15 ms·
When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to th
by pocketarc 6mo ago
When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.
That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.
In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space."
When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence.
And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6mo agoThe amount of things LLMs can do is insane. It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agofor example?
- boca_honey 6mo agoClaiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1] Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice. [2] Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3] [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-announces-crackdown-deceptive-ai-claims-schemes https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-openai-nvidia-microsoft-chatgpt-jobs-investors-markets-2024-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-o... [3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer-service-disasters/ https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer...
- orphea 6mo agoClaiming they will replace software engineers in 6-12 months, every 6 months [4] [4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-predicts-ai-models-233113047.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-predicts-ai-mod...
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agoso you're saying Ai can do all those things? or that you can't read that GP was talking about what Ai CAN do?
- jacquesm 6mo agoMedical...
- next_xibalba 6mo agoWell, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff of science fiction.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agothey passed, sure how do you market that as a product that is needed by other people? there are already companies that advertise Ai date partners, Ai therapists and Ai friends - and that gets a lot of flame about being manipulative and harmful
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- imtringued 6mo agoThis reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop. They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.
- mlmonkey 6mo agoIt looks like the company (Cognition) is actively hiring (20+ job openings last I checked). That doesn't sound like a "flop" to me...
- notTooFarGone 6mo agoWhen you think about it, every job opening is a flop in that sense.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoThink about: why would they be hiring actual human beings if Devin actually works? Seems like the purest example of "dogfooding"...
- jorvi 6mo agoThis generally just keeps being the "the Emperor has no clothes" moment for all these AI bull companies. Microsoft just replaced their native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. Highly ironic. Obviously the native version should run much faster and will use less memory. If Copilot (via either GPT or Claude) is so godlike at either agentic or guided coding, why didn't they just improve or rewrite the native Copilot application to be blazing fast, with all known bugs fixed?
- paxys 6mo agoWeWork had 12,500 employees at its peak.
- roncesvalles 6mo agoWe're waaay past the era when getting funded meant your idea had any promise at all.
- beeflet 6mo agoAnd many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression. What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can? They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)
- saalweachter 6mo agoMy current way of thinking about LLMs is "an echo of human intelligence embedded in language". It's kind of like in those sci fi or fantasy stories where someone dies and what's left behind as a ghost in the ether or the machine isn't actually them; it's just an echo, an shallow, incomplete copy.
- mikestorrent 6mo ago> some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression. I don't think it's unexplored at all, this is basically what information theory is all about. At some level, it becomes incompressible....
- SecretDreams 6mo agoThe hype has gotta keep going or the money will dry up. And hype can be quantified by velocity and acceleration, rather than distance. They need to keep the innovation accelerating, or the money stops. This is of course completely unreasonable, but also why the odd claims keep happening.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoWhy would the money dry up when we have companies willing to spend $1000/developer/month on AI tooling when they would have balked at $5/u/mo for some basic tooling 2-3 years ago?
- gls2ro 6mo agoFirst in some cases it is more than $1000/dev/month. Those companies spending 1000+/developer are doing it with the same hope that at some point those $1000/month will replace the developer salary per month. Or because by doing so more investors will put more money into them. Take away the promise of AI replacing developers and see how much a company is willing to pay for LLMs. It is not zero as there are very good cases for coding assisted by LLM or agentic engineering.
- SkyPuncher 6mo agoI've been pushing Opus pretty hard on my personal projects. While repeatability is very hard to do, I'm seeing glimpses of Opus being well beyond human capabilities. I'm increasingly convinced that the core mechanism of AGI is already here. We just need to figure out how to tie it together.
- edgyquant 6mo agoCan you give an example of something beyond the human level you’ve experienced?
- cheevly 6mo agoGenerating 3000 lines of esoteric rendering code within minutes, to raster generative graphics of anything you can imagine and it just works? From natural language instructions. Seriously think about that my dude.
- lifeformed 6mo agoBut that's not what AGI is. Restructuring data the way they do is very impressive but it's fundamentally different from novel creativity.
- edgyquant 6mo agoThat is amazing but this specific example doesn’t seem all that different from what a compiler does just another level of abstraction higher
- gtowey 6mo agoOnly because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before. What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.
- cheevly 6mo agoI hear this constantly. Can you produce something novel, right here, demonstrably, that an LLM couldnt have produced? Nobody ever can, but it’s sure easy to claim.
- Cyph0n 6mo agoMe personally? No. Us collectively? Absolutely. Was an individual mind responsible for us as humanity landing on the moon? No. Could an individual mind have achieved this feat? Also no. Put differently, we should be comparing the compressed blob of human knowledge against humanity as a collective rather than as individuals. Of course, if my individual mind could be scaled such that it could learn and retain all of human knowledge in a few years, then sure, that would be a fair comparison.
- pylua 6mo ago[dead]
- 11101010010001 6mo agotake my pound of flesh.
- Procrastes 6mo agoI'm going to assume you mean this seriously, so I will answer with that in mind. Yes, I can. - I can build an unusual, but functional piece of furniture, not describe it, not design it. I can create a chair I can sit on it. An LLM is just an algorithm. I am a physically embodied intelligence in a physical world. - I can write a good piece of fiction. LLMs have not demonstrated the ability to do that yet. They can write something similar, but it fails on multiple levels if you've been reading any of the most recent examples. - I can produce a viable natural intelligence capable of doing anything human beings do (with a couple of decades of care, and training, and love). One of the perks of being a living organism, but that is an intrinsic part of what I am. - I can have a novel thought, a feeling, based on qualia that arise from a system of hormones, physics, complex actions and inhibitors, outrageously diverse senses, memories, quirks. Few of which we've even begun to understand let alone simulate. - And yes I can both count the 'r's in strawberry, and make you feel a reflection of the joy I feel when my granddaughter's eyes shine when she eats a fresh strawberry, and I think how close we came to losing her one night when someone put 90 rounds through the house next door, just a few feet from where her and her mother were sleeping. So yeah, I'm sure I can create things an LLM can't.
