7 ms·
AGI is not a continuum from LLMs; true intelligence is characterized by comprehension, reasoning, and self-awareness, transcending mere data patterns.
by Veraticus 2y ago
AGI is not a continuum from LLMs; true intelligence is characterized by comprehension, reasoning, and self-awareness, transcending mere data patterns.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoReasoning and comprehension aren't reducible to patterns of non-reasoning and non-comprehending components?
- sberens 2y agoWhat is an abstract reasoning task that your average 15 year old (who has "general intelligence") can do that you think LLMs can't do?
- joe_the_user 2y agoThese "it's like a young/stupid person" arguments are wretched. LLMs are interesting but it should be obvious their development is not comparable to the development of human beings.
- nvy 2y agoThis. It's obvious to everyone who isn't willfully blind that LLMs aren't truly intelligent, and all the mental gymnastics that people go through to try to portray LLMs as genuinely intelligent is just so tedious.
- xarope 2y agodifferentiating between puppy and a husky in a snowy background without being trained in millions of images?
- mathsmath 2y agoGPT-4 is also really bad right now about comprehending “new” software libraries (even when I ask it to scrape the web).
- 1024core 2y agoWhy does it matter how it was trained?
- Jensson 2y agoBecause that tells us how you approach novel problems. If you need tons of data to solve a novel problem that makes you bad at solving novel problems, while humans can get up to speed in a new domain with much less training and thus solve problems the LLM can't. Thus AGI needs to be able to learn something new with similar amounts of data as a human, or else it isn't an AGI as it wont be even close to as good as a human at novel tasks.
- sberens 2y agoI wouldn't say humans are so different. You could argue we've been trained on about one quadrillion bytes of visual data by the time we're 4 years old: https://x.com/ylecun/status/1750614681209983231 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1750614681209983231
- xarope 2y agoI would say as counter, a child, pseudo-random training by parents and environment. Not sure what price tag to put on this, but in comparison, LLMs, how many billions, to reach what level of competency exactly?
- zdw 2y agoActually caring about another person.
- 1024core 2y agoTIL "caring" == "abstract reasoning".
- kelseyfrog 2y agoHow do you measure that?
- charlescurt123 2y agoDoing any job for more than an hour without completely forgetting it's goals and tasks
- sberens 2y agoHow long do you expect LLMs/agents to be unable to do this?
- nvy 2y agoPersonally, I think that phenomenon (along with "hallucinations") is fundamentally baked into LLMs writ large. I think LLMs are a dead end on the path to AGI.
- charlescurt123 2y agoI think hallucinations are actually the sign that LLMs are far closer to a real brain than we realize. I think hallucinations are a major unsearched gateway to AGI.
- lostmsu 2y agoI agree. Whenever people complain about LLM hallucinations they behave like they never seen one in humans. Not only humans hallucinate all the time, humans also have persistent hallucinations as evident from the presence of opposing beliefs in various slices of society.
- charlescurt123 2y agoGood question, I'm working on exactly this, I suppose you could call it the replacement of RAG. It's actually not very easy to achieve this. I could give a very long winded answer (don't tempt me) but suffice to say it's a resolution problem. All AI have a fixed resolution on creation. Long running tasks focus on a very particular narrowing space per step, the resolution required for an infinite task is infinite resolution. No 9s of error will ever fix this. Funny enough, small animals do this with ease so I strongly disagree the idea that our AI outcompete even small mammals in every way.
- aabhay 2y agoSpeaking from experience. More specifically, something like “whats the best brand of phone”. The LLM just summarizes common knowledge. But even a child will grasp some of the differences and have opinions drawn from experience. Note that this isn’t just an anthro-good argument. AI systems could have experiences and be trained on long duration tasks with memory of what worked and why.
- cageface 2y agoCurrent LLMs have a number of limitations that human reasoning doesn't. Whether these are intrinsic to the technology or can be overcome with larger and better datasets is an open question.
- esjeon 2y ago> your average 15 year old What's the point of this restriction? It really just presupposes the limitation of LLM, so that any negative points would look moot. EDIT: Also, I tried to discuss this very specific point w/ GPT, but it didn't really "get" it. 15-year old kids would be able to follow through.
