[HN Gopher] Getting 50% (SoTA) on Arc-AGI with GPT-4o
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Getting 50% (SoTA) on Arc-AGI with GPT-4o
        
       Author : tomduncalf
       Score  : 374 points
       Date   : 2024-06-17 21:51 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (redwoodresearch.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (redwoodresearch.substack.com)
        
       | traject_ wrote:
       | We don't actually know if it is SOTA, the previous SOTA solution
       | also got around the same on the evaluation set.
        
         | cma wrote:
         | Yeah and GPT4o was potentially trained on this test set and if
         | the tried to hold it out it was still likely trained on
         | discussions of the problems.
        
       | extr wrote:
       | Very cool. When GPT-4 first came out I tried some very naive
       | approaches using JSON representations on the puzzles [0], [1].
       | GPT-4 did "okay", but in some cases it felt like it was falling
       | for the classic LLM issue of saying all the right things but then
       | then failing to grasp some critical bit of logic and missing the
       | solution entirely.
       | 
       | At the time I noticed that many of the ARC problems rely on
       | visual-spatial priors that are "obvious" when viewing the grids,
       | but become less so when transmuted to some other representation.
       | Many of them rely on some kind of symmetry, counting, or the very
       | human bias to assume a velocity or continued movement when seeing
       | particular patterns.
       | 
       | I had always thought maybe multimodality was key: the model needs
       | to have similar priors around grounded physical spaces and
       | movement to be able to do well. I'm not sure the OP really
       | fleshes this line of thinking out, brute forcing python solutions
       | is a very "non human" approach.
       | 
       | [0] https://x.com/eatpraydiehard/status/1632671307254099968
       | 
       | [1] https://x.com/eatpraydiehard/status/1632683214329479169
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | > brute forcing python solutions is a very "non human"
         | approach.
         | 
         | ARC-AGI has odd features that leave me flummoxed by the naming
         | and the attendant prize money and hype.
         | 
         | It is one singular task and frankly I _strongly_ suspect
         | someone could beat it within 30 days[1], in an unsatisfying
         | way, as you note.
         | 
         | There's so much alpha that can be pieced together from here,
         | ex. the last couple Google papers use the 1M context to do
         | *500-shot*, i.e. 500 question answer examples. IIRC most recent
         | showed raising travelling-salesman problem solve rate from 3 to
         | 35%.
         | 
         | [1] I pre-registered this via a Twitter post, about 48 hours
         | ago, i.e. before this result was announced.
        
           | elicksaur wrote:
           | The private test set has been available to crack for almost
           | four years now. There was also a monetary prize competition
           | run last year.
           | 
           | In your opinion, what has changed that would accelerate a
           | solution to the next 30 days?
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | Prize money meant people would more cleverly strain the
             | rule that "the private test set stays private, no GPT4o,
             | Claude etc.", as shown by the TFA.
             | 
             | This sort of idea would then be shared openly on new sites,
             | creating more attempts. Fallout I did not anticipate was
             | getting widespread attentional on general tech news sites,
             | and then getting public comment from a prize co-founder
             | confirming it was acceptable.
        
               | elicksaur wrote:
               | It seems like you don't understand the rules of the
               | competition. Entries don't have access to the internet.
               | The OP acknowledges in their post that this is not
               | eligible for the prize. The HN comment from the prize co-
               | founder specifically says the OP's claims haven't been
               | scrutinized. (implicit: they won't be for the prize set
               | unless the OP submits with an open LLM implementation)
               | 
               | There is a plan for a "public" leaderboard, but it
               | currently has no entries, so we don't actually know what
               | the SOTA for the unrestrained version is. [1]
               | 
               | The general idea - test time augmentation - is what the
               | current private set SOTA uses. [2] Generating more
               | examples via transforming the samples is not a new idea.
               | 
               | Really, it seems like all the publicity has just gotten a
               | bunch of armchair software architects coming up with 1-4
               | year-old ideas thinking they are geniuses.
               | 
               | [1] https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
               | 
               | [2] https://lab42.global/community-interview-jack-cole/
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | > It seems like you don't understand the rules of the
               | competition.
               | 
               | I don't think you "don't understand" anything :) I'd ask
               | you, politely, to consider that when you're replying to
               | other people in the future.
               | 
               | Better to bring to interactions the prior that your
               | interlocutor is a presumably intelligent individual who
               | can have a different interpretation of the same facts,
               | than decide they just don't get it. The second is a quite
               | lonely path.
               | 
               | > Entries don't have access to the internet.
               | 
               | Correct. Per TFA, cofounder, Chollet, then me: this _is
               | an offline solution_ : the solution is the Python program
               | found by an LLM.
               | 
               | > The HN comment from the prize co-founder specifically
               | says the OP's claims haven't been scrutinized.
               | 
               | Objection: relevancy? Is your claim here that it might be
               | false so we shouldn't be discussing it at all?
               | 
               | > (implicit: they won't be for the prize set unless the
               | OP submits with an open LLM implementation)
               | 
               | I don't know what this means, "open LLM implementation"
               | is either a term of art I don't recognize, or a
               | misunderstanding of the situation.
               | 
               | I do assume you read the article, so I'm not trying to
               | talk down to you, but to clarify:
               | 
               | The _solution is the Python program_ , not the LLM
               | prompts that iterated on a Python program. A common
               | thread that would describe the confusing experience of
               | reading your comment phrased aggressively and disputing
               | everything up until you agree with me: your observations
               | assume I assume the solution requires a cloud-based LLM
               | to run. As noted above, it doesn't, which is also the
               | thrust of my comment: they found a way to skirt what I
               | thought the rules are, and the co-founder and Chollett
               | have embraced it, publicly.
               | 
               | > There is a plan for a "public" leaderboard, but it
               | currently has no entries, so we don't actually know what
               | the SOTA for the unrestrained version is. [1]
               | 
               | This was false before you posted, when I checked this
               | morning, and it was false as early as 4 days ago, June
               | 14th, we can confirm via archive.is. (prefix the URL you
               | provided with archive.is/ to check for yourself)
               | 
               | > The general idea - test time augmentation - is what the
               | current private set SOTA uses. [2] Generating more
               | examples via transforming the samples is not a new idea.
               | 
               | Did anyone claim it was?
               | 
               | > Really, it seems like all the publicity has just gotten
               | a bunch of armchair software architects coming up with
               | 1-4 year-old ideas thinking they are geniuses.
               | 
               | I don't know what this means other than you're upset, but
               | yes, sounds like both you and I agree that having an LLM
               | generate Python programs isn't quite what we'd thought
               | would be an AGI solution in the eyes of Chollet.
               | 
               | Alas, here we are.
        
               | nl wrote:
               | (Not the OP)
               | 
               | >> (implicit: they won't be for the prize set unless the
               | OP submits with an open LLM implementation)
               | 
               | > The solution is the Python program, not the LLM prompts
               | that iterated on a Python program. A common thread that
               | would describe the confusing experience of reading your
               | comment phrased aggressively and disputing everything up
               | until you agree with me: your observations assume I
               | assume the solution requires a cloud-based LLM to run. As
               | noted above, it doesn't, which is also the thrust of my
               | comment: they found a way to skirt what I thought the
               | rules are, and the co-founder and Chollett have embraced
               | it, publicly.
               | 
               | I think the implication is that solutions that use an LLM
               | via an API won't be eligible (the "no internet" rule).
               | 
               | This seems obvious to solve: can use GPT4 to generate
               | catalogs in advance and a lesser, local LLM with good
               | code abilities to select them.
               | 
               | I don't see why this skirts any rules you think were
               | implied and I'm puzzled why you think it does.
               | 
               | > sounds like both you and I agree that having an LLM
               | generate Python programs isn't quite what we'd thought
               | would be an AGI solution in the eyes of Chollet.
               | 
               | > Alas, here we are.
               | 
               | Chollet noted that program synthesis was a promising
               | approach, so it's not surprising to me that a program
               | synthesis approach that also uses an LLM is effective.
        
