model doesn't need to be fully "generally intelligent" all on its own for there to exist a general intelligence, because the language model can be part of a generally intelligent system, which can do things like form, recall, and manage memories which are by now a standard feature in basically every chatbot.

> On the other hand, we must be aware that these models are static, and they indeed stop when nobody asks something or requests an action from them

The parent commenter noted:

"if a harness alone can help the LLM saturate the benchmark with a near perfect score then the combination of the two must still be effectively AGI"

Harnesses absolutely can enable models to continue thinking about things. And LLMs do wonder and explore weird ideas like daydreams when you allow them to do this.

Humans are general intelligence, not artificial general intelligence. :)

The point is replacing humans, and for that it only has to equal them at lower cost (including factors like not needing sleep and being easily clonable). The outperformance lies in the cost savings, not necessarily in the intelligence.

> AI right now could not come up with an award winning novel from the spark of some creative notion

I agree, but in this field we value evidence. So there needs to be some test of novel-writing abilities.

Once there is, AI companies will be out to score highly on it.

Wait for a resurgence of Philip K Dick-style novels as humans desperately try to write things LLMs cannot.

If you consider the data on which an LLM was trained on to be points on a very highly multidimensional object, the claim is that the LLM can interpolate a convex hull spanned by those points, therefore recovering a subset of consequences attainable from those points. Obviously this hull includes completely novel points that were not present in the initial data set, so the output of the LLM goes beyond its initial training. And yet, there are clearly points outside a convex hull spanned by any finite number of points, such that we can imagine not all possible outputs are attainable using this method.

The claim is furthermore that truly original thinking, the infamous leaps in understanding and creativity, happen by attaining points outside such a convex hull.

It's hard to rigorously verify or disprove this claim. Hopefully this helps build an intuition of why the claim is not as shallow and obviously wrong as it may seem initially.

This makes me realize there is a higher bar we need to achieve with AI still. The ability for the model to evolve through interactions more on a hourly or daily basis. The models are accelerating but inference doesn’t modify the model.

speak for yourself

> I think if a person had those same advantages (e.g. could spend 5 hours thinking about what to say next) we could all hold outstanding conversations, or if we had read every book ever written I think many of us could write a very popular book, if we could read every singe company's P&L statement in a few seconds we could invest better than an index fund

I’m not so sure of that - to get average outcomes in these fields it’s a matter of time, to get above average or extraordinary, you need talent/intelligence/taste.

And the bar the parent set is at extraordinary.

I think I view humanity fairly positively, but I admit I would gladly take the other side of that bet

You'd get rapidly diminishing to zero returns after the cost of university a few times over. Every dollar past that would produce no performance gain beyond that.

Are you imagining artificial augmentation somehow? Purely through tutors or training programs we seem pretty limited. Otherwise billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could have far more consistently successful kids.

I claim that the percentages add up to more than 100% because the first described case overlaps with the second.

You (as a human) don't need to prompt AI. Why do you think it is required?

Autonomy is not the same as general intelligence. We already have all kinds of fully autonomous technologies that are nowhere close to generally intelligent. Plus, at a certain level of abstraction, human beings also need to be “prompted” to some extent by stimuli. And this is the funny thing about general intelligence as a concept: most of the definitions that come close to internal coherence rely on references to human intelligence, a concept we feel like we understand because we all live it all the time, but whose actual nature and structure is extremely slippery.

I don't get it, human employees frequently need to ask for directions too?

They often act on their own, too, and get things wrong a lot. The reason it works is because of all the systems of laws and institutions we have built around humans, not so much because human minds are special.

It sounds like what you're saying is that AGI should have some sort of free will. I'm not sure why you would add that as a requirement. Could you expand?

"Being a person in all of its aspects" isn't the same as "generally intelligent". The latter is at best subset of the former, and it's also easy to imagine a system that is more generally intelligent than humans, without being a person. See also discussions of the personhood of various animals who are less intelligent than average humans.

How many times have you done each of the following?

- write a well-received book, write a best-seller

- come up with a new company idea, Run that company

- actually have a decent conversation, maybe someday talk somebody out of suicide effectively

- come up with its own ideas or theories that nobody else has presented

- understand the stock market well enough to trade better than an index fund

I just picked the first few from the top of the list. The average human has probably not done any of them.