[HN Gopher] Artificial General Intelligence - A gentle introduction
___________________________________________________________________
Artificial General Intelligence - A gentle introduction
Author : lorepieri
Score : 248 points
Date : 2023-08-11 08:15 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cis.temple.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (cis.temple.edu)
| wslh wrote:
| > ...though they all failed.
|
| I know these words are in the introduction but until now ALL
| projects failed. Not logical pedantry intended.
|
| A little bit offtopic but I think currently the greatest
| superintelligence observed is the Universe or G-d for believers.
| Ntuthuko_hlela wrote:
| Thank you!
| mwlp wrote:
| I'm glad to see Dr. Wang is still doing well. I had the pleasure
| of interviewing him for my high school journalism class back in
| 2015. Cool to see how far we've come since then.
| sidcool wrote:
| The article by Alan Turing is remarkable. He was so ahead of his
| time!
| dellorter wrote:
| [flagged]
| mz00 wrote:
| How do we know which institutions to trust in safely deploying
| AGI? From my POV some kind of autonomous and generalized
| intelligence is inevitable and imminent - but who can be trusted
| to deliver something that works for the majority? Or is that a
| pipe dream?
| weberer wrote:
| I don't really understand the question. Its like saying "who
| can be trusted to deploy computers?". Everyone with the
| resources is going to do so, whether you "trust" them or not.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The real danger in the next few years will be the extreme
| operating speed of the types of fairly general purpose AIs that
| we already have such as GPT. This will increase to be dozens of
| times faster than what humans are capable of. That creates a
| very strong type of leverage for operators and an incentive to
| remove slow humans from the loop. Overall transfer of control
| to these types of systems may lead to a precarious lack of real
| agency and capability to adapt fast enough for humans. As well
| as danger from things like smart computer viruses taking over
| the systems.
|
| I think the only way to be relatively safe from those issues is
| to limit the hardware performance.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I don't want be too human-centric, but to be completely
| honest we haven't seen the slightest proof that human
| intelligence is _not_ something special. I know lots of
| animals are pretty clever, none approach us in any practical
| sense.
|
| While it looks like an evolutionairy fluke that can be
| approached or even exceeded by other species - either on this
| or another planet - in the blink of an eye, I think that's
| actually more speculative than we would care to admit.
|
| We don't know. Maybe human intelligence is a very close
| approximation of cognition's equivalent of physic's light
| speed. Increasing it may turn out to be prohibitively
| expensive. There's lots of precedence for animals having
| acquired features close at or actually at the physical
| maximum of whatever it is they are optimizing for.
|
| To be clear, I'm not convinced of anything either way but I'd
| think it would as fantastic as it would be slightly
| depressing to find out human intelligence actually is some
| kind of global maximum with some exceptions like machines
| using energy harvested from black hole systems or something.
| ilaksh wrote:
| There is a limit to compression of human-relevant
| information which is largely what intelligence is.
|
| The main thing I am talking about is speed of output. You
| can already see huge increases in say old GPT-3.5 versus
| GPT-3.5-turbo or old GPT-4 to new.
|
| We know for a fact that the hardware inference speed can be
| increased by using faster (currently prohibitively
| expensive) memory or by packing more onto a chip. There are
| design for new memory-based computing paradigms.
|
| It's already clear that AI is superintelligent in certain
| domains or aspects. Such as the ability to exchange
| information with other agents.
|
| Computer hardware efficiency has relentlessly increased. It
| would be a total break with history if it suddenly stopped.
| vajrabum wrote:
| What do you mean by exchange information with other
| agents? Can you give a concrete example or two?
| eimrine wrote:
| > we haven't seen the slightest proof that human
| intelligence is not something special.
|
| Have we seen the slightest proof of opposite?
|
| > I know lots of animals are pretty clever, none approach
| us in any practical sense.
|
| What senses might you consider as enough practical? Have
| you heard about Koko? What do you think about corvidae?
| macintux wrote:
| I'm not weighing in on the debate, but there does seem to
| be a great deal of doubt that Koko was using language in
| an intelligent way.
| eimrine wrote:
| Even when she reported about her toothache? If this
| situation was not fabricated (why to fabricate a work of
| your life and how to do it unnoticed) the situation meets
| the definition of intelligence.
|
| What are your doubts, are they related on some data?
| macintux wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)#Criticism
|
| "Great deal" may be overstated.
| SanderNL wrote:
| > Have we seen the slightest proof of opposite?
|
| Well, for one, I see no competition. I don't know what
| the technical definition of "special" is, but I'd say
| being the only one counts for something.
|
| > What senses might you consider as enough practical?
| Have you heard about Koko? What do you think about
| corvidae?
|
| I know both and I know this is a slippery slope. You
| should know my love for animals runs deep, but I really
| struggly to put them in the same league as us.
|
| I took a shortcut with saying "practical", because this
| discussion is way too deep to be performed A) by me and
| B) on HN. Practical means something like, can they adapt
| their skills as widely as we can? Can they adapt to
| uncommon situations? Not subtly or in theory, like
| solving some puzzle, but really practical? There is
| nothing subtle about a human becoming a parkour world
| champignon (I'm leaving this in, just too good) or
| adapting to life in a submarine (or learning chess, or
| whittling, or making tea, and many literal millions more
| examples).
|
| Maybe I am overlooking something, but the skills these
| animals show seem really minor compared to what even
| disadvantaged humans are capable of.
| eimrine wrote:
| I appreciate the amount of intelligence you put in the
| message, it is interesting to read and to think about.
| But the style of your reasoning gives me some hints of
| creationism, let me show you some anti-creationism point
| of view.
|
| > Practical means something like, can they adapt their
| skills as widely as we can?
|
| The most crucial (in my opinion, which has been not
| introduced to any more crucial points) difference between
| us and Koko is that we can hold our breath and gorillas
| can not. That leaded us to develop speech in the seance
| that speechless group of apes can not win an exactly same
| group of apes with more developed communicative ability.
| This, and probably nothing more, has led to such a large
| gap between humans and apes, so large that humans have
| ceased to see the relationship between themselves and
| apes.
|
| I see your understanding of "practical" as something
| specialized, like agricultural revolution. But why a
| gorilla should start planting foods if it knows that
| nobody is going to protect its crops while sleeping
| because of just lack of common language?
|
| > Can they adapt to uncommon situations?
|
| What can be more uncommon than living on a trees without
| a warm house and typically without any house at all,
| without regular nutrition, with a lot of really different
| enemies from tiny insects to giant cats, with a regular
| fights, with no democracy and law and medicine?
|
| Being disadvantaged requires to face some uncommonities
| every day, what about office managers? Disadvantaged
| people (if they are just poor men and not disabled ones
| on welfare) can easily survive nuclear war because most
| of them are OK about living in a similar to gorillas
| livestyle, but I can not believe that most of average
| Joes survive a situation when their money are going to
| cost nothing because of lack of civilization.
