7 ms·

How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

35 points by ororm 2y ago

vouaobrasil 2y ago
From the article: > “Bad things could happen because of either the misuse of AI or because we lose control of it,” says Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada. God, I hate phrases like this. We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. AI will evolve in the rich medium of capitalism and be used by anyone due to its ease of use and even laws will be unable to restrict that. At this point, since we've set up a system that promotes technologies regardless of their long-term cost or dangers, we simply cannot control them. Bad things are already happening and human beings are being integrated into a matrix of technology whose ultimate purposes is just the furthering of technology. Even people like Dr. Bengio are just pawns in a system, whose purpose is just to present an artificially balanced viewpoint as if there were a reasonable set of pros and cons, designed to make people think that we could "lose control" but with the right thinking, we don't have to let that happen. I mean come on, just suppose for a second the hypothesis of "AI is already out of control". If Dr. Bengio and their colleagues acknowledged that, then they'd be out of a job. So just by evolutionary pressure on "organizations that monitor AI", they have to be artificially balanced.
- soco 2y ago
  As a thought exercise, on one hand the technology's purpose is having no purpose at all, just doing what it was made to do. So I'd rather focus on the technology people, where some develop it for the sake of developing, and others want to extract most money possible out of it. Nothing surprising because capitalism, but now there's a real possibility that the AI owner(s) will extract all the money there is. And I have no idea how our society will function then - until now rulers always needed subjects... We try building guardrails in laws and regulations exactly because we don't know where all this can lead, but as even today humans find ways to circumvent laws I expect the AI finding ways around its guardrails as well (with human help for sure). Thus sooner or later we will unavoidably come to that point where we have no idea what's gonna happen, and that's when usually unrest peaks.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    I disagree with your first statement. Technology has a purpose, and that is to evolve itself. The ancient greeks had this perspective, so did several philosophers, and I agree with them.
- mrfinn 2y ago
  We are not in control either of the nukeclear power which is available for quite a few nations, since a lot of decades now, as well. Soo... c'mon cheer up most probably is some kind of simulation anyway.
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Thank you for this. I'm glad someone has their head on straight. I think it's like some rich guys said, "Lets roll this tiny snowball down this mountain towards that village." Of course, we are also heating an already overheating Earth with these mostly useless things "just to see" (line from Gibson's Neuromancer, spoken by the psychopath).
- danaris 2y ago
  > We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. I think it's important to be clear on what's being said here: There's a very big difference between "we, the people, do not have control over what Silicon Valley businesses and billionaires are doing with AI" and "there are AIs out there that no human has any control over". The former is current reality. The latter is sci-fi, and nothing yet has demonstrated that it is actually possible. The former is also precisely what I would describe as "the misuse of AI".
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    You are right and I do not think anyone making AI has much control over it either because too many people who make it are addicted to the process in a very similar way in which drug users are addicted to drugs. And also, the prisoner's dilemma solution is almost forcing a lot of people to control it. So I really do believe that NO human has control over it, really.
italodev 2y ago
Is the question even that relevant? I would say the best models already have better than human culture. Maybe not skills, but culture for sure.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Wikipedia has better culture. Shadow libraries and private trackers have more culture than you may need in a lifetime.
  - italodev 2y ago
    Would love to see a model trained on wikipedias only
  - tomgp 2y ago
    I don't understand how culture is being used here. What does "more culture" mean? A culture is a process and a system of relations I can understand how wikipedia has a culture but not how a shadow library has "more culture than you need". Are we talking about the products of cultural production? To suggest that LLMs are anywhere near human level is laughable.
Dah00n 2y ago
I have yet to speak to any actual expert who believes we will see any of the "I" in "AI" anytime soon, if ever.
- synarchefriend 2y ago
  You must be using a peculiar definition of expert because even generally conservative AI experts like LeCun now expect we could have human-level intelligence within 5 to 10 years.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    You should hear about the movement to take the word 'gullible' out of the dictionary.
- jddj 2y ago
  Not to call into question your experience, but for gauging this anecdote: what sorts/levels of experts and how many have you been speaking with?
  - Vampiero 2y ago
    There are some comments that, even if I was blindfolded and only had to listen to them through a loudspeaker, I would immediately recognize as coming from some HN commenter who thinks they're being really smart. This is one of those such comments. It begs the question: have you actually used any of these "AI"s, or are just reading about them on HN?
genericspammer 2y ago
Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect? I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he considers GPT to be a reasoning machine. I suppose that if you consider what GPT does to be resoning, then calling it AI is not so far fetched. I feel it’s more like pattern recognition though rather than reasoning, since there’s no black box ”reasoning” component in an LLM.
- nathansherburn 2y ago
  How do you think reasoning happens in our brains? I wonder if it's more like an LLM than we realise?
- Filligree 2y ago