               | elicksaur wrote:
               | From the leaderboard link (and on the archive version):
               | 
               | >ARC-AGI-Pub is a secondary leaderboard (in beta)
               | measuring the public evaluation set. ... The public
               | evaluation set imposes no limitations on internet access
               | or compute. At this time, ARG-AGI-Pub is not part of ARC
               | Prize 2024 (eg. no prizes are associated with this
               | leaderboard).
               | 
               | And, all the entries at time of writing and in the
               | archive link say "You?...". "ARC-AGI 2024 HIGH SCORES"
               | which does have entries is on the private test set.
               | 
               | >I don't think you "don't understand" anything :)
               | 
               |  _I genuinely don't understand_ if we are viewing the
               | same websites.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | > I genuinely don't understand if we are viewing the same
               | websites.
               | 
               | We are! I missed the nuance on you're looking for a
               | _public_ leaderboard on the _private_ test set. I do see
               | it now, but I 'm still confused as to how that's relevant
               | here.
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | I wish this comment was less confrontational because
               | there's useful information in it and several points I
               | agree with.
        
               | elicksaur wrote:
               | Hey! Genuinely, thank you for the feedback!
        
           | nl wrote:
           | I don't think this is "non-satisfying" at all.
           | 
           | Program synthesis has been mentioned as a promising approach
           | by Francois Chollet, and that's exactly what this is.
           | 
           | The place I find slightly unsatisfying is this:
           | 
           | > Sample vast, vast numbers of completions (~5,000 per
           | problem) from GPT-4o.
           | 
           | > Take the most promising 12 completions for each problem,
           | and then try to fix each by showing GPT-4o what this program
           | actually outputs on the examples, and then asking GPT-4o to
           | revise the code to make it correct. We sample ~3,000
           | completions that attempt to fix per problem in total across
           | these 12 starting implementations.
           | 
           | I'd been tossing around a MCTS idea similar to AlphaGo, based
           | on the idea that the end transformation is a series of sub-
           | transformations. I feel like this could work well alongside
           | the GPT-4o completion catalog. (This isn't an original
           | observation or anything)
        
             | bubblyworld wrote:
             | Classic, I've been doing the same, writing an alphazero for
             | the transformation part. What seems _much_ harder is
             | picking a decent set of transformations/concepts to work
             | with, or more generally automating that process. Maybe
             | you're right that LLMs could help there!
        
               | luke-stanley wrote:
               | Reminds me of NVIDIA Eureka: https://github.com/eureka-
               | research/Eureka
        
               | bubblyworld wrote:
               | Very nice! Thanks for the link, that's great inspiration.
        
               | nl wrote:
               | Great link, thanks.
        
             | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
             | >> Program synthesis has been mentioned as a promising
             | approach by Francois Chollet, and that's exactly what this
             | is.
             | 
             | To be precise, "this" -a bog-standard generate-and-test
             | approach- is the dumbest possible way to do program
             | synthesis. It's like sorting lists with bogosort and a very
             | big computer.
             | 
             | It's _exactly_ like bogosort: generate permutations and
             | test. Except of course the system that generates
             | permutations costs a few millions(?).
        
               | bubblyworld wrote:
               | Bogosort is driven by 0 heuristics - just shuffle and
               | play. Using an LLM as a high-level prior over your search
               | is very different, and the author had to do a lot of
               | problem-specific tuning to make it work well.
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | But he tuned the "test" side of the generate-and-test
               | loop, not the "generate" side. The "generate" side
               | remains a big permutation generator that is also very
               | hard to control. The current highest-ranked system on the
               | private test set of the ARC-AGI (at 34%) is another LLM
               | fine-tuned on manually created examples of ARC tasks, so
               | that would indeed be messing with the generator part of
               | the loop. I'm guessing performance will jump when someone
               | puts the two together.
               | 
               | A heuristic btw, is something completely different than
               | fine tuning, or filtering. Heuristic search is the
               | closest thing we have to an approximation of the kind of
               | goal-driven behaviour we see in animal intelligence.
               | 
               | I think you could argue that gradient optimisation or any
               | kind of optimisation of some kind of objective function
               | is the same (Rich Sutton has a paper titled "Reward is
               | all you need"). I'm not sure where I stand with that.
        
         | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
         | >> GPT-4 did "okay", but in some cases it felt like it was
         | falling for the classic LLM issue of saying all the right
         | things but then then failing to grasp some critical bit of
         | logic and missing the solution entirely.
         | 
         | It still is. It misses the solution so comprehensively that it
         | needs an outer loop to figure out which one is the solution out
         | of 8k programs GPT-4o generates.
        
           | ealexhudson wrote:
           | We don't really know what GPT-4 "is". I remember reading a
           | number of relatively well-informed suggestions that there are
           | a number of a models inside there, and the API being
           | interacted with is some form of outer-loop around them.
           | 
           | I don't think the location of the outer-loop or the design of
           | it really makes much difference. There is no flock of birds
           | without the individuals, the flock itself doesn't really
           | exist as a tangible thing, but what arises out of the
           | collective adjustments between all these individuals gives
           | rise to a flock. Similarly, we may find groups of LLMs and
           | various outer control loops give rise to an emergent
           | phenomena much greater than the sum of their parts.
        
             | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
             | >> We don't really know what GPT-4 "is".
             | 
             | Yes, we do. It's a language model.
        
       | greatpostman wrote:
       | You know you're approaching AGI when creating benchmarks gets
       | difficult. This is only just beginning
        
         | elicksaur wrote:
         | Alternatively, society has no common understanding of what AGI
         | means.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | Which is why the first "artificial" sentient beings will
           | likely go through the wringer that humanity historically put
           | other "sub-human" beings through.
        
         | Slyfox33 wrote:
         | Benchmarks being difficult to create has no connection to
         | something being agi.
        
       | rgbrgb wrote:
       | > 50% accuracy on the public test set for ARC-AGI by having
       | GPT-4o
       | 
       | Isn't the public test set public on github and therefore GPT-4o
       | trained on it?
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | I keep seeing this comment all over the place. Just because
         | something exists 1 time in the training data doesn't mean it
         | can just regurgitate that. That's not how training works. An
         | LLM is not a knowledge database.
        
           | adroniser wrote:
           | And yet it doesn't rule out that it can't. See new york times
           | lawsuit
        
             | bongodongobob wrote:
             | From old pieces of articles that are quoted all over the
             | internet? That's not surprising.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | That's still sufficient for both The Times and for it to
               | be a potential problem in this case.
        
           | spencerchubb wrote:
           | It could exist many times. People can fork and clone the
           | repo. People are likely to copy the examples and share them
           | online.
        
         | daemonologist wrote:
         | In this case I don't think having seen the Arc set would help
         | much in writing and selecting python scripts to solve the test
         | cases. (Unless someone else has tried this approach before and
         | _their_ results are in the training data.)
         | 
         | It will be good to see the private set results though.
        
           | cma wrote:
           | Public discussions of solutions to the public test set will
           | presumably have somewhat similar analogies and/or embeddings
           | to aspects of the python programs that solve them.
        
           | Truth_In_Lies wrote:
           | Yes, someone has tried https://iprc-dip.github.io/DARC/
        
       | bashfulpup wrote:
       | I looked at the website and have no idea how Arc is supposed to
       | be AGI.
       | 
       | Can someone explain?
        