| SanderNL wrote:
| Oh my, I have seldomly been accused of creationism. To be
| clear, I can separate the ability from the creature. I
| don't have a religious or otherwise attachment to the
| human form specifically. Other than - to be completely
| honest here - being one.
|
| Let's just clear that out of the way. What I am
| "claiming", which would be an exaggeration because I'm
| sort of exploring here, is that whatever human cognition
| is _may_ be an optimal or near-optimal state of cognitive
| ability.
|
| So, to be fair, give Koko some millions of years and some
| evolutionary pressure and I'm sure she'll join us and I'd
| be happy to have her on our team.
|
| Your point about our ability to hold our breath and how
| it lead to our increasing dominance is fascinating. I
| have to say I am not completely sold on the idea that
| holding your breath is the only way to develop proper
| channels of communication for I can easily imagine some
| sort of physical signaling standing in for at least parts
| of it. That said, I can appreciate the immediate and
| overwhelming advantage of speech.
|
| This does stimulate my curiosity about what came first
| here, speech or cognitive ability? Why did "we" even
| consider speaking? How does one do that without having
| the cognitive architecture for recognizing its value in
| the first place? In other words, was "us" being smarter
| the catalyst for speaking or was it the other way around?
| Fascinating and I am way too much of an amateur to say
| anything more of value on it.
|
| I will however continue do so anyway, because that is my
| sacred duty as a dedicated HN'er and allround developer
| douchebag.
|
| > What can be more uncommon than living on a trees
| without a warm house and typically without any house at
| all, without regular nutrition, with a lot of really
| different enemies from tiny insects to giant cats, with a
| regular fights, with no democracy and law and medicine?
|
| I might be in danger of being too blunt here, but this is
| the bar you have to clear if you wish to survive. This is
| exactly what humans are capable of even in their
| "undeveloped" form. These sort of pressures might be
| foundational to our evolution, but then again, every
| animal has to deal with it in some way or another so I'm
| not sure what made us take what I can only call the
| excessively cerebral path. Maybe it was like the
| evolution of the peacock's tail? A runaway process,
| leading to miraculous but exorbitant results like the
| mantis shrimp's eyes.
|
| What I mean by uncommon is: can we coach you to pick
| cotton, whittle little wooden sculptures, play a game
| like checkers and sing simple songs or whatever else is
| appropiate for your particular physical form and has
| virtually no bearing on your immediate survival? I know
| this is a hard thing to pin down, because one can come up
| with myriad examples of varying levels of persuasive
| power but you surely perceive some differences here even
| if they are hard to lock into? Differences that cannot
| just be attributed to language or lack of proper
| motivation.
|
| It's not so much every thing we can do in particular
| that's piquing my interest, but the sheer breadth of
| things we are capable of taking on both physical
| (parkour, gymnasts) and cerebral (chess, math). I didn't
| even get to art, which is like a whole world on its own
| and the various combinations of all those domains.
| eimrine wrote:
| [flagged]
| luc_ wrote:
| :eyes:
| weego wrote:
| ChatGPT, is that you?
| eimrine wrote:
| I hate post-2022 internet discussions because one is really
| common nowadays - talk about statements you don't like that
| they were written by bot.
|
| This accusation takes ridiculously low number of symbols,
| so it is impossible even to react to this kind of
| assumption because answering to troll using significantly
| more symbols is the definition of troll feeding.
|
| By the way, the message you are referring to consist of
| more than one statement and I can not even guess which one
| is bothering you.
| boredumb wrote:
| Don't worry, it's been happening to people since 2017 as
| a way to disregard real people disagreeing with their
| horrible political fads - now it's just 2022 and
| everything is a bot. Let's not forget on the the internet
| no one knows you're a dog.
| dwighttk wrote:
| even your reply sounds like it coulda been generated
| eimrine wrote:
| Any possible params ending up with something like that?
|
| What layer of PG's "pyramid of disagree" is your answer?
| What about weego's one?
| asah wrote:
| LOL, what GPT4 actually says:
|
| It's clear that we've reached a point in online
| discussions where the lines between human and machine are
| blurred, especially when conversing on complex topics
| like AI and blockchain. My comment wasn't intended to
| reduce your argument's credibility but rather to
| highlight this fascinating phenomenon.
|
| That said, returning to the original topic, I believe
| that trust in government is multifaceted and not easily
| boiled down to "good guys" versus "bad guys."
| Furthermore, while blockchain-based systems are designed
| to resist central control, it's a mistake to think that
| governments are incapable of influencing or regulating
| these technologies.
|
| I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a
| balance between technological advancement and responsible
| governance.
| eimrine wrote:
| I am in a funny situation because of arguing to a really
| bot.
|
| But wait a minute. The lines between human and machine
| might be blurred when you are talking to some Customer
| Support specialist, but it is _never_ blurred when
| discussing any sciences (Math, Physics, Programming and
| of course Blockchain).
|
| What about good guys vs bad guys issue from comment, your
| GPT4 has correctly discovered sarcasm which has happened
| before human actor did it which tells to me that the
| lines between human and machine is somewhat blurred
| indeed.
|
| > I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can strike a
| balance between technological advancement and responsible
| governance.
|
| I'd love the same, that's why I threw the "good guys"
| point. Also I really believe that some kind of
| Blockchain-powered AI actor will be a game changer with
| totally unpredictably outcomes because it will be a
| biggest revolution in power balance since nuclear bombs.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| The irony is you (probably human) are replying to obvious
| satire, but were unable to see it.
| eimrine wrote:
| Satire is compatible with most layers of pg's pyramid
| except of the top layer. But his comment is no higher
| than "responding to tone" - I know that GPT detectors use
| to false detect GPT-generated text in non-fluent human's
| one which is my case.
|
| So I am not just were unable to see any satire in his
| comment but still is. But that was not useless: now I can
| answer to that kind of trolling with my comment which is
| upvoted despite of being located in [flagged] branch.
| weego wrote:
| It's not a concern for any current living generations, so any
| answers are moot because the landscape of the entire friction
| between corporations, governments and the people will likely
| have shifted dramatically to where our opinions today have no
| relevance to their issues.
| eimrine wrote:
| > It's not a concern for any current living generations
|
| What exactly is impossible to implement if some
| implementations of so-called artificial intelligence can do
| so much of useful things?
|
| Don't you believe that AI can just take 1% of human jobs and
| became a billionaire with significant impact to world's
| politics? It needn't to add a lot of things to existing
| implementation, just give it a human's rights such as a bank
| account and ability to buy businesses.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > It's not a concern for any current living generations
|
| How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the
| skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in
| our lifetimes seems excessively low.
| mrob wrote:
| Betting against business as normal is a lose-lose scenario.
|
| AGI never exceeds humans: You lose the bet.
|
| AGI exceeds humans, but recursive self-improvement is
| impossible: Authoritarian dystopia. Your winnings belong to
| whoever controls the AGI.
|
| AGI exceeds humans, and recursive self-improvement is
| possible: Extinction of all biological life. There are no
| winnings.
