Comment by davnicwil
3 hours ago
> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.
I keep seeing this idea and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.
I think it could be a bit like saying if you showed someone 500 years ago a smartphone they would likely conclude at first it was magic. But once you had some time to let them use it and tell them how it all worked on a high level they would eventually obviously realise, no, it's not magic.
I guess just in the same way if you presented current LLM tech out of nowhere a few years ago to someone who'd never seen it, I concede they may be likely to imagine it was AGI in that first conversation, depending on their background.
But after using it for a bit and learning what an LLM is etc they'd land exactly where everyone is today - a great technology useful for some things, not AGI, not magic.
I know how they work pretty well and most days I still have moments where I am struck by how bizarre and magical these thinking machines are.
The fact that a monkey can pick up an artifact a size of a small mirror and do a video chat, see and talk to another monkey on tge other side of the planet is absolutely bizarre. There's no good reason why this should be allowed.
I'm finding it more bizarre, if compared to creating a virtual talking monkey from scratch, with a little bit of Python and a large calculator.
What would convince you that it is AGI?
I always here things like "oh it's useful but dumb on some things", but it's just vague.
What is the test? What is a question that it fails at compared to humans? And no, you can't just say "find me the cure for cancer", but I believe there is probably enough intelligence in the weights that there is likely a cure in there with enough compute and the right questions.
When it can replace a white collar remote worker without humans team realizing they work with the machine. And no, Agents are not like this whatever initial prompt and set of skills you give them. They still won't progress, learn and apply that knowledge like a human.
The fact that you need to ask "the right questions" is why it's not AGI. A general intelligence should be able to ask of its own volition the interesting questions required to advance its goals.
I can’t predict how a novel intelligence could prove to me that it is intelligent. A novel intelligence would have to work out how to do that for itself
i think we'll know agi when we see it, but we can't really predict what that will look like