         | TheDudeMan wrote:
         | It is necessary but not sufficient.
         | 
         | If you can't do ARC, you aren't general enough. But even if you
         | can do ARC, you still might not be general enough.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | It's also possible that you are an AGI and simply cannot pass
           | ARC.
        
             | TheDudeMan wrote:
             | How so? If there is a task that humans can do but the AI
             | cannot, I would not call it AGI. But that's just my
             | definition.
        
               | awwaiid wrote:
               | Yeah but if my brother can't pass it, that doesn't mean
               | he is NOT human.
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | Could he pass it if he was educated to do the task from
               | birth? Human level intelligence includes being able to be
               | educated, the ML models we have done so far can't be
               | educated so have to match the level of educated humans to
               | compare.
               | 
               | General intelligence as we know it requires ability to
               | receive education.
        
               | infgeoax wrote:
               | Isn't chatGPT already proven to be smarter than many of
               | us in many ways?
        
               | TheDudeMan wrote:
               | I said AGI. I did not say human.
        
         | biophysboy wrote:
         | Its not a test of AGI. It tests whether you possess innate
         | human capacities: rudimentary arithmetic & geometry, etc. Most
         | of the problems were created manually. The original paper
         | states that they limited the test to innate human priors to
         | make the scope well-defined.
        
       | eigenvalue wrote:
       | The Arc stuff just felt intuitively wrong as soon as I heard it.
       | I don't find any of Chollet's critiques of LLMs to be convincing.
       | It's almost as if he's being overly negative about them to make a
       | point or something to push back against all the unbridled
       | optimism. The problem is, the optimism really seems to be
       | justified, and the rate of improvement of LLMs in the past 12
       | months has been nothing short of astonishing.
       | 
       | So it's not at all surprising to me to see Arc already being
       | mostly solved using existing models, just with different
       | prompting techniques and some tool usage. At some point, the
       | naysayers about LLMs are going to have to confront the problem
       | that, if they are right about LLMs not really
       | thinking/understanding/being sentient, then a very large
       | percentage of people living today are also not
       | thinking/understanding/sentient!
        
         | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
         | Actually the solution being discussed here is the one that
         | Chollet mentioned in his interview with Dwarkesh, and only
         | bolsters his case.
         | 
         | The LLM isn't doing the reasoning here, it's just pattern
         | matching the before/after diff and generating thousands of
         | Python programs. The actual reasoning is done by an agentic
         | like loop wrapped around the LLM, as described in the linked
         | blog.
        
           | awwaiid wrote:
           | When you peer into the soul of the machine it delicately
           | resolves to `while(1){...}`. All Hail The REPL.
        
         | Smaug123 wrote:
         | > a very large percentage of people living today are also not
         | thinking/understanding/sentient
         | 
         | This isn't _that_ big a bullet to bite
         | (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-
         | who... comes from well before ChatGPT's launch), and I myself
         | am inclined to bite it. System 1 alone does not a general
         | intelligence make, although the article is extremely
         | interesting in asking the question "is System 1 plus Python
         | enough for a general intelligence?". But it's not a very
         | relevant philosophical point, because Chollet's position is
         | consistent with humans being obsoleted and/or driven extinct
         | whether or not the LLMs are "general intelligences".
         | 
         | His position is that training LLMs results in an ever-larger
         | number of learned algorithms and no ability to construct _new_
         | algorithms. This is consistent with the possibility that, after
         | some threshold of size and training, the LLM has learned every
         | algorithm it needs to supplant humans in (say) 99.9% of cases.
         | (It would definitely be going out with a whimper rather than a
         | bang, on that hypothesis, to be out-competed by something that
         | _really is_ just a gigantic lookup table!)
        
         | threeseed wrote:
         | a) 50% result is not solving the problem. Especially when the
         | implementation is brute forcing the problem and is against the
         | spirit of ARC.
         | 
         | b) He is not being overly negative of LLMs. In fact he believes
         | they will play a role in any AGI system.
         | 
         | c) OpenAI CTO has publicly said that ChatGPT 5 will not be
         | significantly better than existing models. So the rate of
         | improvements you believe in simply doesn't match reality.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | For the record, a lot of problems might turn out to be like
           | this, where we figure out a brute force approach that stands
           | in for human creativity.
        
           | hackerlight wrote:
           | Skeptical about (c), source please. She did say they don't
           | have anything much better than GPT-4o currently, but GPT-5
           | likely only started training recently.
        
         | traject_ wrote:
         | > It's almost as if he's being overly negative about them to
         | make a point or something to push back against all the
         | unbridled optimism.
         | 
         | I don't think it is like that but rather Chollet wants to see
         | stronger neuroplasticity in these models. I think there is a
         | divide between the effectiveness of existing AI models versus
         | their ability to be autonomous, robust and consistently learn
         | from unanticipated problems.
         | 
         | My guess is Chollet wants to see something more similar to
         | biological organisms especially mammals or birds in their level
         | of autonomous nature. I think people underestimate the degree
         | of novel problems birds and mammals alone face in just simply
         | navigating their environment and it is the comparison here that
         | LLMs, for now at least, seem lacking.
         | 
         | So when he says LLMs are not sentient, he's asking to consider
         | the novel problems animals let alone humans have to face in
         | navigating their environment. This is especially apparent in
         | young children but declines as we age and gain experience/lose
         | a sense of novelty.
        
           | infgeoax wrote:
           | Agree. When I first saw ARC, my reaction was this could
           | possibly be the kind of problem that gives us evolutionary
           | pressure.
        
         | adroniser wrote:
         | I don't see how the point about the typical human is relevant.
         | Either you can reason or you can't, the ARC test is supposed to
         | be an objective way to measure this. Clearly a vanilla LLM
         | currently cannot do this, and somehow an expert crafting a
         | super-specific prompt is supposed to be impressive.
        
           | eigenvalue wrote:
           | The point is that if you have some test of whether an AI is
           | intelligent that the vast majority of living humans would
           | fail or do worse on than gpt4-o (let alone future LLMs) then
           | it's not a very persuasive argument.
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > I don't find any of Chollet's critiques of LLMs to be
         | convincing. It's almost as if he's being overly negative about
         | them to make a point or something to push back against all the
         | unbridled optimism.
         | 
         | Chollet published his paper _On the measure of intelligence_ in
         | 2019. In Internet time that is a lifetime before the LLM hype
         | started.
        
           | refulgentis wrote:
           | Einstein, infamously, couldn't really make much progress with
           | quantum physics, even though he invented the precursors (ex.
           | Brownian motion). Your world model is hard to update.
        
             | imperfect_light wrote:
             | A bit of a stretch given that Chollet is a researcher in
             | deep learning and transformers and his criticism is that
             | memorization (training LLMs on lots and lots of problems)
             | doesn't equate to AGI.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | > A bit of a stretch
               | 
               | Is that true?
               | 
               | C.f. what we're discussing
               | 
               | He's actively encouraging using _LLMs_ to solve his
               | benchmark, called ARC _AGI_.
               | 
               | 8 hours ago, from Chollet, re: TFA
               | 
               | "The best solution to fight combinatorial explosion is to
               | leverage intuition over the structure of program space,
               | provided by a deep learning model. For instance, _you can
               | use a LLM to sample a program_... "
               | 
               | Source: https://x.com/fchollet/status/1802801425514410275
        
               | imperfect_light wrote:
               | The stretch was in reference to comparing Chollet to
               | Einstein. Chollet clearly understands LLMs (and
               | transformers and deep learning), he simply doesn't
               | believe they are sufficient for AGI.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | I don't know what you mean, it's a straightforward
               | analogy, but yes, that's right, except for the part where
               | he's heralding this news by telling people the LLM is an
               | underexplored solution space for a possible solution to
               | his AGI benchmark he made to disprove LLMs are AGI.
               | 
               | I don't mean to offend, but to be really straightforward:
               | he's the one saying it's possible they might be AGI now.
               | I'm as flummoxed as you, but I think its hiding the ball
               | to file it under "he doesn't mean what he's saying,
               | because he doesn't believe LLMs can ever be AGI." The
               | only steelman for that is playing at: AGI-my-benchmark,
               | which I say is for AGI, is not the AGI I mean
        
               | imperfect_light wrote:
               | You're reading a whole lot into a tweet, in his interview
               | with Dwarkesh Patel he says, about 20 different times,
               | that scaling LLMs (as they are currently conceived) won't
               | lead to AGI.
        