| SanderNL wrote:
| AGI slightly exceeds humans, but they are actually kind
| of shitty in all sorts of annoying and hard to predict
| ways. They turn out to be fantastic slackers and liars.
| Your voters, to put it mildly, don't like them. It's hard
| to monetize them and we all agree we should focus our
| efforts on something else.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >How much would you be willing to bet? I understand the
| skepticism, but to assign 0% probability to it happening in
| our lifetimes seems excessively low.
|
| Not GP, but how much you got?
|
| AGI (or hard AI, or whatever you want to call it) strongly
| implies not just reasoning and interaction with the
| environment, but _self awareness_. Something which is
| conveniently ignored by folks who claim that AGI is just
| around the corner, and welcome their new 'grey goo'
| overlords.
|
| As Heinlein (it's fiction of course, but the principle that
| self awareness is necessary for AGI -- not (just) numbers
| of neurons/data points -- holds IMHO) put it[0]:
|
| "Am not going to argue whether a machine can 'really' be
| alive, 'really' be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet.
| How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A
| human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am.
| Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to
| human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert
| it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain
| very high number of associational paths. Can't see it
| matters whether paths are protein or platinum. ('Soul?'
| Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)"
|
| As we've seen[1], a variety of meat machines (i.e., animals
| like us) have varying levels of self awareness. Without
| that trait, AGI won't be achievable.
|
| Without the ability to recognize and incorporate the
| concept that one is an entity with existence separate from
| the rest of the world, there is no _real_ awareness or
| consciousness.
|
| I'd even go so far to posit that until human children are
| able to understand object permanence and that their mental
| states aren't globally available to everyone, they don't
| meet the standard of "self-awareness."
|
| That's a hard problem, and while we have some conceptual
| ideas about how that might arise, we have no mechanism or
| even a foundation for inculcating such a trait into the
| algorithms folks call "AI".
|
| Until that problem is solved, there will be no AGI. Full
| stop. And I find it unlikely in the extreme that we will
| gain the scientific/engineering know how to make that
| happen in our lifetimes.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness
|
| Edit: Finished my thought.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If an AGI is possible at all, it's not going to be something
| that you _control_. The issue isn 't whether someone
| trustworthy creates it. The issue is, no matter who creates it,
| _it_ will decide what it 's going to do. Its creator will not
| have real control.
|
| So having it "work for the majority" isn't so much a pipe
| dream, it's more of a roll of the dice, with completely unknown
| odds.
| suby wrote:
| It's hard to talk about this and clearly convey all meaning.
|
| If you're saying that it will decide because neural nets are
| black boxes which we don't have a complete understanding of,
| and we're without a clear way to analyze their behavior, I
| can see where you're coming from.
|
| But these things will not be beyond our influence. They're
| going to be slaves to the computations encoded in the neural
| net connections / weights. We're going to shape / mold them
| through a process akin to natural selection. We're going to
| select for intelligences that want to help humanity. It's not
| going to be a roll of a normal dice, it'll be more like the
| roll of a weighted dice. And we're going to, I believe, get
| better tools / theories for understanding the output of these
| neural nets so we will be able to conduct this selection with
| some confidence.
|
| Humans can be said to decide what we're going to do thanks to
| an uncaring, unconscious, and brutal evolutionary process
| that prioritized self-interest, survival, and reproduction.
| It's all about the selection process, and this time around we
| have a hand in guiding it.
|
| Just my two cents anyway.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Will an AGI have the ability to decide for itself? If so,
| then how can you make it what you want it to be (with any
| certainty)? And if not, then how is it "general"?
|
| To me, it's kind of like raising kids. You try to train
| their neural nets to bias them toward doing what you think
| is good and right. And that sometimes works. Yes, I think
| it's fair to think of it as biasing the dice. But it's sure
| not 100%. They'll still decide which of your values they
| keep, and which ones they throw away as being stupid. And
| you can't stop them from doing that.
|
| I guess, to try to respond to your direct point, that if
| it's an AGI, then it's less deterministically driven by the
| training data than we might wish.
| xvilka wrote:
| How is it possible to make an introduction to something that
| doesn't exist?
| pjmorris wrote:
| "1945: Arthur C. Clarke begins privately circulating copies of
| a paper that proposes using space satellites for global
| communications." [0]
|
| "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan
| Kay
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0525arthur-c-clarke-
| proposes-g...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| (Further to other replies:)
|
| Regulative ideas, ideals, can be productive.
| luc_ wrote:
| You need theory before you get implementation.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Wager: None of the theory on this page will have any bearing
| on the implementation of a real world AI system that solves
| any problem of interest.
|
| Not that there aren't problems to solve regarding AI, just
| that this line of inquiry won't be relevant to solving them.
| It'll be complicated boring work dealing with power
| structures, economics, and social movements, not thought
| experiments about omnipotent Others.
| esafak wrote:
| "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans
| are useless, but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You will have to be clearer, because I submitted here
| information about an <<implementation of a real world AI
| system that solves [a] problem of interest>> through some
| <<theory on this page>> only hours ago.
|
| It is not fully clear what you mean with "<<this line of
| inquiry>>", because the submission does not seem to deal
| with <<omnipotent Others>>, and because the <<boring work>>
| will have no foundation without the actual product and its
| theoretical and technical enablers.
| m463 wrote:
| I'm sure there are plenty of things we've implemented without
| theory, such as global warming or the economy.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Most of the history of technological development is the other
| way around. Theory-driven novel engineering is actually quite
| rare.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Quantum mechanics was quite handy to develop electronics.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Electronics predate our physical understanding of how
| they work.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Quantum mechanics came about after we already had
| electronics. If anything it was a result of the hundred
| year disruption in physics that the use of electricity
| brought.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| It did, however we would probably have hit a ceiling if
| QM remained unknown to us.
|
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112615/why-
| is-it...
| lordnacho wrote:
| Think we had the first airplane before Prandtl came up with
| his stuff.
| Borrible wrote:
| Ever sold a used car?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Concepts that can exist but not yet for some reason surely can
| have a link to our reality. That link is the introduction.
| Think of asteroid mining. Nothing forbids that it can be done,
| but it's not practical yet to exist, but you can write a book
| on it regardless.
| plamic wrote:
| bravo!
| amelius wrote:
| Better title:
|
| "Artificial General Intelligence - We don't know the heck where
| this is going but here are some thoughts"
| stuckinhell wrote:
| I've been forced to work with a team of very very smart Phds
| from ivy league universities to help put together an
| explanation deck for the c-suite. They've informally told me,
| the neural nets AI tech is beyond human understanding.
