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by keskival 1132 days ago
Large Language Models aren't a silver bullet – they don't solve all your problems. But they are a holy grail – as a universal common sense module they give IT systems a capability they never had before, a capability which has been sought after from since computers became a thing, a capacity for common sense.

We now have that capacity and that alone will revolutionize the world. The chatbots aren't about chat, they are about common sense.

Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential.

We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI.

6 comments

You've got it exactly backwards. They're not about common sense; they're about chat.

LLMs act in insensible ways all the time. They contradict themselves. They hallucinate. If you ask an LLM to follow a simple but long logic puzzle and show you its work, it will often make extremely obvious errors and fail to notice even when you ask it to review its work.

What LLMs can do is coherently string together language. That requires sophisticated linguistic understanding, and LLMs are pretty impressive for it. But merely understanding language is not intelligence, or even common sense. I suspect we're approaching the limits of what we can get out of statistical language generation.

Actual AGI would require a logical model of the world, not a probabilistic model of language. Looking at non-human animals, we can see problem-solving evolved long before language did. Language is a second-order phenomenon we use to express first-order problem-solving conclusions about the world, and I'm skeptical that we'll ever manage to accurately recreate first-order problem-solving by training models on the second-order linguistic artefacts of problem-solving. It's actually very easy to create superficially-realistic second-order problem-solving artefacts which, when examined with first-order problem solving capabilities, don't stand up to scrutiny—i.e. contradictions, hallucinations, and faulty reasoning. I suspect that, when computers do learn to problem-solve, it will have been by training to solve problems.

There's also no way we'll get the kind of growth you're predicting from self-play. When it comes to a simple competition like a board game, it's easy to optimize for more skilled play. But there's no objective way to win a conversation. Maybe we'll get some gains out of training these systems against each other, but it's just not a clearly viable use case.

> Like the article, I am only talking about technology that already exists although the progress in deep learning is still super-exponential.

> We will certainly achieve AGI during this year as it will only require making these systems self-play like we did with AlphaGo -> AlphaZero -> MuZero. Self-play, or reinforcement learning with machine feedback will skyrocket the performance of these systems in language domain, which conveniently encompasses much of what is still missing for AGI.

There’s an important difference between exponential and sigmoidal curves. The early stages are indistinguishable, and not enough time has passed to judge.

Personally, I don’t think AGI is possible with current techniques. You say all that’s needed is self play or RLHF. This is categorically not true. It doesn’t even guarantee that AIs will ever care whether they’re alive, a fundamental property of sentience.

There is likely a definitional gap here. Sentience is unnecessary for intelligence for my definition of intelligence, but agreeing on a common definition has been tough when we understand it so poorly.

I happen to also disagree with "caring" (requires definition) being relevant to sentience, defined as the ability to perceive or feel things.

I’m sympathetic to these arguments, but AGI to me is Data from Star Trek. I think most people would agree.

He has curiosity. The current gen of AIs don’t. They don’t even ask questions, let alone remember anything.

He has a capacity to get bored. He tries out guitar just because he wants to. He paints. He’s frustrated when the details aren’t right.

A lot of these traits are human. But that’s the whole point — we’re trying to make a wo/man in a machine.

I’ve never understood the hype, and I’m a researcher. It seems to me that there is a vast gulf between what AIs are capable of and anything that makes being human, human.

I believe they’ll get progressively better at intellectual tasks, though. That will be really disruptive.

>It doesn’t even guarantee that AIs will ever care whether they’re alive, a fundamental property of sentience.

Since when?

We will certainly achieve AGI during this year...

As exciting and transformative as GPT3+ is, let's not get too hypey.

You need to back up outlandish claims with actual evidence and references. As discussed many times in this forum there's no evidence of sentience or any reason to consider the current systems to be even on the path to AGI.

Props up falling share prices though.
> a capacity for common sense.

Uh, nope. Being able to spur out text is far from understanding what common sense is. If it did have the common sense, why would OpenAI struggle so much with filtering? Because the model doesn't comprehend what it generates. It's only capable of interpolate textual data it witnessed. The sense of common sense is merely an illusion created by the brain, which also loves interpolating whatever there are.

It's pretty straightforward to build an RL environment for closed systems like chess but I don't think it's close enough for an AGI to learn. Like RLHF uses human feedback. Unless we come up with a way to scale that process AGI by this year doesn't seem possible
Wait until they can watch TV to learn (I am serious). If you imbue them with competitive play, oh boy. We just gotta figure out what they think funny is.
"Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04501