No, it is isn’t and saying it is here by using vague goalposts does not make AGI show up. I will agree we have been unable to define what it is, but we can’t even figure out why humans have consciousness right now.
1) Still unreliable at logic and general inference: try and try again seems to be SoTA...
2) Comically bad at pro-activity and taking the right initiative: eg. "You're right to be upset."
3) Most likely already reaching the end of the line in terms of available good training data: looking at the posted article here, I would tend to agree...
The problem is that LeCun was obviously wrong on LLMs before. You have to take what he says with the caveat that he probably talks about these in a purist (academic) way. Most of the "downsides" and "failures" are not really happening in the real world, or if they happen, they're eventually fixed / improved.
~2 years ago he made 3 statements that he considered failures at the time, and he was quite adamant that they were real problems:
1. LLMs can't do math
2. LLMs can't plan
3. (autoregressive) LLMs can't maintain a long session because errors compound as you generate more tokens.
ALL of these were obviously overcome by the industry, and today we have experts in their field using them for heavy, hard math (Tao, Knuth, etc), anyone who's used a coding agent can tell you that they can indeed plan and follow that plan, edit the plan and generally complete the plan, and the long session stuff is again obvious (agentic systems often remain useful at >100k ctx length).
So yeah, I really hope one of Yann, Ilya or Fei-Fei can come up with something better than transformers, but take anything they say with a grain of salt until they do. They often speak on more abstract, academic downsides, not necessarily what we see in practice. And don't dismiss the amout of money and brainpower going into making LLMs useful, even if from an academic pov it seems like we're bashing a square peg into a round hole. If it fits, it fits...
> we can’t even figure out why humans have consciousness right now.
My uneducated guess is that it just means we save/remember (in a lossy way) inputs from our senses and then constantly decide what to do right now based on current and historical inputs, as well as contemplated future events.
I think the rest of our body greatly influences all of that as well, for example: we know running is healthy and we should do it, but we also decide not to run if we are busy, feel tired, or are in pain etc.
"the hard problem of consciousness" is not about "what are we conscious of", but rather: how is it possible to be conscious (i.e. experience qualia) at all?
I think we agree - we have arbritrary goalposts regarding AGI and they have been met. WE don't know what we consider to be "the big changing moment" and that moment is hard to define because we don't have a good definition of it when we talk about ourselves even.
So the convo becomes - what is that "thing" and do we need to draw similarities between "it" and our own intelligence.
It's what everyone other than pedantic jerks think AGI means. Read a book. Watch a movie. Every depiction of AGI is essentially a depiction of a human. Sometimes a human without substantial emotions. That's sentience.
The focus of AGI is on achieving human equivalence in cognitive tasks, or to surpass it ("intelligence"). That's where the money and the research is. Making a stupid machine that happens to be aware ("sentient") isnt the goal.
in french ...so in my own words:
1) Still unreliable at logic and general inference: try and try again seems to be SoTA...
2) Comically bad at pro-activity and taking the right initiative: eg. "You're right to be upset."
3) Most likely already reaching the end of the line in terms of available good training data: looking at the posted article here, I would tend to agree...