  There is no black box 'reasoning' component in humans either. I will grant you that humans are far more intelligent, and after spending thousands of hours playing with LLMs, it's hard not to see their limitations. At the same time... they're dumb like a very dumb person who has (implausibly) read the Library of Congress, not like a rock or a computer. I often use Claude to write short stories, largely just for fun. Certainly, its skill at English vastly outmatches its skill at reasoning. It doesn't write well, but it regularly produces turns of phrase that makes me laugh; meanwhile, it needs hand-holding to successfully handle situations with asymmetrical knowledge. It's bad at theory of mind. But it's just bad, in more or less the same way that a two-year-old is bad at it. Not the best reasoner in the world. It would be false to claim it's as smart as the typical seven-year-old... It's almost as wrong to claim that it can't reason at all.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    But it's not reasoning, it's just wordplay, just a gargantuanly complex level of auto-generated ELIZA.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      It definitely feels like reasoning. Problems get solved. They may be simple problems, but it's still far beyond what a calculator can do. Does it really matter if it's "just wordplay"? I'm not convinced humans are any different, beyond the sheer scale. I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'.
shinycode 2y ago
/sarcasm/ The real question is : will it eat us ? (Like in matrix) if we believe there is only one dominant intelligence
frklem 2y ago
I can't believe this article is being published in Nature. The article is flawed, plagued with assumptions that I guess the author doesn't even notice (like what do we really mean by AGI, the epistemological problems/assumptions to intelligence, the real nature of thinking, the real functioning of the human brain). It is really curious that the philosophical community is addressing the debate on what AI really is and its implications, but the computer science community does not read almost anything about philosophy. Regarding the fear of 'losing control of it', I would suggest reading the works (or at least about) of Gunther Anders and Bernard Stiegler. Technology (in this case AI) is inseparable from human being, to the point that we already lost control of technology, its use and its meaning (like, 100 years ago). Another thing that surprises me is how the computer science community is blind to the work of Hubert Dreyfus and other contemporary philosophers that analyze AI from and epistemological and philosophical perspective. But, actually, I should no t be surprised: we barely study philosophy in any scientific discipline when attending university. This rhetoric about how AI is similar to the human brain is starting to be a bit boring. It assumes a very simplistic view on the brain and turns a deaf ear to other types of research (like language acquisition and embodiment, mind/brain duality, epistemological basis for knowledge acquisition, ontological basis of causal reasoning...). And above all, what is really upsetting is the techno-optimism behind this way of thinking.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  This is not a scientific paper that was published in nature by researchers, it is a news editorial written by an editor/journalist. Don't get fooled by the domain.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Yes. Why do people have a problem with Nature publishing the occasional 'article' instead of a 'paper'.
- pera 2y ago
  You are probably thinking of Nature Communications. This article was posted on their more pop-science publishing site. You aren't the first one mislead by the Nature brand btw - if you look into past submissions you will find similar comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com
ssuperczynski 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20241205113633/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03905-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20241205113633/https://www.natur...
mjburgess 2y ago
General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprinting (ie., genes, evolution..) to the living environment of the animal. The most generally intelligent animals are those that have nearly all of their sensory motor skills acquired during their life -- we learn to walk and so can learn to play the piano, and to build a rocket. There is a serious discontinuity in strategy to achive this defferal: the kinds of processes which "blueprint" the intelligence of a bacterium are discontinuous with the processes which a living animal needs to dynamically conceptualise its environment under shifts to its structure. Of the latter animals need: living adaption of their sensory-motor systems, heirachical coordination of their bodies, robust causal modelling, and so on. General intelligence is primitively a kind of movement, which becomes abstract only with a few hundred thousand years of culture. The earliest humans, able to lingusitically express almost nothing, were nevertheless generally intelligent. Present computer-science-led investigations into "intelligence" assume you can operate syntactically across the most peripheral consequences of general intelligence given by linguistic representations. This is profoundly misguided: each todller necessarily must learn to walk. You cannot just project a slideshow of walking, and get anywhere. And if you remove this capability and install a "walking module", you've remved the very capabilities which allow that child then to do anything new at all. There is nothing in the linguistic syntactical shadow of human intelligence to be found in creating generally capable systems. It's just overfitting to our 2024 reflections.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Human nature is to have a moral compass (conscience), with a mind to contemplate whether our planned behavior is positive or negative for the happiness of those around us, and a free will to then choose which paths to take. What you describe is all present in the animals, to more or less advanced degree, where chimps and crows can use tools and even pass that knowledge on to others. Yes, our bodies follow the mammalian template, and with it comes our baseline tendencies to form packs to fight against other packs and fight for dominance within the pack, all in order to enjoy more physical pleasure. We inherit that, but we are capable of rising above those animalistic urges to become a humanitarian, who considers the happiness of others, and even the whole, in their decisions. Further, with our advanced being and our free will, we are able to self-evolve our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, in EITHER moral direction: either towards a more selfish, brutal, and callous competitive state, or towards a more selfless, compasionate, and caring cooperative state. The former leads to where we are now in human history, the latter, rarely exercised, leads to our highest potential, returning us to a happy, prosperous, environmental-concerned human race with various cultural differences but united in the success of each and every person, should they choose to participate. So, no, no computer logic engine at present can in any way mimic the totality of "human intelligence" because very few people understand human nature, so they can only literally "ape" it. They can't even approach simulating what is going on within us, the only moral beings on this planet, and the only beings here with the power to consciously change ourselves and our environment, for better or worse, it all being our choice, however subconscious and inertial for the vast majority.