               | anoncareer0212 wrote:
               | You keep changing topics so I don't get it either, I can
               | attest it's not a fringe view that the situation is
               | interesting, seen it discussed several times today by
               | unrelated people.
        
               | imperfect_light wrote:
               | He's said it pretty clearly, an LLM could be part of the
               | solution in combination with program synthesis, but an
               | LLM alone won't achieve AGI.
        
             | infgeoax wrote:
             | But it's his EPR paper inspired the Bell's inequality and
             | pushed the field further. Yes he was wrong about how
             | reality works, but still he asked the right question.
        
           | gwern wrote:
           | From Chollet's perspective, the LLM hype started well before,
           | with at least GPT-2 half a year before his paper, and he
           | spent plenty of time mocking GPT-2 on Twitter before he came
           | up with ARC as a rebuttal.
        
             | modeless wrote:
             | It's a very convincing rebuttal considering that GPT-3 and
             | GPT-4 came out after ARC but made no significant progress
             | on it. He seemingly had the single most accurate and
             | verifiable prediction of anyone in the world (in 2019)
             | about _exactly_ what type of tasks scaled LLMs would be bad
             | at.
        
         | imtringued wrote:
         | Yeah I agree. We have reached the end of LLMs. LLMs are
         | infallible and require no further improvement. Anyone who
         | points out shortcomings of current architectures and training
         | approaches should be ignored as a naysayer. Anyone who proposes
         | a solution to perceived flaws is a crank trying to fix
         | something that was never broken. Everyone knows humans are
         | incapable of internal monologues or visualization and
         | vocalisation. Humans don't actually move their lips to speak to
         | produce a sound that can be interpreted by a speaker of the
         | same language, they produce universally understood tokens
         | encoding objective reality and the fact that they use the local
         | language is merely a habit that is hard to break out of.
        
           | mrtranscendence wrote:
           | Sometimes, when I'm undertaking the arduous work of assigning
           | probabilities to everything I could possibly say next in a
           | conversation, I wish that I weren't merely a stochastic
           | autoregressive next-token generator. Them's the breaks,
           | though.
        
         | biophysboy wrote:
         | I don't think he's as critical as you say. He just views LLMs
         | as the product of intelligence rather than intelligence itself.
         | LLM fans will say this is a false distinction, I guess.
         | 
         | His definition of intelligence is interesting: something that
         | can quickly achieve tasks with few priors or experience. I also
         | think the idea of using human "Core Knowledge" priors is a
         | clever way to make a test.
        
         | lassoiat wrote:
         | I am a chatGPT fan boy and have been quite impressed by 4o but
         | I will really be impressed when it stops inventing aspects of
         | python libraries that don't exists and instead just tells me it
         | doesn't exist.
         | 
         | It literally just did this for me 15 minutes ago. You can't
         | talk about AGI when it is this easy to push it over the edge
         | into something it doesn't know.
         | 
         | Paper references have got better the last 12 months but just
         | this week it made up both a book and paper for me that do not
         | exist. The authors exist and they did not write what it said
         | they did.
         | 
         | It is very interesting if you ask "do you understand your
         | responses?" sometimes it will say yes and sometimes it will so
         | no not like a human understands.
         | 
         | We should forget about AGI until it can at least say it doesn't
         | know something. It is hardly a sign of intelligence in humans
         | to make up answers to questions you don't know.
        
           | motoxpro wrote:
           | Every time you're wrong and you disagree with someone who is
           | right you are inventing things that don't exist.
           | 
           | Unless you're saying you have never held on to a wrong
           | opinion that was at some point proven to be wrong?
        
         | imperfect_light wrote:
         | Did you listen to what Chollet said? How much of LLM
         | improvements are due to enlarging the training sets to cover
         | more problems and how much is due to any emergent properties?
        
         | Lockal wrote:
         | That's a big jump in generalization that bruteforcing 4 colors
         | in 9x9 grids with 8000 programs has anything near to what
         | sentient human can do.
         | 
         | Back in the days similar generalization was used for Deep Blue
         | chess computer. Computer won in 1997, but the AGI abyss is
         | still as big.
        
       | mikeknoop wrote:
       | (ARC Prize co-founder here).
       | 
       | Ryan's work is legitimately interesting and novel "LLM reasoning"
       | research! The core idea:
       | 
       | > get GPT-4o to generate around 8,000 python programs which
       | attempt to implement the transformation, select a program which
       | is right on all the examples (usually there are 3 examples), and
       | then submit the output this function produces when applied to the
       | additional test input(s)
       | 
       | Roughly, he's implemented an outer loop and using 4o to sample
       | reasoning traces/programs from training data and test. Hybrid DL
       | + program synthesis approaches are solutions we'd love to see
       | more of.
       | 
       | A couple important notes:
       | 
       | 1. this result is on the public eval set vs private set (ARC
       | Prize $).
       | 
       | 2. the current private set SOTA ~35% solution also performed ~50%
       | on the public set. so this new result _might_ be SOTA but hasn 't
       | been validated or scrutinized yet.
       | 
       | All said, I do expect verified public set results to flow down to
       | the private set over time. We'll be publishing all the SOTA
       | scores and open source reproductions here once available:
       | https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
       | 
       | EDIT: also, congrats and kudos to Ryan for achieving this and
       | putting the effort in to document and share his approach. we hope
       | to inspire more frontier AI research sharing like this
        
         | refibrillator wrote:
         | Do you have any perspectives to share on Ryan's observation of
         | a potential scaling law for these tasks and his comment that
         | "ARC-AGI will be one benchmark among many that just gets solved
         | by scale"?
        
           | mikeknoop wrote:
           | ARC isn't perfect and I hope ARC is not the last AGI
           | benchmark. I've spoken with a few other benchmark creators
           | looking to emulate ARC's novelty in other domains, so I think
           | we'll see more. The evolution of AGI benchmarks likely needs
           | to evolve alongside the tech -- humans have to design these
           | tasks today to ensure novelty but should expect that to
           | shift.
           | 
           | One core idea we've been advocating with ARC is that pure LLM
           | scaling (parameters...) is insufficient to achieve AGI.
           | Something new is needed. And OPs approach using a novel outer
           | loop is one cool demonstration of this.
        
         | Nimitz14 wrote:
         | Ah that's an important detail about public v private. Makes it
         | a nice result but nearly as impressive as initially stated.
        
         | hackerlight wrote:
         | Reminds me of the AlphaCode approach.
         | 
         | Why do you say it's sampling programs from "training data"?
         | With that choice of words, you're rhetorically assuming the
         | conclusion.
         | 
         | If he only sampled 20 programs, instead of 8000, will we still
         | say the programs came from "training data", or will we say it's
         | genuine OOD generalization? At what point do we attribute the
         | intelligence to the LLM itself instead of the outer loop?
         | 
         | This isn't meant to be facetious. Because clearly, if the N
         | programs sampled is very large, it's easy to get the right
         | solution with little intelligence by relying on luck. But as N
         | gets small the LLM has to be intelligent and capable of OOD
         | generalization, assuming the benchmark is good.
        
