Comment by mrandish

7 hours ago

> planes don't flap wings therefore they cannot fly?

This example still misses my point, which isn't related to usefulness or economic value. I concede that LLMs can have greater utility and economic value than humans on many tasks. The point is most definitions of AGI include something like "can fully replicate all the routine daily tasks done by any competent high-school graduate." That's not related to whether LLMs can solve many high-value problems faster and at larger scale than any human. That was also true of ENIAC in 1946.

The fact an airplane can fly faster and farther than any bird is irrelevant to whether an airplane can "fully replicate all the routine daily tasks done by any competent bird." That's the bird equivalent to most AGI definitions. An airplane can't build a nest or recognize the signals encoded in birdsong.

In the same way airplanes fail the 'bird replacement' requirement, AIs currently fail most AGI requirements only on the terms: "fully", "all" and "any". And in this context, airplanes scoring 15,000% more than birds on 'speed' and 'distance' doesn't matter any more than AIs scoring 15,000% more than humans on 'add 10,000 numbers'. We still aren't near AGI because LLMs cannot fully match any high-schooler's ability to independently conceive new approaches to novel problems not in their prior training data.

> isn't related to usefulness or economic value

which gets us closer to philosophical questions which I'm personally not that interested in.

>In the same way airplanes fail the 'bird replacement' requirement, AIs currently fail most AGI requirements only on the terms: "fully", "all" and "any".

I'm not sure we want a machine that fully succeeds that test.

Planes pass the 'bird replacement' test on the only criteria that matters to us ... flying.

If we wanted nest making planes I think we'd have them by now. Nest making doesn't rate highly on the problems we're looking to solve though.

I don't want a machine that is moody, or depressed or has schizophrenia, which are all pat of the human condition.

We don't need the human "intuition magic dust" to do 99.99999% of useful work.

They're machines designed to do the work we don't want to. That's as "general" as their intelligence needs to be.

I'd prefer if my clothes folding machine did not have an existential crisis.