[goolulusaurs]

The reality is that o1 is a step away from general intelligence and back towards narrow ai. It is great for solving the kinds of math, coding and logic puzzles it has been designed for, but for many kinds of tasks, including chat and creative writing, it is actually worse than 4o. It is good at the specific kinds of reasoning tasks that it was built for, much like alpha-go is great at playing go, but that does not actually mean it is more generally intelligent.

[madeofpalk]

LLMs will not give us "artificial general intelligence", whatever that means.

[righthand]

AGI currently is an intentionally vague and undefined goal. This allows businesses to operate towards a goal, define the parameters, and relish in the “rocket launches”-esque hype without leaving the vague umbrella of AI. It allows businesses to claim a double pursuit. Not only are they building AGI but all their work will surely benefit AI as well. How noble. Right?

It’s vagueness is intentional and allows you to ignore the blind truth and fill in the gaps yourself. You just have to believe it’s right around the corner.

[pzs]

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t." - without trying to defend such business practice, it appears very difficult to define what are necessary and sufficient properties that make AGI.

[pizza]

What about if the human brain were so complex that we could be complex enough to understand it?

[swalsh]

In my opinion it's probably closer to real agi then it's not. I think the missing piece is learning after the pretraining phase.

[UltraSane]

An AGI will be able to do any task any humans can do. Or all tasks any human can do. An AGI will be able to get any college degree.

[layer8]

> any task any humans can do

That doesn’t seem accurate, even if you limit it to mental tasks. For example, do we expect an AGI to be able to meditate, or to mentally introspect itself like a human, or to describe its inner qualia, in order to constitute an AGI?

Another thought: The way human perform tasks is affected by involuntary aspects of the respective individual mind, in a way that the involuntariness is relevant (for example being repulsed by something, or something not crossing one’s mind). If it is involuntary for the AGI as well, then it can’t perform tasks in all the different ways that different humans would. And if it isn’t involuntary for the AGI, can it really reproduce the way (all the ways) individual humans would perform a task? To put it more concretely: For every individual, there is probably a task that they can’t perform (with a specific outcome) that however another individual can perform. If the same is true for an AGI, then by your definition it isn’t an AGI because it can’t perform all tasks. On the other hand, if we assume it can perform all tasks, then it would be unlike any individual human, which raises the question of whether this is (a) possible, and (b) conceptually coherent to begin with.

[pixl97]

The biggest issue with AGI is how poorly we've described GI up until now.

Moreso, I see an AI that can do any (intelligence) task a human can will be far beyond human capabilities because even individual humans can't do everything.

[UltraSane]

One AI being able to do every task every human can do would be superhuman. But it is much more likely that at least at first AIs would be customized to narrower skill sets like Mathematician or programmer or engineer due to resource limitations.

[pizza]

> For example, do we expect an AGI to be able to meditate, or to mentally introspect itself like a human, or to describe its inner qualia, in order to constitute an AGI?

Do you mind sharing the kinds of descriptive criteria for these behaviors that you are envisioning for which there is overlap with the general assumption of them occurring in a machine? I can foresee a sort of “featherless biped” scenario here without more details about the question.

[philwelch]

> For example, do we expect an AGI to be able to meditate, or to mentally introspect itself like a human, or to describe its inner qualia, in order to constitute an AGI?

How would you know if it could? How do you know that other human beings can? You don’t.

[madeofpalk]

> For example, do we expect an AGI to be able to meditate, or to mentally introspect itself like a human, or to describe its inner qualia, in order to constitute an AGI?

...Yes. This is what I think 'most' people consider a real AI to be.

[perfmode]

Meditation requires Beingness.

[adrianN]

Neither of those words have a sufficiently precise meaning that you could tell whether a human has/does it or not.

[nkrisc]

So it’s not an AGI if it can’t create an AGI?

[UltraSane]

Humans might create AGI without fully understanding how.

[ithkuil]

Thus a machine can solve tasks without "understanding" them

[pixl97]

Humans do this all the time to.

[qup]

You can't do any task humans can do

[Xmd5a]

No but they gave us GAI. The fact they flipped the frame problem(s) upside down is remarkable but not often discussed.

[nurettin]

I think it means a self-sufficient mind, which LLMs inherently are not.

[ben_w]

What is "self-sufficient" in this case?

Lots of debate since ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion can be summarised as A: "AI cheated by copying humans, it just mixes the bits up really small like a collage" B: "So like humans learning from books and studying artists?" A: "That doesn't count, it's totally different"

Even though I am quite happy to agree that differences exist, I have yet to see a clear answer as to what about people even mean when asserting that AI learning from books is "cheating" given that it's *mandatory* for humans in most places.

[nurettin]

I just think that language is a big part of the puzzle, but it is not the only one. Simply generating tokens may sometimes look like thought, but as you feed the output back at itself, it quickly devolves into repeating nonsense and looks nothing like introspection. Self-sufficiency would reliably form new ideas and angles.

[swyx]

it must be wonderful to live life with such supreme unfounded confidence. really, no sarcasm, i wonder what that is like. to be so sure of something when many smarter people are not, and when we dont know how our own intelligence fully works or evolved, and dont know if ANY lessons from our own intelligence even apply to artificial ones.

and yet, so confident. so secure. interesting.

[sandspar]

Social media doesn't punish people for overconfidence. In fact social media rewards people's controversial statements by giving them engagement - engagement like yours.

[adrianN]

So-so general intelligence is a lot harder to sell than narrow competence.

[kilroy123]

Yes, I don't understand their ridiculous AGI hype. I get it you need to raise a lot of money.

We need to crack the code for updating the base model on the fly or daily / weekly. Where is the regular learning by doing?

Not over the course of a year, spending untold billions to do it.