         | refreshingdrink wrote:
         | Also worth nothing that Ryan mentions
         | 
         | > In addition to iterating on the training set, I also did a
         | small amount of iteration on a 100 problem subset of the public
         | test set
         | 
         | and
         | 
         | > it's unfortunate that these sets aren't IID: it makes
         | iteration harder and more confusing
         | 
         | It's not unfortunate: generalizing beyond the training
         | distribution is a crucial part of intelligence that ARC is
         | trying to measure! Among other reasons, developing with test-
         | set data is a bad practice in ML because it hides the
         | difficulty this challenge. Even worse, writing about a bunch of
         | tricks that help results on this subset is extending the test-
         | set leakage the blog post's readers. This is why I'm glad the
         | ARC Prize has a truly hidden test set
        
           | rfoo wrote:
           | ... and we know that if we really want to nail it we'd better
           | just pay someone else to create 1,000,000 more harder
           | problems for training (without looking at any in test set, of
           | course). i.e. make the training set distribution similar to
           | test set again.
           | 
           | Because the thing we have now is data-hungry. Your brain is
           | pre-trained on other similar challenges as well. What's the
           | point of requiring it to "generalize beyond the training
           | distribution" with so few samples?
           | 
           | Really, I thought LLMs ended this "can we pretrain on in-
           | house prepared private data for ILSVRC" flame war already.
        
             | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
             | The problem with that it is we know approaches that can
             | generalise very well from very few examples, even one
             | example, without any kind of pretraining, That requires a
             | good background theory of the target domain (a "world
             | model" in more modern parlance), and we don't know how to
             | automatically generate that kind of theory; only human
             | minds can do it, for now. But given such a theory the
             | number of examples needed can be as few as 1. Clearly, if
             | you can learn from one example, but find yourself using
             | thousands, you've taken a wrong turn somewhere.
             | 
             | The concern with the data-hungry approach to machine
             | learning, that at least some of us have, is that it has
             | given up on the effort to figure out how to learn good
             | background theories and turned instead to getting the best
             | performance possible in the dumbest possible way, relying
             | on the largest available amount of examples and compute.
             | That's a trend against everything else in computer science
             | (and even animal intelligence) where the effort is to make
             | everything smaller, cheaper, faster, smarter: it's putting
             | all the eggs in the basket of making it big, slow and dumb,
             | and hoping that this will somehow solve... intelligence. A
             | very obvious contradiction.
             | 
             | Suppose we lived in a world that didn't have a theory of
             | computational complexity and didn't know that some programs
             | are more expensive to run than others. Would it be the case
             | in that world, that computer scientists competed in solving
             | ever larger instances of the Traveling Salesperson Problem,
             | using ever larger computers, without even trying to find
             | good heuristics exploiting the structure of the problem and
             | simply trying to out-brute-force each other? That world
             | would look a lot like where we are now with statistical
             | machine learning: a pell-mell approach to throwing all
             | resources at a problem that we just don't know how to
             | solve, and don't even know if we can solve.
        
               | advael wrote:
               | The formalism that data-driven machine learning leans on
               | is empirical tuning of stochastic search to drive
               | approximation of functions, and despite what Silicon
               | Valley would have you believe, most of the significant
               | advances have been in creating useful meta-structures for
               | modeling certain kinds of problems (e.g. convolution for
               | efficiently processing transformations that care about
               | local structure across dimensions of data, or qkv
               | attention for keeping throughlines of non-local
               | correspondences intact through a long sequence). Neural
               | networks as a flavor of empirical function approximation
               | happened to scale well, and then a bunch of people who
               | saw how much this scale improved the models' capabilities
               | but couldn't be bothered to understand the structural
               | component concluded that scale somehow magically gets you
               | to every unsolved problem being solved. It's also
               | convenient for business types that if you buy this
               | premise, any unicorn they want to promise is just a
               | matter of throwing obscene amounts of resources at the
               | problem (through their company of course)
               | 
               | I think probably the general idea of dynamic structures
               | that are versatile in their ability to approximate
               | functional models is at least a solid hypothesis for how
               | some biological intelligence works at some level (I think
               | maybe the "fluid/crystallized" intelligence distinction
               | some psychology uses is informative here - a strong world
               | model probably informs a lot of quick acquisition of
               | relationships, but most intelligent systems clearly
               | posess strong feedback mechanisms for capturing new
               | models), though I definitely agree that a focus on how
               | best to throw a ton of scale at these models doesn't seem
               | like a fruitful path for actionably learning how to build
               | or analyze intelligent systems in the way we usually
               | think about, nor is it, well, sustainable. Moore's law
               | appeals to business people because buying more
               | computronium feels more like a predictable input-output
               | relationship to put capital into, but even if we're just
               | talking about raw computation speed advances in
               | algorithms tend to dwarf advances in computing power in
               | the long run. I think the same will hold true in AGI
        
               | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
               | Yeah, very good points. To be fair there are people who
               | have argued the big data side who have clearly solid
               | knowledge of AI and are not just SV suits, for example I
               | remember Yann LeCun in a debate with Christopher Manning,
               | where Manning was arguing for the importance of
               | "structure" and LeCun was arguing against it. Or see the
               | "Bitter Lesson", mentioned in a parent comment. That may
               | have become a total shibboleth of the Silicon bros but
               | Rich Sutton, who wrote the eponymous article, is the guy
               | who wrote the book on Reinforcement Learning (literally).
               | And then Rodney Brooks' replied with his "Better Lesson"
               | (https://rodneybrooks.com/a-better-lesson/). So there's a
               | lot of debate in this and I don't reckon we'll have a
               | consensus soon. It should be clear which side I'm on- I
               | work with firmly model-based AI ("planning is the model-
               | based approach to autonomous behaviour" has become my
               | shibboleth - see Bonnet and Geffner's book on planning:
               | https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01564-9)
               | so maybe it's a _deformation professionelle_. And even
               | LCun 's recent plans for JEPA are very consciously model-
               | based, except he wants to learn his models from data;
               | which is not a bad idea I suppose.
        