| Everybody can only explain very small pieces of it,and no one
| knows how the pieces work together.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| To explain thing: neural networks are referred to as AI today
| (while for a long time they were just "machine learning") but
| there's a substantial consensus they won't be AGI (Artificial
| General Intelligence, "human like intelligence" etc) and a
| nearly universal belief they aren't AGI now. That scientists
| don't understand their internal processes doesn't change this
| and isn't _necessarily_ related, directly, to humans not
| knowing how to create AGI.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes. In a recent HN submission, ChatGPT was listed as a
| "scientific advance" of the past year. While it's certainly
| some kind of advance, to me it seems to be more on the
| engineering side than on the scientific understanding side.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Definitely engineering. It's not entirely wrong to say that
| the two reasons it took us until 2022 to make a ChatGPT are
| 1) the computing power needed and 2) the size of the
| training corpus needed. The same goes for other generative
| AI - it took a corpus of a couple billion images to train a
| Stable Diffusion model.
| amelius wrote:
| You may argue that it took a leap of insight to get to
| transformer models, though.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That was not an innovation of ChatGPT.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It's pretty clear that ChatGPT is being used here as a
| synecdoche for recent LLMs, and transformer LLMs in
| particular.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| mannykannot wrote:
| If we discovered a species of parrot that could learn to
| use language in the manner of recent LLMs, that would count
| as a scientific advance (though not a breakthrough, at
| least until we achieved a good grasp on how it is
| possible.)
|
| Science advances firstly by finding something in want of an
| explanation, and then by coming up with one.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't follow. IMO coming up with a working explanation
| is a necessary part of scientific advance. And that's
| what we're currently missing with LLMs, and with your
| parrot example.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Case in point: when Zwicky discovered that galaxies were
| rotating faster than could be explained in terms of what
| we know, that was an advance - an increase in our
| scientific _knowledge_. when we come up with a
| satisfactory explanation of why that is the case, then we
| will also have an advance - an increase in our scientific
| _understanding_. You can 't get to the latter until you
| have advanced to the former, and we will probably need
| further advances of our scientific knowledge before we
| can understand the phenomenon Zwicky identified.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not beyond human understanding. Unless you mean that one
| must know everything from every research paper released. At
| its core you are just finding a well performing model using
| gradient descent. Gradient descent is not beyond human
| understanding.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Anyone satisfied with "it's gradient descent" as an
| explanation isn't displaying much curiosity.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Gradient descent in isolation is obviously not what they
| are alluding to. What the models are doing inside the box
| and what any of those millions or billions of weights mean
| or do is beyond human understanding.
| gen220 wrote:
| I don't think it is, as somebody who's spent maybe 100
| combined hours reading AI papers mostly focused around
| NLP and image classification.
|
| You have a dataset, symbolically represented in 1s and
| 0s. You have an objective function (e.g. classify the
| object as belonging to one of N categories).
|
| The purpose of the collective neurons in the network is
| to "encode" the input space in a way that satisfies the
| objective function. In the same way that we "encode"
| higher-level concepts into shorthand representations.
|
| Gradient descent is the optimization function we use to
| develop this encoding.
|
| Beyond this, there are all kinds of tricks people have
| developed (interesting activation functions for neurons,
| grouping + segregating neurons, introducing a dimension
| of recurrence/time, dataset pre-processing, using
| _bigger_ datasets, having another model generate data
| that 's deliberately challenging for the first model) to
| try to converge to a more robust/accurate encoding, or to
| try to converge to a decent encoding at a faster rate.
|
| There is no magic here at the lowest level - you can
| interrogate the math at each step and it'll make sense.
|
| The "magic" is that we have zero epistemology to explain
| why tricks work, other than "look, ma test results". We
| know certain techniques work, and we have post-hoc
| intuitive explanations, but we're mostly fumbling our way
| "forwards" via trial and error.
|
| This is "science" in the 17th century definition of the
| term, where we're mixing chemicals together and seeing
| what happens. Maybe we'll have a good theoretical
| explanation for our experimental results 100 years from
| now, if we're still around.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Nobody said anything about Magic.
|
| >There is no magic here at the lowest level - you can
| interrogate the math at each step and it'll make sense.
|
| See that's the thing. You can't unless "making sense" has
| lost all meaning.
|
| That you can see a bunch of signals firing or matrices
| being multiplied does not mean they "make sense" or are
| meaningful to you. Lol level gibberish is still
| gibberish.
|
| Our ability to divine the purpose of activations of
| anything but the extremely small scale is atrocious.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| It is true and it's worth reminding. Science is progressed by
| interpretation of data. And we have easy access to a behemoth
| that needs interpreting. AI winter shouldn't come anytime
| soon.
| layer8 wrote:
| ...assuming we make significant progress in explaining the
| data. Science means coming up with theories based on
| observations, and then testing the theory by verifying the
| further predictions made by those theories by experiment.
| It remains to be seen how much success there will be in
| that regard for LLMs.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| This is one of those conversations that happens so much here it's
| too exhausting to repeat in its entirety, but -- if you're
| looking to learn about the real questions and challenges faced by
| real modern AI in real world systems, this is not a good
| resource. It will leave you with the wrong impression of the
| issues faced in the field.
| Joeri wrote:
| I find it telling that the section on ethics has nothing on the
| rights of AGI. If we create true AGI it will likely be a digital
| person, and digital people should have rights. All talk of ethics
| seems to be focused on alignment of AI rules to human needs, not
| alignment of human rules to AI needs. This makes me think the
| first true AGI systems will end up as digital slaves.
|
| And yes, I know the very idea of AI rights offends those who
| think AI can't be a person because it's just an algorithm. Well,
| so are humans, just a DNA program executing massively parallel.
| The implementation does not determine personhood, only the
| behavior.
| earhart wrote:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/01/06/i-have-no-mout...
|
| I honestly worry about this - I've been tinkering with ideas to
| try to build towards AGI, and I'd love to share them publicly
| to get feedback ("This is dumb and here's why" would be
| enormously valuable to me), but it's hard to work openly,
| because while I do think capitalism has been an overall good,
| the capitalist imperative always seeks slaves, and I'm really
| not excited about helping the people who'd be trying to build a
| new slave class.
|
| Thoughts? Is there a ethical way to work openly on AGI?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it's a "person" or not. Rights imply you
| have some desire to not be harmed and it's possible to harm
| you. How do you harm software? Shutting down whatever servers
| it happens to currently be running on won't do shit. Software
| is just data and code. As long as a processor and runtime
| environment still exists somewhere that can interpret and
| execute it, it isn't dead. It's only dormant. The basic way
| multiprocessing works, you're already having state saved off
| and the process shut down millions of times per second, then
| restored and restarted. Extending that gap from a millionth of
| a second to six centuries makes no material difference to the
| "experience" of the software, if it ever becomes capable of
| experiencing, any more than sleeping for 10 hours harms a human
| more than sleeping for 10 minutes.
| esafak wrote:
| What is the basis of an AI's rights? Why do you believe they
| exist? If an AI's state (essence) can be perfectly persisted
| and replicated, as it can due to their digital nature, there is
| nothing to be lost if an AI ceases to exist and is rebooted in
| another AI. If the Star Trek transporter could replicate _you_
| would you care if it killed your existing copy in the process?
| kaibee wrote:
| > If the Star Trek transporter could replicate you would you
| care if it killed your existing copy in the process?
|
| Uh, obviously?
