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Comment by staticman2

7 hours ago

Is anyone from 2016 still alive today?

If so I'm hoping we can track them down and have them tell us if they think this is AGI.

I'm still here, nearly 50 years and counting. If you had asked me what I imagined AGI would look like back in the 90's, I would have told you "A system that can do everything we can: see, hear, think, do.". If you had shown me GPT-6 back then, I would have said "It looks like a really powerful program, but that's not really what I had in mind.". That's AI, but it's not quite general.

  • And then you'd ask it about an area you're knowledgeable in and realise it routinely makes stupid mistakes.

    Or you'd ask it to add a new page to your website and shout at it to use your existing brand colours instead of inventing some and realise it's not AGI at all...

    • > And then you'd ask it about an area you're knowledgeable in and realise it routinely makes stupid mistakes.

      This honestly doesn’t happen to me much anymore. In what areas do you find LLMs routinely make stupid mistakes?

      2 replies →

As someone who spent countless nights tweaking Edge Detectors (looking at you, Canny), morphology operators, etc., building models to recognize 10 handwritten digits, let me tell you: the current set of LLMs (even the smaller ones) seem like magic. I had never imagined a computer would do such things in my lifetime.

  • Exactly people can say whatever they want, but current level of LLM is AGI level to me. It is already on par with senior programmer if the instruction/prompt is right.

    Once we have 1000 tps, i am sure robots etc.. will also start working like magic.

    • I don’t know, I am writing a modest 30 page paper with Fable and even after rounds and rounds of feedback and improvements there are so many things that are just plain wrong or weirdly out of place or just stupidly written that Fable 5.1 doesn’t seem to have any awareness of by itself that I don’t think it’s AGI, I think a human researcher can easily outclass it in writing and problem understanding. It definitely has super human capabilities but it lacks awareness or self reflection in my opinion.

      For example it should be easy to tell it to not write a paper in the style of a clickbait SEO article or use all of its stupid hallmark AI writing patterns “it’s A, not B!” And a smart human that would be told that would be easily able to comply with that but the model needs to be told in a very detailed way and it seems to lack even basic capabilities to reflect on this, when explicitly given a sentence it will be able to rewrite it but otherwise it’s mostly blind to it. That’s to me a hallmark of it being overtrained on the specific tasks or problems so it appears very smart but once you go off script it still shows that it’s not a “real” mind.

      Of course it’s amazing and has super human capabilities in many areas but if you honestly think it’s better than Einstein like some people suggest why can’t it write a simple “good” academic paper even after giving it specific examples and instructions.

      Maybe that’s what makes these things dangerous, they have super human capabilities in some areas but apparently lack self awareness, taste and meta reflection abilities. The only reason people aren’t afraid more is that they don’t act in the physical world yet, imagine giving it a body, superhuman strength and letting it care for your child when it has a strong “urge” to comply with your exact request and little to no self awareness and human basic instincts.

      1 reply →

    • >It is already on par with senior programmer if the instruction/prompt is right.

      It's magical to me as well, but I don't feel like it's AGI.

      Because in my experience a Senior Programmer does not need the right prompts to deliver the right outcome! :-)

    • Though what has a program that is really really good at edge detection have to do with AGI? The community just spent decades to perfect edge detection. That's great! But let your edge detector try to fry an egg and then tell me again that it's AGI.

    • Doesn’t the G stand for “general”?

      An AI model that’s human-level at programming is an incredible achievement. But it isn’t general intelligence. It’s highly specified intelligence.