- langcss 2y agoIf you mean LLMs today: Write code that works. More than 100k tokens worth. Learn something without a megawatt hour of power. Read a novel and talk about what it really means.
- lostmsu 2y agoIt's extremely ironic you picked megawatt hour of power because that is approximately the amount of power humans need to get good at anything according to the popular proverb. But don't worry just yet, GPT-4o could not detect the irony on its own either.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoA 15 year old can reason about how to move their body through a complex obstacle course. They could reason about the nonverbal social cues in a complex interpersonal situation between multiple people, estimate the mood of each person even if there are very few words being exchanged, and determine how different possible actions would affect the situation. They could learn with brief instruction how to control their muscles to climb up a rope. They could learn how to learn so that they become better at a task of their choosing. They can receive new information that permanently changes their understanding of the world. They can learn new tasks for which no massive data set of training data exists. They can perform hierarchical reasoning, like “if I want to fly from San Francisco to New York I first need to buy a plane ticket, then pack my bags, tell my family where I will be going, make sure my phone is charged, walk to the train station, etc etc.” Also if you ask them a question they can provide you one answer with very little thinking, and then if that’s not good enough they can devote more time to thinking about the answer before they answer again. They can devote arbitrary levels of thinking to any problem depending on what is needed. They can continuously take in new data and continually update their world view throughout their entire existence based on this new information. There’s actually a huge list of things current autoregressive approaches to AI cannot do, but they can be hard to describe and people don’t like to talk about them so many people actually don’t understand how limited the current systems are. Here’s a great video where Yann Lecun talks about the limits of autoregressive approaches to AI with many examples: https://youtu.be/1lHFUR-yD6I https://youtu.be/1lHFUR-yD6I
- lostmsu 2y agoAlso: https://sl.bing.net/ep8K7FWVAHY https://sl.bing.net/ep8K7FWVAHY The quality of your argument is very low. You didn't even bother to check yourself.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoThat’s fair. In the interview LeCun uses the example of flying from San Francisco to New York and he asserts that these systems are not good at hierarchical reasoning. I’m no expert in this field so I take him at his word but maybe it warrants further explanation. He also says that such a system wouldn’t be familiar with how to actually move through the world because we don’t have good datasets for how to do so. The rest of what I said still stands. These systems aren’t good at things for which we don’t have massive datasets, and they’re not able to devote different amounts of thinking time to different problems.
- mrkeen 2y agoDrawing a room without an elephant in it.
- budududuroiu 2y agoCounting the number of “r”s in “strawberry”
- qingcharles 2y agoEven if an LLM it isn't "AGI" as we all imagined the term a decade ago, it will certainly be able to fake it pretty well in the near-term. What LLMs have done is really redefine my internal definition of "intelligence." Putting aside the fact I don't believe in free will, I'm no longer sure my own brain is doing anything substantially different to what an LLM does now. Even with tasks like math I wonder if my brain is not really "working out" the solution but merely using probabilities based on every previous math problem I have seen or solved.
- daveguy 2y agoI promise you that your brain is doing more than what an LLM does.
- neom 2y agoIs there much evidence that the brain is doing very much other than what a transformer is working its way towards? Either way, doesn't much matter because you are not your brain, you are a spirit inhabiting a meat sack, brain is just one of the meat sack components.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoNonsense. You can't even define some of those words or know how to measure or identify them in humans. Well, foreign language learners do "reading comprehension tests" but an LLM can already ace that and it's not really the same meaning of the word. For reasoning you can write out the logic of your reasons, so there's that. But that's absolutely not required for AGI. People can already go a long way (often further than by reasoning) on intuition alone without being able to explain how they reached their conclusions.
- Veraticus 2y agoI think most people would agree there’s more to intelligence than language. LLMs don’t have anything except language, so they are not intelligent.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoIf that's the case, then a huge amount of useful intelligent-seeming stuff that humans do isn't intelligence because it can already be done by LLMs. You can keep calling them not intelligent all you like but they're already doing the jobs of human intelligences and it's only going to grow. If they eventually outperform all of us but still only using language and still never being intelligent then I guess intelligence was never that useful to begin with.