mkoubaa 2y ago
It's definity capable of human-level stupidity
- benburleson 2y ago
  Maybe that’s the true destiny of AI all along..
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Every machine bears traits of is creator?
jeswin 2y ago
While AI may not be at human level intelligence, we are already beginning to see what superhuman-level intelligence can look like.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Kinda like an idiot savant that can keep up with Terrence Tao at math, yet fail to play Tic Tac Toe or help a farmer plan a river crossing with his chicken.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > superhuman-level intelligence Is this even a meaningful concept?
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Nope, especially because human intelligence is so very thin on the ground.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
I continue to be dismayed by AI's quixotic focus on "human" intelligence. AI is very far from pigeon-level intelligence or dog-level intelligence. I strongly suspect transformers are dumber than spiders.[1] This focus on human intelligence via formal human knowledge is putting the cart before the horse. If your "human-level" AI architecture cannot conceivably be modified for chimp intelligence, and requires bootstrapping with a bunch of pre-processed human knowledge, then it is not actually emulating human intelligence. LLMs are fancy encyclopedias, not primitive brains. [1] Suppose you have an accurate web-spinning simulator and you train a transformer ANN on 40 million years of natural spiderweb construction: between trees, rocks, etc. This AI is excellent at spinning natural webs. Would the transformer be able to spin a functional web in your pantry or basement. If not, then the AI isn't as smart as a spider. I don't think this thought experiment is actually possible: any computer simulation would excessively simplify the physical complexity. But based on transformers' pattern of failures in other domains, I don't think they are good enough to pull it off.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  I think we should discard the entire concept of intelligence at this point. If it is a thing, humans are too dumb to even agree on what it looks like.
- lm28469 2y ago
  I also find it quite weird, I think the fact that the current cycle is focused on chat bots fools a lot of people into anthropomorphising LLMs and perceiving them as better than they actually are. It's very comforting in a world with increasingly less meaningful social interaction
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  I tend to agree, what is being lost in most recent discussions on Human Level AI, is the focus on Language and LLM's. There are plenty of other researchers and companies working on non-LLM models. And there you start getting a little more 'human' like reasoning. Maybe eventually the LLM will just be the 'human interface' to a different AI model underneath, that does have a model of the world, and goals that it is charting through the real-world complexity and not just a game simulation.
handsclean 2y ago
> You can’t say everybody’s a crackpot. Sure can. Whole world’s done this every time there’s a major advance in algorithms. We do this with other major advances, too, like how the industrial revolution was going to usher in utopia and GMO was going to end world hunger. Whenever we can’t see the end of something, only half the world figures it’s a vision problem, while the other half figures the end must not exist.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  Present-day developed world must look a lot like utopia for a medieval serf. And we're now feeding 8 billion as opposed to, what, 2 billion before the green revolution. The exaggerations are only slight.
anonyfox 2y ago
There is zero reasoning in it so far, everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP. Its large _language_ models after all, no matter the hype. Still I find it excellent when exploring new knowledge domains or cross-comparing cross knowledge domains, since LLMs by design (and training corpus) will spill out highly probable terms/concepts matching my questions and phrase it nicely. Search on steroids when you will, where also real-time doesn't matter for me at all. This is not intelligence, yet hugely valuable if used right. And I am sure because of this, a lot of scientific discoveries will be made with todays LLMs used in creative ways, since most of scientific discoveries is ultimately looking at X within a setting at Y, and there are a lot of potential X and Y combinations. I am exaggerating a bit, but at some point (niels bohr?) had the thought of thinking about atoms like we do about planets, with stuff circling each other. Its an X but in Y situation. First come up with such a scenario (or: an automated way to combine lots of X and Y cleverly) and then filter the results for something that actually would make sense, and then dig deeper in a semi-automatic way with actual human in the loop at least.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP Is there some concrete task or behavior that, if demonstrated, you believe wouldn't be explainable by advanced statistics and NLP? In my mind even human/animal behavior is in theory explainable with advanced statistics.
  - anonyfox 2y ago
    thats the jackpot question I think. personally I am leaning towards yes, the human mind is nothing magical here, just more advanced wetware.
tim333 2y ago
>models... AGI. ... unlikely to reach this milestone on their own. I don't think there is a single milestone. Intelligence has many aspects - IQ test type ability, chess playing ability, emotional intelligence, ability to go down to the shops and buying something and so on. AI is making gradual progress and is very good at some things like chess and very bad at others. There will probably be a gradual passing of different milestones on different dates. When they can replace a plumber including figuring out the problem and getting and fitting the parts might be a sign they can do most stuff. There's probably a way to go there but there are a lot of resources being thrown at the problem just now.