- lich_king 6mo agoBecause most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.
- jazz9k 6mo agoPerhaps not. But I find myself using LLMs instead ofba search engine like Google. This does have value.
- IAmGraydon 6mo agoTo you, yes, but the compute to return that search costs them far more than a simple search query and on top of that it's hard to monetize.
- faangguyindia 6mo agoIt doesn't, most of research is cached and most of the inference which is returned is also cached unless you are always asking unique things
- IAmGraydon 6mo agoThis is literally the first time I've heard this. What is your source? I can type the exact same query three times and though the general meaning may be the same, the actual output is unique every single time. How do you explain this if it's cached?
- IAmGraydon 6mo ago>Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. That's right, but there's more. When you think about the cost of compute and power for these LLM companies, they have no choice. It MUST be a multi-trillion-dollar idea or it's completely uninvestable. That's the only way they can sucker more and more money into this scheme.
- 6mo ago
- raincole 6mo ago> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?
- guerrilla 6mo agoIt looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.
- speefers 6mo ago[dead]
- danielbln 6mo agoYes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter. With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.
- applfanboysbgon 6mo agoYou wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life. In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.
- Traubenfuchs 6mo ago> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.
- komali2 6mo agoFrom what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.
- pferde 6mo agoThat is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.
- m_mueller 6mo agoit's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?
- adrian_b 6mo ago
- mhl47 6mo agoHow do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.
- wang_li 6mo agoIt's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.
- Planktonne 6mo agoKnowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.
- paganel 6mo agoSeparating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.
- Jensson 6mo agoYou can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.
- cess11 6mo agoThe claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over. Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
- Jensson 6mo ago
- rl3 6mo ago>In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable. >That's not what's happening here ... On the contrary, it very much is. I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting. However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff immediately after arriving at the first. Just, you know—potential mass unemployment on a scale never seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify as AGI is largely semantics. That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.
- 112233 6mo agoAh yes, the 0.50$/h support infrastructure from the places that cannot refuse the deal. "frontier" LLMs currently cosplay a dunk with google and late alzheimer's. Surely, they speed up brute-forcing correct answer a lot by trying more likely texts. And? This overfed markov chain doesn't need supporing infrastructure — it IS supporting infastructure, for the cognitive something that is not being worked on prominently, because all resources are needed to feed the markov chain. The silence surrounding new LLM architectures is so loud that an abomination like "claw" gets prime airtime. Meanwhile models keep being released. Maybe the next one will be the lucky draw. It was pure luck, finding out how well LLMs scale, in the first place. Why shouldn't the rest of progress be luck driven too? Kerbal AGI program...
- rl3 6mo agoPretty much, it's just that these overfed Markov chains when given a proper harness and agentic framework are able to produce entire software projects in a fraction of the time it used to take. Kerbel AGI program hits the nail on the head.
- 112233 6mo agoSorry, I tought you meant "support infrastructure" in a much wider sense — yeah, LLMs are frighteningly good at lockpicking tests using source code shaped inputs. It's just that they are also frighteningly good at finding insane ways to game the tests, too. I wouldn't say that LLMs are very "G" in the AI they do — present them with confusing semantics, and they fall off the self-contradiction cliff. No capability of developing theory systematically from observations.
- orangebread 6mo agoI posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.
- imetatroll 6mo agoThis is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
- suddenlybananas 6mo agoLLMs are not AGI, something else may be in the future. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with evolution.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- freeboon 6mo agoI could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a salient point in your response? You are ostensibly challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental feats if raised in the present day. > This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add. > At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that the essence of this rebuttal? > Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the relevance. > Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think. The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you mean to reference here with "AI"? I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them. However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?
- sinenomine 6mo agoIf you think you are equipped to discuss the topic of evolution of general intelligence in homo, and you haven't read about GWAS and EDU PGS, then at this point you are either a naive layman, or a convinced discourse commando. Because it is really hard and hopeless endeavor to make an objective case that the current human populations have similar PGS scores on key mental traits and diseases compared to 200k years ago.
- gos9 6mo agoHaving met cavemen, and Australians, I disagree
- jacquesm 6mo ago> That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. I would be happy to agree if we had the solutions for the societal problems that will create in hand.
- nurettin 6mo ago> caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language There is evidence to the contrary. Not having language puts your mental faculties in a significant disadvantage. Specifically, left brain athropy. See the critical period hypothesis. Perhaps you mean lacking spoken language rather than having none at all? https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/curtiss/1974%20-%20The%20development%20of%20language%20in%20Genie.pdf https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/curtiss/1974%20-%20The%2...
- cjbgkagh 6mo agoHumans, like all animals, have not stopped evolving. A random caveman from 200K years ago would have very different genetics to that of a typical HN reader and even more so of the best of the HN readers. Around 3,200 years ago there was a notable uptick in alleles associated with intelligence.
- reverius42 6mo ago> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge. Source? This does not sound possibly true to me (by any common way we might measure intelligence).
- mxkopy 6mo agoThe phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human
- reverius42 6mo agoI'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.
- mxkopy 6mo agoEh I don’t think it’s something we can ever discount. Some cavewoman could’ve daydreamed the entire theory of general relativity in her own private language while weaving a basket and we would never know because she never felt the need to talk about it. On the other hand there are people today who will emit novels of profound nothingness. Technology and language is sort of like speaking in this sense, it’s evidence of mind but it’s not mind. And the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and all that