Comment by sholladay
3 hours ago
In my view, intelligence includes an ability to learn and adapt to never-before-seen situations. And then general intelligence is an ability to apply that across a wide variety of domains.
Machines can certainly recognize patterns and achieve goals through brute force trial and error. They can also use the results of previous iterations to change their behavior in future iterations, which we could call learning. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are good at brand new situations, but there has definitely been progress.
However, last I checked, a seemingly very intelligent LLM still struggles to play Chess at a basic level, let alone drive a robot or other non-language tasks. Its architecture and ability to learn seem a long way off from being general.
Vision models, being able to encompass language and much more, seem to me like a theoretically closer step to AGI. Yet, there is a lot more to the world than just what we can see.
On the other hand, in humans, vision certainly is not necessary for intelligence. So there is something more fundamental, neither vision nor language, that high levels of intelligence are based upon. Once we figure that out, I think we will be able to build AGI.
> In my view, intelligence includes an ability to learn and adapt to never-before-seen situations.
This is exactly what ARC AGI tests
> And then general intelligence is an ability to apply that across a wide variety of domains.
My experience with Fable is that it can certainly apply that in a wide variety of domains
> However, last I checked, a seemingly very intelligent LLM still struggles to play Chess at a basic level
People also struggle to play Chess at a basic level. They only succeed by studying the game for a long time. I will concede that humans can do this and LLMs generally cannot.
While you are mostly accurate in your definition, I’d argue we have discovered that intelligence is emergent/empirical not analytical. There is not a substrate we have yet to discern. Intelligence does not have to approach humanity to be AGI.