35 points by ororm 2y ago

From the article: > “Bad things could happen because of either the misuse of AI or because we lose control of it,” says Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada. God, I hate phrases like this. We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. AI will evolve in the rich medium of capitalism and be used by anyone due to its ease of use and even laws will be unable to restrict that. At this point, since we've set up a system that promotes technologies regardless of their long-term cost or dangers, we simply cannot control them. Bad things are already happening and human beings are being integrated into a matrix of technology whose ultimate purposes is just the furthering of technology. Even people like Dr. Bengio are just pawns in a system, whose purpose is just to present an artificially balanced viewpoint as if there were a reasonable set of pros and cons, designed to make people think that we could "lose control" but with the right thinking, we don't have to let that happen. I mean come on, just suppose for a second the hypothesis of "AI is already out of control". If Dr. Bengio and their colleagues acknowledged that, then they'd be out of a job. So just by evolutionary pressure on "organizations that monitor AI", they have to be artificially balanced.

soco 2y ago
As a thought exercise, on one hand the technology's purpose is having no purpose at all, just doing what it was made to do. So I'd rather focus on the technology people, where some develop it for the sake of developing, and others want to extract most money possible out of it. Nothing surprising because capitalism, but now there's a real possibility that the AI owner(s) will extract all the money there is. And I have no idea how our society will function then - until now rulers always needed subjects... We try building guardrails in laws and regulations exactly because we don't know where all this can lead, but as even today humans find ways to circumvent laws I expect the AI finding ways around its guardrails as well (with human help for sure). Thus sooner or later we will unavoidably come to that point where we have no idea what's gonna happen, and that's when usually unrest peaks.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I disagree with your first statement. Technology has a purpose, and that is to evolve itself. The ancient greeks had this perspective, so did several philosophers, and I agree with them.
mrfinn 2y ago
We are not in control either of the nukeclear power which is available for quite a few nations, since a lot of decades now, as well. Soo... c'mon cheer up most probably is some kind of simulation anyway.
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
MrMcCall 2y ago
Thank you for this. I'm glad someone has their head on straight. I think it's like some rich guys said, "Lets roll this tiny snowball down this mountain towards that village." Of course, we are also heating an already overheating Earth with these mostly useless things "just to see" (line from Gibson's Neuromancer, spoken by the psychopath).
danaris 2y ago
> We've already lost control of it. We don't have any control. I think it's important to be clear on what's being said here: There's a very big difference between "we, the people, do not have control over what Silicon Valley businesses and billionaires are doing with AI" and "there are AIs out there that no human has any control over". The former is current reality. The latter is sci-fi, and nothing yet has demonstrated that it is actually possible. The former is also precisely what I would describe as "the misuse of AI".
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  You are right and I do not think anyone making AI has much control over it either because too many people who make it are addicted to the process in a very similar way in which drug users are addicted to drugs. And also, the prisoner's dilemma solution is almost forcing a lot of people to control it. So I really do believe that NO human has control over it, really.