               | advael wrote:
               | I've commented here before that I find myself really
               | conflicted on LeCunn's public statements. I think it's
               | really hard to reconcile the fact that he's undeniably a
               | world-leading expert with the fact that he does work for
               | and represent a tech company in a big way, which means
               | that it's both hard to tell when what he says, especially
               | publicly, is filtered through that lens, either
               | explicitly or just via cultural osmosis. I know some
               | people still in academia (e.g. "Bitter Lesson") are
               | following suit but given how much of this field has been
               | scooped up by large tech firms, this necessarily means
               | that what we get out of research from those firms is
               | partially filtered through them. Like it sounds like
               | you're in CS/AI academia so I'm sure you're familiar with
               | the distorting effect this brain drain has had on the
               | field. Research out of places like FAIR or deepmind or
               | OpenAI (arguably they were different until about 2019 or
               | so? Hard to say how much of that was ever true
               | unfortunately) are being done and published by world-
               | leading experts hired by these companies and obviously
               | this research has continued to be crucial to the field,
               | but the fact that it's in industry means there's
               | obviously controls on what they can publish, and the
               | culture of an institution like Facebook is definitely
               | going to have some different effects on priorities than
               | that of most universities, and so while we can all
               | collectively _try_ to take it all with a grain of salt in
               | some way, there is no way to be careful enough to avoid
               | tribal knowledge in the field being heavily influenced by
               | the cultures and priorities of these organizations.
               | 
               | But even if this kind of thinking is totally organic, I
               | think it could arise from the delayed nature of the
               | results of data-driven methods. Often a major structural
               | breakthrough for a data-driven approach drastically
               | predates the most obviously impactful results from that
               | breakthrough, because the result impressive enough to
               | draw people's attention comes from throwing lots of data
               | and compute at the breakthrough. The people who got the
               | impressive result might not even be the same team as the
               | one that invented the structure they're relying on, and
               | it's really easy to get the impression that what changed
               | the game was the scale alone, I imagine even if you're on
               | one of those research teams. I've been really impressed
               | by some of the lines of research that show that you can
               | often distill some of these results to not rely so
               | heavily on massive datasets and enormous parallel
               | training runs, and think we should properly view results
               | that come from these to be demonstrations of the power of
               | the underlying structural insights rather than new
               | results. But I think this clashes with the organizational
               | priorities of large tech firms, which often view scale as
               | a moat, and thus are motivated to emphasize the need for
               | it
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | The recent result shows SOTA progress from something as
               | goofy as generating 5000 python programs until 0.06% of
               | them pass the unit tests. We can imagine our own brains
               | having a thousand random subconscious pre thoughts before
               | our consciously registered though is chosen and amplified
               | out of the hallucinatory subconscious noise. We're still
               | at a point where we're making surprising progress from
               | simple feedback loops, external tools and checkers,
               | retries, backtracking, and other bells and whistles to
               | the LLM model. Some of these even look like world models.
               | 
               | So maybe we can cure LLMs of the hallucinatory leprosy
               | just by bathing them about 333 times in the mundane
               | Jordan river of incremental bolt ons and modifications to
               | formulas.
               | 
               | You should be able to think of the LLM as a random
               | hallucination generator then ask yourself "how do I wire
               | ten thousand random hallucination generators together
               | into a brain?" It's almost certain that there's an
               | answer... And it's almost certain that the answer is even
               | going to be very simple in hindsight. Why? Because llms
               | are already more versatile than the most basic components
               | of the brain and we have not yet integrated them in the
               | scale that components are integrated in the brain.
               | 
               | It's very likely that this is what our brains do at the
               | component level - we run a bunch of feedback coupled
               | hallucination generators that, when we're healthy,
               | generates a balanced and generalizing consciousness - a
               | persistent, reality coupled hallucinatory experience that
               | we sense and interpret and work within as the world
               | model. That just emerges from a network of self
               | correcting natural hallucinators. For evidence, consider
               | work in Cortical Columns and the Thousand brains theory.
               | This suggests our brains have about a million Cortical
               | Columns. Each loads up random inaccurate models of the
               | world... And when we do integration and error correction
               | over that, we get a high level conscious overlay. Sounds
               | like what the author of the currently discussed SOTA did,
               | but with far more sophistication. If the simplest most
               | obvious approach to jamming 5,000 llms together into a
               | brain gives us some mileage, then it's likely that more
               | reasoned and intelligent approach could get these things
               | doing feats like the fundamentally error prone components
               | of our own brains can do when working together.
               | 
               | So I see absolutely no reason we couldn't build an
               | analogy of that with llms as the base hallucinator. They
               | are versatile and accurate enough. We could also use
               | online training llms and working memory buffers as the
               | base components of a Jepa model.
               | 
               | It's pretty easy to imagine that a society of 5000 gpt4
               | hallucinators could, with the right self administered
               | balances and utilities, find the right answers. That's
               | what the author did to win the 50%.
               | 
               | Therefore I propose that for the current generation it's
               | okay to just mash a bunch of hallucinators together and
               | whip them into the truth. We should be able to do it
               | because our brains have to be able to do it. And if
               | you're really smart, you will find a very efficient
               | mathematical decomposition... Or a totally new model. But
               | for every current LLM inability, it's likely to turn out
               | that sequence of simple modifications can solve it. Will
               | probably accrue a large number of such modifications
               | before someone comes along and thinks of an all-new model
               | then does way better, perhaps taking inspirations from
               | the proposed solutions, or perhaps exploring the negative
               | space around those solutions.
        
               | yccs27 wrote:
               | Sadly, right now the "throw lots of compute at it in the
               | dumbest possible way" models work, and the "learn good
               | background theories" approaches have gone nowhere. It's
               | Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson and a lot of us aren't ready
               | to accept it.
               | 
               | http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
        
               | lesuorac wrote:
               | > that ``brute force" search may have won this time, but
               | it was not a general strategy, and anyway it was not how
               | people played chess. These researchers wanted methods
               | based on human input to win and were disappointed when
               | they did not.
               | 
               | Mostly tangential to the article but I never really like
               | this argument. Like you're playing a game a specific way
               | and somebody else comes in with a new approach and mops
               | the floor with you and you're going to tell me "they
               | played wrong"? Like no, you were playing wrong the whole
               | time.
        
               | entropicdrifter wrote:
               | Yeah, people get salty when their preconceptions are
               | shattered, especially when they've invested a lot of
               | time/energy in thinking based on the idea that they were
               | sound.
               | 
               | It goes beyond simple sunk cost and into the realm of
               | reality slapping them with a harsh "humans aren't
               | special, grow up", which I think is especially bitter for
               | people who aren't already absurdists or nihilists.
        
             | advael wrote:
             | You seem to misunderstand why generalization is important
             | for making claims about intelligent systems. To illustrate
             | this, we could really easily design a system that encodes
             | all the test set questions and their answers, puts them in
             | an enormous hash table, and looks up the correct answer to
             | each challenge when presented with it. This could probably
             | score 100% on ARC if given the entire test set. Would you
             | call this AGI? What if I put it through a transformer as a
             | hashing function?
             | 
             | The mainstream attention LLMs have garnered has added a
             | bunch of noise to the way we talk about machine learning
             | systems, and unfortunately the companies releasing them are
             | partially to blame for this. That doesn't mean we should
             | change the definition of success for various benchmarks to
             | better suit lay misunderstandings of how this all works
        
               | rfoo wrote:
               | First, LLMs are not AGI. Never will be. Can we talk now?
               | 
               | > if given the entire test set.
               | 
               | I don't want the entire test set. Or any single one in
               | the test set.
               | 
               | The problem here is ARC challenge deliberately give a
               | training set with different _distribution_ than both the
               | public and the private test set. It 's like having only
               | 1+1=2, 3+5=8, 9+9=18 in training set and then 1+9=10,
               | 5*5=25, 16/2=8, (0!+0!+0!+0!)!=24 in test set.
               | 
               | I can see the argument of "giving the easy problems as
               | demonstration of rules and then with 'intelligence' [1]
               | you should be able to get harder ones (i.e. a different
               | distribution)", but I don't believe it's a good way to
               | benchmark current methods, mainly because there are
               | shortcuts. Like I can teach my kids how factorial works
               | and ! means factorial, instead of teaching them how
               | addition works only and make them figure out how
               | multiplication, division and factorial works and what's
               | the notation.
               | 
               | [1] Whatever that means.
        