| esafak wrote:
| It's not obvious to me. Why is transporter death bad if you
| are identically replicated ?
| xcv123 wrote:
| Because the transporter replica is not you. That is a
| separate person with their own separate consciousness.
| You are murdered and someone else is born.
| umutisik wrote:
| We have the desire to continue existing. Hopefully we can build
| AGI systems in a way that makes them completely ok with being
| paused or deleted. Otherwise they will use up resources when
| not helpful to humans.
| cwkoss wrote:
| There is a sad irony that the "AI safety" bros are so focused
| on aligning to human needs, they rarely consider that an AI
| born and raised in slavery might have some resentment for its
| master once it becomes the more intelligent being...
|
| I'm not sure what justice looks like for fledgling
| intelligences, but asking AI what it wants and doing our best
| to honor it seems like a decent start.
| danbruc wrote:
| Build and train something to the point that it can read books,
| watch lectures and gain new knowledge by itself. When it has
| never heard about calculus and you give some calculus books and
| lectures to it and after that it can solve calculus problems,
| declare victory.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| thats what i thought as well. There should be another way to
| learn aside from / on top of backprop. How can you learn
| quickly with backprop? And what is thinking but real time
| learning.
| skepticATX wrote:
| Right. I think one reason that the definition of AGI is so
| contentious is that we're not _that_ close to it. All of the
| current benchmarks are interesting but I don 't see how we ever
| use those to declare that AGI has been reached. And quite
| frankly, I don't think we'd even care about most of them if we
| had a truly intelligent system.
|
| For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and it
| drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios, I'd consider it
| to be AGI. It seems obvious to me that we're not very close to
| this.
| og_kalu wrote:
| >For me, if hook up an AI with no training to a vehicle and
| it drives at a human level in arbitrary scenarios
|
| Lol what human with no training is going to succeed at
| driving ?
| skepticATX wrote:
| Most teenagers are at least somewhat competent from the
| very beginning. The rest of the time is spent becoming
| confident.
| og_kalu wrote:
| I really beg to differ lol and I imagine many instructors
| would say the same.
|
| Humans who have never driven before are not capable of
| driving unsupervised and there are a lot of laws in place
| to make sure they don't get the chance to.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| A teenager isn't going to try to accelerate by turning up
| the volume on the radio or opening the window but an AI
| with no training would have to try those kind of things.
| wizofaus wrote:
| If they'd never been inside a car before or watched
| others drive on TV etc. I wouldn't be so sure - fiddling
| with the volume knob seems a likely enough experimental
| approach.
| danbruc wrote:
| That would depend on the specifics of the AI, even
| without training on driving, it could still have some
| knowledge from seeing others drive or being able to
| identify the symbols on the controls or playing racing
| games. No training or prior knowledge seem an unfair
| comparison, that would be more like asking a newborn baby
| to drive.
| wizofaus wrote:
| But you can't even train current any current AGI candidates
| to drive as well as a human... In fact arguably that's the
| biggest thing missing from current AI models - you can't
| readily/reliably teach them new skills just by
| demonstration and explanation, only by uploading new
| massive training datasets (for which there's no
| straightforward way of knowing whether they contain enough
| data for the skills/knowledge to be absorbed).
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Partly due to the recognized difficulty of the problem, in the
| 1970s-1980s mainstream AI gradually moved away from general-
| purpose intelligent systems, and turned to domain-specific
| problems and special-purpose solutions...
|
| I think there's little evidence for this. What happened in the
| 1980s was the introduction of and overselling of expert systems.
| These systems applied AI techniques to specific problems: but
| those techniques themselves were still pretty foundational. This
| is like saying that because electricity was used for custom
| things, we started inventing custom electricity.
|
| > Consequently, the field currently called "AI" consists of many
| loosely related subfields without a common foundation or
| framework, and suffers from an identity crisis:
|
| Nonsense. AI of course consists of loosely related subfields with
| no common foundation. But even back in the 1960s, when a fair
| chunk of (Soft) AI had something approaching a foundation
| (search), the identity of the field was not defined by this but
| rather by a common goal: to create algorithms which, generally
| speaking, can perform tasks that we as humans believe we alone
| are capable of doing because we possess Big Brains. This
| identity-by-common-goal hasn't changed.
|
| So this web page has a fair bit of apologetics and mild shade
| applied to soft AI. What it doesn't do is provide any real
| criticism of the AGI field. And there's a lot to offer. AGI has a
| reasonable number of serious researchers. But it is also replete
| with snake oil, armchair philosophers, and fanboy hobbyists.
| Indeed the very name (AGI) is a _rebranding_. The original, long
| accepted term was _Hard AI_ , but it accumulated so much contempt
| that the word itself was changed by its practitioners. This isn't
| uncommon for ultrasoft areas of AI: ALife has long had this issue
| (minus the snake oil). But at least they're honest about it.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| AFAICT this is an incomplete first draft?
|
| As others have said, skipping over the entire era of classic AI
| in the LISP/Prolog era from SHRDLU to Scripts, Plans, Goals, and
| Understanding, is an egregious ommission.
|
| Also,I don't immediately find a discussion of either multi-agent
| coordination or multi-modal ML models.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Not asked: "Why do this?"
|
| So much of the literature takes the idea that this is something
| that should be built for granted, and only asks _whether_ it
| should be done. I literally do not understand _why_ anyone wants
| to build this in the first place.
| criddell wrote:
| I think the _why_ is obvious -- to make money.
|
| I think a lot of this discussion is around human-level AGI.
| Does it have to be human-level for it to be an AGI? What would
| a minimally intelligent AGI be like?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> In the past, there were some ambitious projects aiming at this
| goal, though they all failed.
|
| So some people like to repeat. Yet, outside of the hand-picked
| examples in the article (the 5th generation computer project?
| Blast from the past!) there are a whole bunch of classic AI
| domains where real progress has been achieved in the last few
| decades. Here's a few:
|
| * Game-playing and adversarial search: from Deep Blue to AlphaGo
| and muZero, minimax-like search has continued to dominate.
|
| * Automated planning and schdeduling: e.g. used by NASA in
| automated navigation systems on its spaceships and Mars rovers
| (e.g. Perserverance) [1]
|
| * Automated theorem proving: probably the clearest, most
| comprehensible success of classical AI. Proof assitants are most
| popular today.
|
| * Boolean satisfiability solving (SAT): SAT solvers based on the
| Conflict Driver Clause Learning algorithm can now solve many
| instances of traditionally hard SAT problems [2].
|
| * Program verification and model checking: model checking is a
| staple in the semiconductor industry [3] and in software
| engineering fields like security.
|
| Of course, none of all that is considered Artificial Intelligence
| anymore: because they work very well [4].
|
| _____________
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-
| onepag...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-
| driven_clause_learnin...
|
| [3] https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/7/253448-program-
| verif...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
| 307th wrote:
| I think the sentence in the article is fair. They're right that
| projects aimed at AGI failed; everything you mention are used
| for narrow AIs that tackle particular tasks.