italodev 2y ago

Is the question even that relevant? I would say the best models already have better than human culture. Maybe not skills, but culture for sure.

skydhash 2y ago
Wikipedia has better culture. Shadow libraries and private trackers have more culture than you may need in a lifetime.
- italodev 2y ago
  Would love to see a model trained on wikipedias only
- tomgp 2y ago
  I don't understand how culture is being used here. What does "more culture" mean? A culture is a process and a system of relations I can understand how wikipedia has a culture but not how a shadow library has "more culture than you need". Are we talking about the products of cultural production? To suggest that LLMs are anywhere near human level is laughable.

Dah00n 2y ago

I have yet to speak to any actual expert who believes we will see any of the "I" in "AI" anytime soon, if ever.

synarchefriend 2y ago
You must be using a peculiar definition of expert because even generally conservative AI experts like LeCun now expect we could have human-level intelligence within 5 to 10 years.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  You should hear about the movement to take the word 'gullible' out of the dictionary.
jddj 2y ago
Not to call into question your experience, but for gauging this anecdote: what sorts/levels of experts and how many have you been speaking with?
- Vampiero 2y ago
  There are some comments that, even if I was blindfolded and only had to listen to them through a loudspeaker, I would immediately recognize as coming from some HN commenter who thinks they're being really smart. This is one of those such comments. It begs the question: have you actually used any of these "AI"s, or are just reading about them on HN?

genericspammer 2y ago

Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect? I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he considers GPT to be a reasoning machine. I suppose that if you consider what GPT does to be resoning, then calling it AI is not so far fetched. I feel it’s more like pattern recognition though rather than reasoning, since there’s no black box ”reasoning” component in an LLM.

nathansherburn 2y ago
How do you think reasoning happens in our brains? I wonder if it's more like an LLM than we realise?
Filligree 2y ago
There is no black box 'reasoning' component in humans either. I will grant you that humans are far more intelligent, and after spending thousands of hours playing with LLMs, it's hard not to see their limitations. At the same time... they're dumb like a very dumb person who has (implausibly) read the Library of Congress, not like a rock or a computer. I often use Claude to write short stories, largely just for fun. Certainly, its skill at English vastly outmatches its skill at reasoning. It doesn't write well, but it regularly produces turns of phrase that makes me laugh; meanwhile, it needs hand-holding to successfully handle situations with asymmetrical knowledge. It's bad at theory of mind. But it's just bad, in more or less the same way that a two-year-old is bad at it. Not the best reasoner in the world. It would be false to claim it's as smart as the typical seven-year-old... It's almost as wrong to claim that it can't reason at all.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  But it's not reasoning, it's just wordplay, just a gargantuanly complex level of auto-generated ELIZA.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    It definitely feels like reasoning. Problems get solved. They may be simple problems, but it's still far beyond what a calculator can do. Does it really matter if it's "just wordplay"? I'm not convinced humans are any different, beyond the sheer scale. I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'.

shinycode 2y ago

/sarcasm/ The real question is : will it eat us ? (Like in matrix) if we believe there is only one dominant intelligence