[tomohelix]

Technically, the models can already learn on the fly. Just that the knowledge it can learn is limited to the context length. It cannot, to use the trendy word, "grok" it and internally adjust the weights in its neural network yet.

To change this you would either need to let the model retrain itself every time it receives new information, or to have such a great context length that there is no effective difference. I suspect even meat models like our brains is still struggling to do this effectively and need a long rest cycle (i.e. sleep) to handle it. So the problem is inherently more difficult to solve than just "thinking". We may even need an entire new architecture different from the neural network to achieve this.

[chikere232]

> Technically, the models can already learn on the fly. Just that the knowledge it can learn is limited to the context length.

Isn't that just improving the prompt to the non-learning model?

[mike_hearn]

Google just published a paper on a new neural architecture that does exactly that, called Titans.

[KuriousCat]

Only small problem is that models are neither thinking nor understanding, I am not sure how this kind of wording is allowed with these models.

[ben_w]

All words only gain meaning through common use: where two people mean different things by some word, we influence each other until we're in agreement.

Words about private internal state don't get feedback about what they actually are on the inside, just about what they look like on the outside* — "thinking" and "understanding" map to what AI give the outward impression of, even if the inside is different in whatever ways you regard as important.

* This is also how people with aphantasia keep reporting their surprise upon realising that scenes in films where a character is imagining something are not merely artistic license.

[ninetyninenine]

I understand the hype. I think most humans understand why a machine responding to a query like never before in the history of mankind is amazing.

What you’re going through is hype overdose. You’re numb to it. Like I can get if someone disagrees but it’s a next level lack of understanding human behavior if you don’t get the hype at all.

There exists living human beings who are still children or with brain damage with comparable intelligence to an LLM and we classify those humans as conscious but we don’t with LLMs.

I’m not trying to say LLMs are conscious but just saying that the creation of LLMs marks a significant turning point. We crossed a barrier 2 years ago somewhat equivalent to landing on the moon and i am just dumb founded that someone doesn’t understand why there is hype around this.

[b112]

The first plane ever flies, and people think "we can fly to the moon soon!".

Yet powered flight has nothing to do with space travel, no connection at all. Gliding in the air via low/high pressure doesn't mean you'll get near space, ever, with that tech. No matter how you try.

AI and AGI are like this.

[dTal]

And yet, the moon was reached a mere 66 years after the first powered flight. Perhaps it's a better heuristic than you are insinuating...

In all honesty, there are lots of connections between powered flight and space travel. Two obvious ones are "light and strong metallurgy" and "a solid mathematical theory of thermodynamics". Once you can build lightweight and efficient combustion chambers, a lot becomes possible...

Similarly, with LLMs, it's clear we've hit some kind of phase shift in what's possible - we now have enough compute, enough data, and enough know-how to be able to copy human symbolic thought by sheer brute-force. At the same time, through algorithms as "unconnected" as airplanes and spacecraft, computers can now synthesize plausible images, plausible music, plausible human speech, plausible anything you like really. Our capabilities have massively expanded in a short timespan - we have cracked something. Something big, like lightweight combustion chambers.

The status quo ante is useless to predict what will happen next.

[b112]

By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.

No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon. Ever. Never ever.

If you think it is, you're adding things to make a plane capable of space flight.

[dTal]

>By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.

Indeed. But there's a reason "aerospace" is a word.

>No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon

No indeed. But if you want to build a moon rocket, the relevant skillsets are found in people who make airplanes. Who built Apollo? Boeing. Grumman. McDonnell Douglas. Lockheed.

[mlyle]

I feel like aeronautics and astronautics are deeply connected. Both depend upon aerodynamics, 6dof control, and guidance in forward flight. Advancing aviation construction techniques were the basis of rockets, etc.

Sure, rocketry to LEO asks more in strength of materials, and aviation doesn’t require liquid fueled propulsion or being able to control attitude in vacuum.

These aren’t unconnected developments. Space travel grew straight out of aviation and military aviation. Indeed, look at the vertical takeoff aircraft from the 40s and 50s, evolving into missile systems with solid propulsion and then liquid propulsion.

[Xmd5a]

The first plane to ever fly was in fact ignored by the general public for several years

https://bigthink.com/the-past/wright-brothers-ignored/

[ninetyninenine]

That’s not true. There was not endless hype about flying to the moon when the first plane flew.

People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.

As slow as the progress is, we now have metrics and measurable progress towards agi even when there are clear signs of limitations on LLMs. We never had this before and everyone is aware of this. No one is delusional about it.

The delusion is more around people who think other people are making claims of going to the moon in a year or something. I can see it in 10 to 30 years.

[b112]

That’s not true. There was not endless hype about flying to the moon when the first plane flew.

I didn't say there was endless hype, I gave an example of how one technology would never result in another... even if to a layperson it seems connected.

(The sky, and the moon, are "up")

People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.

Surely you mean "Some people". Because the point in this thread is that there is a lot of hype, and FOMO, and "OMG AGI!" chatter running around LLMs. Which will never ever make AGI.

[ninetyninenine]

You said you didn’t comprehend why there was hype and I explained why there was hype.

Then you made an analogy and I said your analogy is irrelevant because nobody thinks LLMs are agi nor do they think agi is coming out of LLMs this coming year.

[pizza]

And yet, the overall path of unconcealment of science and technological understanding definitely traces a line that goes from the Wright brothers to Vostok 1. There is no reason to think a person from the time of the Wright brothers would find it to be a simple one easily predicted by the methods of their times, but I doubt that no person who worked on Vostok 1 would say that their efforts were epochally unrelated to the efforts of the Wright brothers.

[golol]

This is kind if true. I feel like the reasoning power if O1 is really only truly available on the kinds of math/coding tasks it was trained on so much.

[raincole]

Which sounds like... a very good thing?