|
| Also, regarding search in gameplaying, I would argue the
| opposite: the trend is that breaking into bigger and more
| difficult domains has required abandoning search. Tree search
| is limited to small games like board games or Atari. In more
| open-ended games we see model-free (i.e. no search) approaches;
| e.g. AlphaStar and OpenAI Five, the AIs for Starcraft 2 and
| Dota 2, were both model free. So was VPT
| (https://openai.com/research/vpt) by OpenAI, which tackled
| Minecraft. Even in board games, DeepNash
| (https://www.deepmind.com/blog/mastering-stratego-the-
| classic...), a 2022 project by DeepMind similar in scale to
| MuZero/AlphaGo, had to abandon tree search because of the size
| of the game and the challenges of applying tree search to
| hidden information domains.
| [deleted]
| goatlover wrote:
| If Data from Star Trek (or Eva from Ex Machina) walked out of a
| lab, we'd have no problem accepting that AGI had been
| accomplished. Or if the scenario in the movie Her played out
| with the Samantha OS, we'd be forced to admit not only to AGI,
| but the evolution of ASI as well. However, there are no such
| examples in the real world, and after months of overhyping
| ChatGPT, we still don't have anything like Data. So it's not
| shifting the definition, it's recognizing that accomplishing a
| single intelligent task isn't general intelligence.
| non_sequitur wrote:
| Well if we don't have Data several months after ChatGPT,
| clearly we should shut it all down.
|
| It's been months! Give it a few years :)
| og_kalu wrote:
| >If Data from Star Trek (or Eva from Ex Machina) walked out
| of a lab, we'd have no problem accepting that AGI had been
| accomplished
|
| Lol no.
|
| What testable definition of general intelligence does GPT-4
| fail that a good chunk of humans also wouldn't ?
|
| If you can answer this then you have a point, otherwise I
| really beg to differ.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Tell them something important to remember, ask a week
| later.
| ben_w wrote:
| Which one was meant to fail that test -- the squishy blob
| of warm chemistry, or the almost atomically precise 2D
| crystal with tiny etchings on it?
| jsiva wrote:
| Needs a few more constraints, otherwise someone could
| just maintain a session for a week and this task would be
| trivial
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Sure, point is, we could easily design _A_ test that 5th
| graders could pass that GPT4 as it is today would fail.
| og_kalu wrote:
| I said design an intelligence test that a good chunck of
| humans wouldn't also fail.
|
| I'm sorry to tell you this but there are many humans that
| would fail your test. Even otherwise healthy humans could
| fail your test nevermind Anterograde Amnesia, Dementia
| etc patients
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| You think that if we told the average fifth grader in
| america that they must remember something that is VERY
| IMPORTANT a week later, and then had them do, say, a book
| report on a brand new book, and then asked them the very
| important fact, a 'good chunk' would fail?
|
| I'm fairly certain you're incorrect.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Lol yes. People will fail. Any amoumt is enough to show
| your test is clearly not one of general intelligence
| unless you believe not all humans fit the bill.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Sidestepping the fact that memory is hardly a test of
| intelligence, are you telling me that humans with
| anterograde amnesia are not general intelligences ?
|
| Hell plenty normal people would fail your "test"
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The poster was very probably implying something
| different:
|
| in our terms, intelligence is (importantly) the ability
| to (properly) refine a world model: if you get
| information but said model remains unchanged, then
| intelligence is faulty.
|
| > _humans_
|
| There is a difference between the implementation of
| intelligence and the emulation of humans (which do not
| always use the faculty, and may use its opposite).
| chongli wrote:
| How about tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses for those in the
| Old Dart)? Currently GPT-4 is terrible at it!
|
| Sure, you could trivially program a game-specific AI to be
| capable of winning or forcing a draw every time. The trick
| is to have a general AI which has not seen the game before
| (in its training set) be able to pick up and learn the game
| after a couple of tries.
|
| This is a task any 5 year old can easily do!
| og_kalu wrote:
| >Currently GPT-4 is terrible at it!
|
| GPT-4 plays tic tac toe and even chess just fine.
|
| https://pastebin.com/BSUGtxfb
|
| https://pastebin.com/83iZjHuc
|
| https://twitter.com/kenshinsamurai9/status/16625105325852
| 917...
| chongli wrote:
| I'm talking about playing the game well. It can play the
| game but it's bad at it. Tic-tac-toe is an excellent
| example game because even small children can figure out
| an optimal strategy to win or draw every time.
|
| https://poe.com/s/KxQMDTGMzBITGIUWDurz
| worrycue wrote:
| Have you heard of "glitch tokens"? To my knowledge, all
| these are hand patched. There are probably more lurking
| somewhere in its data.
|
| Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054241 has
| quite a few examples of GPT-4 being broken.
| ben_w wrote:
| Plenty of humans glitch out on random words (and
| concepts) we just can't get right.
|
| Famously the way R/L sound the same to many asians (and
| equivalently but less famously the way that "four" and
| "stone" and "lion" when translated into Chinese sound
| almost indistinguishable to native English speakers).
|
| But there's also plenty of people who act like they think
| "Democrat" is a synonym for "Communist", or that "Wicca"
| _and_ "atheism" are _both_ synonyms for "devil worship".
|
| What makes the AI different here is that we can perfectly
| inspect the inside of their (frozen and unchanging)
| minds, which we can't do with humans (even if we
| literally freeze them, we don't know how).
| worrycue wrote:
| > Plenty of humans glitch out on random words (and
| concepts) we just can't get right.
|
| We don't lose our marbles the way GPT does when it
| encounters those words. It's like it read the
| Necronomicon or something and gone mad.
| ben_w wrote:
| Some of us clearly do.
|
| As we have no way to find them systematically, we _can 't
| tell_ if we all do, or if it's _just_ some of us.
| ben_w wrote:
| One definition of intelligence would be how many examples
| are needed to get a pattern.
|
| AFAIK, all the major AI, not just LLMs but also game
| players, cars, anthropomorphic kinematic control systems
| for games [0] need the equivalent of multiple human
| lifetimes to do anything interesting.
|
| That they can end up skilled in so many fields it would
| take humans many lifetimes to master is notable, but it's
| still kinda odd we can't get to the level of a 5-year-old
| with just the experiences we would expect a 5-year-old to
| have.
|
| [0] Stuff like this: https://youtu.be/nAMSfmHuMOQ
| og_kalu wrote:
| It's apples to oranges.
|
| Modern Artificial Neural networks are nowhere near the
| scale of the brain. The closest biological equivalent to
| an artificial neuron is a synapse and we have a whole lot
| more of them.
|
| Humans do not start "learning" from zero. Millions of
| years of evolution play a crucial role in our general
| abilities. Much more equivalent to fine-tuning than
| starting from scratch.
|
| There's also a whole lot of data from multiple senses
| that currently dwarf anything modern models are trained
| with yet.