frklem 2y ago

I can't believe this article is being published in Nature. The article is flawed, plagued with assumptions that I guess the author doesn't even notice (like what do we really mean by AGI, the epistemological problems/assumptions to intelligence, the real nature of thinking, the real functioning of the human brain). It is really curious that the philosophical community is addressing the debate on what AI really is and its implications, but the computer science community does not read almost anything about philosophy. Regarding the fear of 'losing control of it', I would suggest reading the works (or at least about) of Gunther Anders and Bernard Stiegler. Technology (in this case AI) is inseparable from human being, to the point that we already lost control of technology, its use and its meaning (like, 100 years ago). Another thing that surprises me is how the computer science community is blind to the work of Hubert Dreyfus and other contemporary philosophers that analyze AI from and epistemological and philosophical perspective. But, actually, I should no t be surprised: we barely study philosophy in any scientific discipline when attending university. This rhetoric about how AI is similar to the human brain is starting to be a bit boring. It assumes a very simplistic view on the brain and turns a deaf ear to other types of research (like language acquisition and embodiment, mind/brain duality, epistemological basis for knowledge acquisition, ontological basis of causal reasoning...). And above all, what is really upsetting is the techno-optimism behind this way of thinking.

sigmoid10 2y ago
This is not a scientific paper that was published in nature by researchers, it is a news editorial written by an editor/journalist. Don't get fooled by the domain.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Yes. Why do people have a problem with Nature publishing the occasional 'article' instead of a 'paper'.
pera 2y ago
You are probably thinking of Nature Communications. This article was posted on their more pop-science publishing site. You aren't the first one mislead by the Nature brand btw - if you look into past submissions you will find similar comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com

ssuperczynski 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20241205113633/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03905-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20241205113633/https://www.natur...

mjburgess 2y ago

General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. General intelligence is a strategy to defer the acquisition of abilities from the process of construction/blueprinting (ie., genes, evolution..) to the living environment of the animal. The most generally intelligent animals are those that have nearly all of their sensory motor skills acquired during their life -- we learn to walk and so can learn to play the piano, and to build a rocket. There is a serious discontinuity in strategy to achive this defferal: the kinds of processes which "blueprint" the intelligence of a bacterium are discontinuous with the processes which a living animal needs to dynamically conceptualise its environment under shifts to its structure. Of the latter animals need: living adaption of their sensory-motor systems, heirachical coordination of their bodies, robust causal modelling, and so on. General intelligence is primitively a kind of movement, which becomes abstract only with a few hundred thousand years of culture. The earliest humans, able to lingusitically express almost nothing, were nevertheless generally intelligent. Present computer-science-led investigations into "intelligence" assume you can operate syntactically across the most peripheral consequences of general intelligence given by linguistic representations. This is profoundly misguided: each todller necessarily must learn to walk. You cannot just project a slideshow of walking, and get anywhere. And if you remove this capability and install a "walking module", you've remved the very capabilities which allow that child then to do anything new at all. There is nothing in the linguistic syntactical shadow of human intelligence to be found in creating generally capable systems. It's just overfitting to our 2024 reflections.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Human nature is to have a moral compass (conscience), with a mind to contemplate whether our planned behavior is positive or negative for the happiness of those around us, and a free will to then choose which paths to take. What you describe is all present in the animals, to more or less advanced degree, where chimps and crows can use tools and even pass that knowledge on to others. Yes, our bodies follow the mammalian template, and with it comes our baseline tendencies to form packs to fight against other packs and fight for dominance within the pack, all in order to enjoy more physical pleasure. We inherit that, but we are capable of rising above those animalistic urges to become a humanitarian, who considers the happiness of others, and even the whole, in their decisions. Further, with our advanced being and our free will, we are able to self-evolve our ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, in EITHER moral direction: either towards a more selfish, brutal, and callous competitive state, or towards a more selfless, compasionate, and caring cooperative state. The former leads to where we are now in human history, the latter, rarely exercised, leads to our highest potential, returning us to a happy, prosperous, environmental-concerned human race with various cultural differences but united in the success of each and every person, should they choose to participate. So, no, no computer logic engine at present can in any way mimic the totality of "human intelligence" because very few people understand human nature, so they can only literally "ape" it. They can't even approach simulating what is going on within us, the only moral beings on this planet, and the only beings here with the power to consciously change ourselves and our environment, for better or worse, it all being our choice, however subconscious and inertial for the vast majority.

mkoubaa 2y ago

It's definity capable of human-level stupidity

benburleson 2y ago
Maybe that’s the true destiny of AI all along..
MrMcCall 2y ago
Every machine bears traits of is creator?

jeswin 2y ago

While AI may not be at human level intelligence, we are already beginning to see what superhuman-level intelligence can look like.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Kinda like an idiot savant that can keep up with Terrence Tao at math, yet fail to play Tic Tac Toe or help a farmer plan a river crossing with his chicken.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> superhuman-level intelligence Is this even a meaningful concept?
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Nope, especially because human intelligence is so very thin on the ground.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