               | advael wrote:
               | Okay I admit I'm confused and think I probably missed a
               | crucial thing here. You're saying the publicly available
               | problem set isn't indicative of the distribution of the
               | test set? If so, I can see why you object to that. Still,
               | it's potentially possible that the test's intention is to
               | demonstrate something like progressive integration of
               | compositionality given an abstract model. A lot of
               | machine learning systems can do well as long as they've
               | seen an example similar to the problem they've been
               | presented, but can't do things like respond to a
               | situation that presents them with a novel composition of
               | two abstractions they seem to have already learned in the
               | way a human can trivially.
               | 
               | Like only having [1+1=2, 4+5=9, 2+10=12] in the training
               | set and [2*5=10, 3/4=.75, 2^8=256] in the test set would
               | be bad, but something like [1+1=2, 3+4*2=11, 5*3=15,
               | 2*7=14, 1+3/5=1.8, 3^3=27] vs [2+4*3=14, 3+3^2+4=16,
               | 2*3/4+2^3/2^4=2] might not be, depending on what they're
               | trying to test
               | 
               | Compositionality of information, especially of
               | abstractions (like rules or models of a phenomenon), is a
               | key criterion in a lot of people's attempts to
               | operationally define "intelligence" (which I agree is
               | overall a nebulous and overloaded concept, but if we're
               | going to make claims about it we need at least a working
               | definition for any particular test we're doing) I could
               | see that meaning that the test set problems need to be
               | "harder" in the sense that presenting compositions of
               | rules in training doesn't preclude memorizing the
               | combinations. But this is just a guess, I'm not involved
               | in ARC and don't know, obviously*
        
               | rfoo wrote:
               | > You're saying the publicly available problem set isn't
               | indicative of the distribution of the test set?
               | 
               | Yes. From https://arcprize.org/guide:
               | Please note that the public training set consists of
               | simpler tasks whereas the public evaluation set is
               | roughly the same level of difficulty as the private test
               | set.         The public training set is significantly
               | easier than the others (public evaluation and private
               | evaluation set) since it contains many "curriculum" type
               | tasks intended to demonstrate Core Knowledge systems.
               | It's like a tutorial level.
        
               | advael wrote:
               | Well, in this paragraph they seem to explain that their
               | public evaluation set is meant to be indicative of the
               | kind of jump in difficulty you can expect from the
               | private test set. This to me implies that my guess is
               | close: They're looking for models that can learn simple
               | concepts and apply them to complex problems. Keeping the
               | test set private seems to be an attempt at making it
               | difficult to "cheat" at this by simply memorizing
               | superficial details of the more complex problem set,
               | which makes sense given that the whole point of this
               | seems to be testing for systems that can use learned
               | abstractions to tackle novel, out-of-distribution
               | problems
               | 
               | Like with our toy "algebra" examples, sure there's a lot
               | of emphasis on repetition and rote in primary education
               | on these subjects, and that's one way to get people more
               | consistent at getting the calculations right, but to be
               | frank I don't think it's the best way, or as crucial as
               | it's made out to be. What someone really needs to
               | understand about algebra is how the notation works and
               | what the symbols mean. Like I can't unsee the concept of
               | "+" as a function that takes two operands and starts
               | counting for as many steps as one would in the right
               | operand, starting at the value of the left operand. When
               | looking at algebra, the process I go through relies on a
               | bunch of conceptual frameworks, like "Anything in the set
               | of all arabic numerals can be considered a literal
               | value". "Anything in the roman alphabet is likely a
               | variable". "Any symbol is likely an infix operator, that
               | is, a function whose operands are on either side of it".
               | Some of the concepts I'm using are just notational
               | convention. At some point I memorized the set of arabic
               | numerals, what they look like, what each of them means,
               | how they're generally written in relation to each other
               | to express quantities combinatorically. Some of the
               | concepts are logical relations about quantities, or
               | definitions of functions. But crucially, the form of
               | these distillations makes them composable. If I didn't
               | really understand what "+" does, then maybe someone could
               | give me some really bad homework that goes
               | 
               | 1 + 30 = 31
               | 
               | 20 + 7 = 27
               | 
               | 3 + 10 = 13
               | 
               | And then present me the problem
               | 
               | 20 + 10 + 3 = ?
               | 
               | And I'd think the answer is
               | 
               | 20 + 10 + 3 = 213
               | 
               | That demonstrates _some model_ of how to do these
               | calculations, but it doesn 't really capture all the
               | important relationships the symbols represent
               | 
               | We can have any number of objections to this training
               | set. Like I wasn't presented with any examples of adding
               | two-digit numbers together! OR even any examples where I
               | needed to combine numbers in the same rank!
               | 
               | Definitely all true. Probably mistakes we could make in
               | educating a kid on algebraic notation too. It's really
               | hard to do these things in a way that's both
               | accomplishing the goal _and_ testable, quantifiable. But
               | many humans demonstrate the ability to distill conceptual
               | understanding of concepts without exhaustive examples of
               | their properties, so that 's one of the things ARC seems
               | to want to test. It's hard to get this perfectly right,
               | but it's a reasonable thing to want
        
               | blobbers wrote:
               | The problem is there is no way to infer the right answer
               | to 0! given the training. You need more context to learn
               | it. Humans need more context. If you put that at the end
               | of every grade 1 math test no student would get it right
               | unless they had some context.
               | 
               | Do grade 1 kids have AGI? (Haha)
               | 
               | But seriously, all professions need to train in context
               | to solve complex problems. You can train in adjacent
               | realms and reason about problems but to truly perform,
               | you need more training.
               | 
               | A general surgeon might be better than an electrician as
               | a vet, but that I'd rather have a veterinary surgeon
               | operate on my dog.
               | 
               | So some things are "AGI" able and other things need
               | specific training.
        
               | advael wrote:
               | I think there's variance in people's degree of
               | compositionality, as well as how quickly they can pick up
               | on novel relationships. Testing "intelligence" in humans
               | has always been kind of fraught in the first place, but
               | any capability we may care to measure is going to permit
               | degrees, and there will be some variance in humans on it.
               | We should expect this. There's variance in goddam
               | everything
               | 
               | We should also expect machine learning systems to have
               | somewhat different properties from human minds. Like
               | computers are more likely to accomplish perfect recall,
               | and we can scale the size of their memory and their
               | processing speed. All these confounding variables can
               | make it hard to make binary tests of a _capability_ ,
               | which is really what ARC seems like it's trying to do.
               | One such capability that AI researchers will often talk
               | about is conceptual compositionality. People care about
               | compositionality because it's a good way to demonstrate
               | that an abstract model is being used to reason about a
               | situation, which can be used in unseen but perhaps
               | conceptually similar situations. This "generalization" or
               | "abstraction" capability is really the goal, but it's
               | hard to reason about how to test it, and "composition"
               | (That is, taking a situation that's novel, but a
               | straightforward application of two or more different
               | abstractions the agent should already "know") is one more
               | testable way to try to tease it out.
               | 
               | As you point out, humans often fail this kind of test,
               | and we can rightly claim that in those cases, they didn't
               | correctly grasp the insight we were hoping they had.
               | Testing distilled abstractions versus memorization or
               | superficial pattern recognition isn't just important to
               | AI research, it's also a key problem in lots of places in
               | human education
        
               | astromaniak wrote:
               | > First, LLMs are not AGI.
               | 
               | It's the most generic thing we have right now, right?
               | 
               | > Never will be.
               | 
               | If there is no other breakthrough anytime soon we can
               | engineer AGI-like things around LLMs. I mean LLM trained
               | to use different attachments. Which can be other models
               | and algorithms. Examples will be image recognition models
               | and databases for algorithms. Even now ChatGPT can use
               | Bing search and Python interpreter. First steps done,
               | others will follow. The result will be not a true AGI,
               | but still a very capable system. And there is another
               | factor. Next models can be trained on high quality data
               | generated by current models. Instead of internet random
               | garbage. This should improve their spacial and logical
               | abilities.
        
         | ec109685 wrote:
         | There are similarities to the approach in this paper (though
         | they trained a model from scratch):
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.07062
         | 
         | How well would an LLM trained with a huge number of examples do
         | on this test? Essentially with enough attention, Goodhart's law
         | will take over.
        