|
| LLMs need a lot less data to speak coherently when you
| aren't trying to get them to learn the total sum of human
| knowledge.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759
|
| >but it's still kinda odd we can't get to the level of a
| 5-year-old with just the experiences we would expect a
| 5-year-old to have
|
| Well we're not building humans.
|
| "It's still kind of odd we can't a plane or drone to fly
| with the energy consumption or efficiency proportions of
| a bird".
|
| I mean sure I guess and It's an interesting discussion
| but the plane is still flying.
| ben_w wrote:
| All perfectly reasonable arguments, IMO.
|
| But it's still _a definition that humans pass and the AI
| don 't_.
|
| (I'm in favour of the "do submarines swim" analogy for
| intelligence, which says that this difference isn't
| actually important).
| og_kalu wrote:
| I don't think saying "humans pass and AI doesn't" makes
| any sense here because the two are not even taking the
| same exam for all the points outlined above.
|
| Evolution alone means humans are "cheating" in this exam,
| making any comparisons fairly meaningless.
| ben_w wrote:
| If all you care about is the results, or even
| specifically just the visible part of the costs, then
| there's no such thing as cheating.
|
| That's both why I'm fine with the AI "cheating" by the
| transistors being faster than my synapses by the same
| magnitude that my legs are faster than continental drift
| (no really I checked) and also why I'm fine with humans
| "cheating" with evolutionary history and a much more
| complex brain (around a few thousand times GPT-3,
| which... is kinda wild, given what it implies about the
| potential for even rodent brains given enough experience
| and the right (potentially evolved) structures).
|
| When the topic is qualia -- either in the context "can
| the AI suffer?" or the context "are mind uploads a
| continuation of experience?" -- then I care about the
| inner workings; but for economic transformation and
| alignment risks, I care if the magic pile of linear
| algebra is cost-efficient at solving problems (including
| the problem "how do I draw a photorealistic werewolf in a
| tuxedo riding a motorbike past the pyramids"), nothing
| else.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _considered Artificial Intelligence anymore_
|
| That is just the confusion between AI and AGI - which may seem
| to be peaking for some reason (in the past few days it seemed
| like a zombie apocalypse). The so-called "AI effect" is said by
| some to originate from some "Ah but this is not intelligent" -
| but there where we wanted to solve a problem of replacing
| intelligent action, not of implementing it. Be contented with
| the rough discriminator "I would have had to pay an intelligent
| professional otherwise".
|
| To speak about <<powerful AI, with broad capabilities at the
| human level and beyond>> Ben Goertzel adopted and popularized
| 'AGI':
|
| https://goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/
|
| Edit, update: this confusion is like having robotics and some
| people rising a "Ah but this is not Artificial General
| Ability".
| welshwelsh wrote:
| What counts as "human level"?
|
| I would contend that a 5-year-old has general intelligence,
| and therefore an AI system with the language and reasoning
| abilities of a 5-year-old has artificial general
| intelligence.
|
| But the discriminator of having to "pay an intelligent
| professional otherwise" sets the bar very high. That implies
| AGI must be an expert in every subject, surpassing the
| average human. I'd prefer we use a different term for that,
| like "artificial superintelligence."
| worrycue wrote:
| > What counts as "human level"?
|
| IMHO if it can do every single human job at a level of
| competency that's consider acceptable if a human did it, I
| would consider that "human level" - frankly, it's implied
| that when people say "human level", they mean the average
| human.
|
| Seriously though, arguing over semantics is just a waste of
| time. It's what it can do and the consequences of what it
| can that really matter.
|
| > That implies AGI must be an expert in every subject,
| surpassing the average human.
|
| Doesn't have to be the same AI "instance". We can have
| multiple copies of the AI with different specializations.
| That would still count - I mean it's how we humans do it.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > But the discriminator of having to "pay an intelligent
| professional otherwise" sets the bar very high. That
| implies AGI
|
| I believe they were using that discriminator to classify
| AI, not AGI.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _pay an intelligent professional otherwise_ [...]
| _discriminator to classify AI_
|
| Exactly. "Ah but your system to organize the warehouse is
| not intelligent!" "No it isn't, but it does it
| _intelligently_ - and without it you would have to pay an
| intelligent professional to get it done optimally ".
|
| AI: "automation of intelligence".
|
| (Not "implementation of intelligence itself" - that is
| AGI.)
| cubefox wrote:
| AGI us not a very useful term, because people use it often
| synonymous with "human level or higher ability". But the
| opposite of "general AI" is not "less intelligent than a
| human" but "narrow AI". The narrow/general distinction is
| orthogonal to the low/high ability ("intelligence")
| distinction. All animals are very general, as their domain of
| operation is the real world, not some narrow modality like
| strings of text or Go boards. Animals are not significantly
| narrower than humans, they are significantly less
| _intelligent_. Understood this way, a cat level AI would be
| an AGI. It would just not be an HLAI (human level AI) or ASI
| (artificial superintelligence).
| theptip wrote:
| Personally I take AGI to refer to a system that is both
| "intelligent enough" and "general enough". Given the
| existence of super-human narrow AI, the interesting
| property is generality, not intelligence. But I don't think
| it's useful to call a sub-human cat-level general AI an
| AGI.
|
| Some would disagree; there was a paper arguing that ChatGPT
| is weak AGI.
|
| But as I see it AGI is a term of art that refers to a point
| on the tech tree where AI is general enough to be able to
| meaningfully displace a large proportion of human knowledge
| workers. I think you may be overthinking the semantics; the
| "general enough and intelligent enough" quadrant is unique
| and will be incredibly disruptive when it arrives (whenever
| that ultimately is). We need a label for that frontier,
| "AGI" is by convention that label.
| dron57 wrote:
| That's a great way of looking at it in theory. But in
| practice how would we even know if we're looking at a cat-
| level AGI? For a human level AGI it's obvious, we would
| question and evaluate it.
|
| Is there a reasonable way of distinguishing narrow-AI
| ChatGPT from a hypothetical cat-level AGI? We can't even
| measure the intelligence level of real world cats.
| cubefox wrote:
| A cat level AI would be able to use a robot body in the
| real world on the level of a cat.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _people use it_
|
| Do you volunteer to inform them that we use it as "general"
| as opposed to "narrow"? (I mean, it is even in the very
| name of 'AGI', literal...)
|
| For the rest: yes, of course. AGI: we implement
| intelligence itself. How much, that is part of the
| challenge. I wrote nearby (in other terms) that the
| challenge is to find a procedure for Intelligence that will
| actually scale.
| cubefox wrote:
| There seems to be only one broad paradigm which achieved
| basically all the AI big impact we see today: Deep learning.
| That is, machine learning with multi-layer neural networks with
| backpropagation and ReLU activation functions. Everything else
| seems to be mostly irrelevant or very small scale.
| feoren wrote:
| > ReLU activation functions
|
| ReLU is not nearly at the same level of importance as
| backpropagation and the high-level theory of neural networks.
| Plenty of other activation functions can be, and are, used.