I continue to be dismayed by AI's quixotic focus on "human" intelligence. AI is very far from pigeon-level intelligence or dog-level intelligence. I strongly suspect transformers are dumber than spiders.[1] This focus on human intelligence via formal human knowledge is putting the cart before the horse. If your "human-level" AI architecture cannot conceivably be modified for chimp intelligence, and requires bootstrapping with a bunch of pre-processed human knowledge, then it is not actually emulating human intelligence. LLMs are fancy encyclopedias, not primitive brains. [1] Suppose you have an accurate web-spinning simulator and you train a transformer ANN on 40 million years of natural spiderweb construction: between trees, rocks, etc. This AI is excellent at spinning natural webs. Would the transformer be able to spin a functional web in your pantry or basement. If not, then the AI isn't as smart as a spider. I don't think this thought experiment is actually possible: any computer simulation would excessively simplify the physical complexity. But based on transformers' pattern of failures in other domains, I don't think they are good enough to pull it off.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
I think we should discard the entire concept of intelligence at this point. If it is a thing, humans are too dumb to even agree on what it looks like.
lm28469 2y ago
I also find it quite weird, I think the fact that the current cycle is focused on chat bots fools a lot of people into anthropomorphising LLMs and perceiving them as better than they actually are. It's very comforting in a world with increasingly less meaningful social interaction
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
I tend to agree, what is being lost in most recent discussions on Human Level AI, is the focus on Language and LLM's. There are plenty of other researchers and companies working on non-LLM models. And there you start getting a little more 'human' like reasoning. Maybe eventually the LLM will just be the 'human interface' to a different AI model underneath, that does have a model of the world, and goals that it is charting through the real-world complexity and not just a game simulation.

handsclean 2y ago

> You can’t say everybody’s a crackpot. Sure can. Whole world’s done this every time there’s a major advance in algorithms. We do this with other major advances, too, like how the industrial revolution was going to usher in utopia and GMO was going to end world hunger. Whenever we can’t see the end of something, only half the world figures it’s a vision problem, while the other half figures the end must not exist.

bondarchuk 2y ago
Present-day developed world must look a lot like utopia for a medieval serf. And we're now feeding 8 billion as opposed to, what, 2 billion before the green revolution. The exaggerations are only slight.

anonyfox 2y ago

There is zero reasoning in it so far, everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP. Its large _language_ models after all, no matter the hype. Still I find it excellent when exploring new knowledge domains or cross-comparing cross knowledge domains, since LLMs by design (and training corpus) will spill out highly probable terms/concepts matching my questions and phrase it nicely. Search on steroids when you will, where also real-time doesn't matter for me at all. This is not intelligence, yet hugely valuable if used right. And I am sure because of this, a lot of scientific discoveries will be made with todays LLMs used in creative ways, since most of scientific discoveries is ultimately looking at X within a setting at Y, and there are a lot of potential X and Y combinations. I am exaggerating a bit, but at some point (niels bohr?) had the thought of thinking about atoms like we do about planets, with stuff circling each other. Its an X but in Y situation. First come up with such a scenario (or: an automated way to combine lots of X and Y cleverly) and then filter the results for something that actually would make sense, and then dig deeper in a semi-automatic way with actual human in the loop at least.

Ukv 2y ago
> everything up to today is perfectly explainable with advanced statistics and NLP Is there some concrete task or behavior that, if demonstrated, you believe wouldn't be explainable by advanced statistics and NLP? In my mind even human/animal behavior is in theory explainable with advanced statistics.
- anonyfox 2y ago
  thats the jackpot question I think. personally I am leaning towards yes, the human mind is nothing magical here, just more advanced wetware.

tim333 2y ago

>models... AGI. ... unlikely to reach this milestone on their own. I don't think there is a single milestone. Intelligence has many aspects - IQ test type ability, chess playing ability, emotional intelligence, ability to go down to the shops and buying something and so on. AI is making gradual progress and is very good at some things like chess and very bad at others. There will probably be a gradual passing of different milestones on different dates. When they can replace a plumber including figuring out the problem and getting and fitting the parts might be a sign they can do most stuff. There's probably a way to go there but there are a lot of resources being thrown at the problem just now.