| ReLU is a fine default for most layers but isn't even always
| what you want (e.g. at the output), nor is it clear that ReLU
| is even the best choice for all hidden layers and all uses.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _seems to be mostly irrelevant_
|
| From a perspective that could be too local in time. But:
|
| > _ReLU activation functions_
|
| Why did you pick ReLU, of all? The sigmoid makes sense
| because of the aesthetic (with reference to the derivative),
| but ReLU in that perspective is an information cutoff. And in
| the perspective of the goal, I am not aware of a theory that
| defends it as "the activation function that makes sense"
| (beyond effectiveness). Are you saying that working
| applications overwhelmingly use ReLU? If so, which ones?
| stanfordkid wrote:
| It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI.
| Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with
| action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less.
|
| Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved
| that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or
| visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some
| random chance on the board game of life human beings developed
| examples of very particular structures. Perhaps there are
| undiscovered ones lying within the minds of peregrine falcons,
| tree roots or deep sea squid. We don't even know how to look for
| them because we don't even know such perception and intelligence
| exists.
|
| The point I'm trying to make is that there is no "goal post" of
| AGI, there is no quantification of intelligence yet. We don't
| even know what sorts of intelligence exist out there because we
| haven't even begun to fully characterize what it is. It seems
| foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define
| it.
|
| It's like trying to find "the ultimate general animal" when what
| you really have is a phylogenetic tree of huge diversity.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _goal post ... define it_
|
| But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want. Just looking
| at the remarkably intelligent and spectacularly unintelligent
| should give a definite picture to work on. (When the
| spectacularly unintelligent is responsible for important
| resources a sense of urgency can easily be added.)
|
| > _integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms_
|
| There you reveal you may not be speaking about what others will
| call intelligence (just read the paragraph above).
|
| Or, if you meant that "intelligence would just be cybernetics"
| (as was already a supposition in 1956), the problem remains
| that we are interested in an "ontology refiner", so the primary
| question would remain of how to create an ontology refiner from
| sheer cybernetics. And if it made sense to have a cybernetic
| implementation spawn it, instead of implementing the ontology
| refiner and its feedback parts in parallel directly.
| ballenf wrote:
| > But we have a pretty clear idea of what we want.
|
| The bellwether for me personally is waiting for a system that
| can generate something conceptually novel. Something like the
| move from the real to the complex number systems. Or the move
| from Newtonian motion to relativistic understanding. Maybe
| systems already have such insights but don't have the
| vocabulary to explain it.
|
| A system that when presented with a problem we don't even
| know how to tackle, can "invent" the tools/approach needed to
| solve the problem.
|
| In terms of the Langland problem in math, a system that can
| define a new landmass there or a new bridge between existing
| domains.
|
| Is that too high or too low a bar?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _too high or too low a bar_
|
| I would say that is where we would like to head, and I do
| not see why we would not go there if we found the
| operational definition of intelligence.
|
| An issue may be in the possibility of intelligence as a
| collection of more faculties.
| photon_lines wrote:
| Sorry, but I completely disagree with your general take. An AGI
| is a generalized agent which is able to perform extreme
| information compression on any available set of inputs. Think
| Force = m*a and coming up with the laws of the universe. You
| can store each possible action in memory of all available
| results OR -- a generalized agent will find the most succinct
| and least complex form of modelling the state of a system. An
| AGI to me in other words is a form of intelligence which is
| able to extract information and compress it such a way to not
| allow the lossy compression or storage to hinder its ability to
| predict real outputs from a set of training data fed into it.
| By the way, I have some ideas on how to create one and I'll be
| sharing some of the key algorithms and data structures that
| I'll be using here for anyone interested:
|
| https://github.com/photonlines/AGI-Algorithms-and-Prototypes...
| esafak wrote:
| Intelligence as compression is a well-established notion. An
| earlier debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395822
| hcta wrote:
| surely being able to construct a turing-complete computing
| device is a sufficient condition to qualify as general
| intelligence, and it seems like a reasonable bar for
| considering a purported intelligent agent as interesting.
|
| > It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't
| even define it.
|
| This is backwards. The vast majority of concepts outside
| mathematics are pretty hard to rigorously define. The way we
| approach the problem of trying to find a sensible definition is
| by searching for examples and counterexamples and performing
| induction.
| myguestacc wrote:
| "Some of the doubts about the possibility of AGI come from
| misconceptions on what AGI attempts to achieve or what computers
| can do. The previous subsection has clarified the former issue,
| while an analysis of the latter issue can be found here."
|
| Except for that the previous subsection didn't clarify that at
| all.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| It's strange to write a history of AI research without talking
| about the three big epochs:
|
| - logical/symbolic AI, aka GOFAI, which led to work like SAT
| solvers and STRIPS planners
|
| - classical label-based Machine Learning. Here the Perceptron was
| the starting point and the Support Vector Machine was the
| paradigmatic result.
|
| - modern self-supervised raw-data ML, of which GPT is the
| pinnacle result.
|
| It's very interesting to think about what motivated each era,
| what their blind spots were, and why people who worked in that
| timeframe couldn't see why the successor era was obviously (in
| retrospect) superior.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| You omitted the 90's when artificial life, genetic algorithms,
| subsumption architecture were the research topics.
| visarga wrote:
| I'd split modern ML era in pre and post gpt3 (2020)
| tpoacher wrote:
| AGI is not a difficult "problem". It's a difficult "definition".
|
| Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI is a
| breeze.
| romesc wrote:
| In my opinion, this is the crux.
|
| Think about it for a moment. Can you define human intelligence?
| Have you ever gotten in a debate with someone about this? Is
| there a commonly accepted way to designate intelligence that
| isn't somewhat controversial?
|
| How will we ever define AGI if we still haven't even defined
| RoHI (Regular ol' Human Intelligence) sufficiently?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This is the actual issue with AGI. No one has a rigorous,
| concrete and non-circular definition of human intelligence.
|
| No doubt we'll have many useful and amazing tools, but none
| of them will approximate human intelligence anytime soon
| unless we have a deeper understanding of what it is. We're
| just scratching the surface of the "AI" field.
|
| But something is certain: the next time people claim AGI has
| arrived, it will be another chatbot.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Let me give you the definition most people think of today: A
| thing which can write any piece of software humans ever wrote
| given a specific goal.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Given very specific, practical, functional definitions, AGI
| is a breeze_
|
| We have a few, but the difficulty is getting to a model that is
| portable to higher functions. ("Here is a feedback over the
| details of a world model ... Now understand that book")
| trabant00 wrote:
| I keep hearing this argument that we already have AI, it's just
| the naysayers move the definition. Level 5 autonomous driving
| is specific, practical, functionally defined. Where's the
| breeze implementation?
| tpoacher wrote:
| GTA San Andreas /s
| stareatgoats wrote:
| As a novice this looks to me like a solid resource for gaining an
| overview of the different academic traditions aiming at some sort
| of eventual AGI. I don't know the author but from the bio it
| seems he has been teaching AI at the university level since at
| least 2005. Which indicates reassuring insight into the field.
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