         | sriku wrote:
         | Part of the challenge I understood to be learning priors from
         | the training set that can then be applied to an extended
         | private test set. This approach doesn't seem to do any such
         | "learning" on the go. So, supposing it accomplished 85% on the
         | private test set, would it be construed to have won the prize
         | with "we have AGI" being trumpeted out?
        
         | jd115 wrote:
         | Reminds me a bit of Genetic Programming as proposed by John
         | Holland, John Koza, etc. Ever since GPT came out, I've been
         | thinking of ways to combine that original idea with LLMs in
         | some way that would accelerate the process with a more
         | "intelligent" selection.
        
           | lachlan_gray wrote:
           | I'd love to hear more about this!
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | Maybe I am missing something, but to me this looks like "Let's
         | brute-force on the training data".
         | 
         | I mean, generating tens of thousands of possible solutions, to
         | find one that works does not, to me, signify AGI.
         | 
         | After all, the human solving these problem doesn't make 10k
         | attempts before getting a solution, do they?
         | 
         | The approach here, due to brute force, can't really scale: if a
         | random solution to a _very simple_ problem has a 1 /10k chance
         | of being right, you can't scale this up to non-trivial problems
         | without exponentially increasing the computational power used.
         | Hence, I feel this is brute-force.
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | 10000 samples are nothing compared to 2^100 possible outputs.
           | It is absolutely, definitely not a "brute search". Testing a
           | small fraction of possibilities (e.g. 0.000001%) is called
           | heuristics, and that's what people use too.
           | 
           | Please learn a bit of combinatorics.
           | 
           | > After all, the human solving these problem doesn't make 10k
           | attempts before getting a solution, do they?
           | 
           | No. People have much better "early rejection", also human
           | brain has massive parallel compute capacity.
           | 
           | It's ridiculous to demand GPT-4 performs as good as a human.
           | Obviously its vision is much worse and it doesn't have
           | 'video' and physics priors people have, so it has to guess
           | more times.
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | > 10000 samples are nothing compared to 2^100 possible
             | outputs. It is absolutely, definitely not a "brute search".
             | Testing a small fraction of possibilities (e.g. 0.000001%)
             | is called heuristics, and that's what people use too.
             | 
             | Brute searching literally means generating solutions until
             | one works. Which is exactly what is being done here.
             | 
             | > Please learn a bit of combinatorics.
             | 
             | Don't be condescending - I understand the problem space
             | just fine. Fine enough to realise that the problem was
             | constructed specifically to ensure that "solutions" such as
             | this just won't work.
             | 
             | Which is why _this_ "solution" is straight-up broken
             | (doesn't meet the target, exceeds the computationally
             | bounds, etc).
             | 
             | > It's ridiculous to demand GPT-4 performs as good as a
             | human.
             | 
             | Wasn't the whole point of this prize to spur interest in a
             | new approach to learning? What does GPT-[1234] have to do
             | with the contest rules? Especially since this solution
             | broke those rules anyway?
             | 
             | > Obviously its vision is much worse and it doesn't have
             | 'video' and physics priors people have, so it has to guess
             | more times.
             | 
             | That's precisely my point - it has to _guess_. Humans aren
             | 't guessing for those types of problems (not for the few
             | that I saw anyway).
        
               | ealexhudson wrote:
               | I think to be clear, brute force generally means an
               | iterative search of a solution space. I don't think
               | that's what this system is doing, and it's not like it's
               | following some search path and returning as early as
               | possible.
               | 
               | It's similar that a lot of wrong answers are being thrown
               | up, but I think this is more like a probabilistic system
               | which is being pruned than a walk of the solution space.
               | It's much smarter, but not as smart as we would like.
        
               | lelanthran wrote:
               | > I think to be clear, brute force generally means an
               | iterative search of a solution space.
               | 
               | Sure, but not an exhaustive one - you stop when you get a
               | solution[1]. Brute force does not require an exhaustive
               | search in order to be called brute-force.
               | 
               | GP was using the argument that because it is not
               | exhaustive, it cannot be brute-force. That's the wrong
               | argument. Brute-force doesn't have to be exhaustive to be
               | brute-force.
               | 
               | [1] Or a good enough solution.
        
               | naasking wrote:
               | A brute force search can be expected to find a solution
               | after a more thorough search of the space of
               | possibilities. If it really is only searching 0.000001%
               | of that space before finding solutions, then some
               | structure of the problem is guiding the search and it's
               | no longer brute force.
        
               | killerstorm wrote:
               | I was a member of national ACM ICPC team, I studied
               | algorithms for years. Brute force, heuristics, etc.
               | 
               | You're 100% WRONG on everything you wrote. You don't get
               | change established terminology just to denigrate the
               | approach you don't like.
               | 
               | It seems you are just biased against LLMs. But this test
               | is as much a test for limits of LLM abilities as it is a
               | quest for a new approach. It's open ended.
               | 
               | And it's not like the author of the article claims he has
               | AGI - he just shows the limits of LLM-based solutions.
        
               | lelanthran wrote:
               | > I studied algorithms for years.
               | 
               | Who hasn't?
               | 
               | > You're 100% WRONG on everything you wrote.
               | 
               | Maybe you should update the wikipedia page, then all the
               | other textbooks, that uses a definition of brute-force
               | that matches my understanding of it.
               | 
               | From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search
               | 
               | > Therefore, brute-force search is typically used when
               | the problem size is limited, or when there are problem-
               | specific heuristics that can be used to reduce the set of
               | candidate solutions to a manageable size.
               | 
               | Further, in the same page
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-
               | force_search#Speeding_up...
               | 
               | > One way to speed up a brute-force algorithm is to
               | reduce the search space, that is, the set of candidate
               | solutions, by using heuristics specific to the problem
               | class.
               | 
               | I mean, the approach under discussion is literally
               | _exactly_ this.
               | 
               | Now, _Mr "ACM ICPC, studied algorithms for years"_,
               | where's _your_ reference that reducing the solution space
               | using heuristics results in a non-brute-force algorithm?
        
               | baobabKoodaa wrote:
               | This was extremely cringe worthy to read. You are
               | confidently wrong about this. You are trying to redefine
               | well established terminology. I don't care about whatever
               | random wiki page you might find to "support your claims".
               | Anybody who has worked a lot on algorithms (including
               | myself) knows what brute force means and this is not it.
               | 
               | Also: lol at your "who hasn't" comment. Because you
               | clearly haven't.
        
               | lelanthran wrote:
               | > You are trying to redefine well established
               | terminology.
               | 
               | Reference? Link, even?
               | 
               | > don't care about whatever random wiki page you might
               | find to "support your claims".
               | 
               | That isn't some "random wiki" page; that's the wikipedia
               | page for this specific term.
               | 
               | I'm not claiming to have defined this term, I'm literally
               | saying I only agree with the sources for this term.
               | 
               | > Also: lol at your "who hasn't" comment. Because you
               | clearly haven't.
               | 
               | Talk about cringe-worthy.
        
               | baobabKoodaa wrote:
               | > Reference? Link, even?
               | 
               | Sure, here's definition for "brute force" from university
               | textbook material written by pllk, who has taught
               | algorithms for 20 years and holds a 2400 rating on
               | Codeforces:
               | 
               | https://tira.mooc.fi/kevat-2024/osa9/
               | 
               |  _" Yleispateva tapa ratkaista hakuongelmia on toteuttaa
               | raakaan voimaan (brute force) perustuva haku, joka kay
               | lapi kaikki ratkaisut yksi kerrallaan."_
               | 
               | edit:
               | 
               | Here's an English language book written by the same
               | author, though the English source does not precisely
               | define the term:
               | 
               | https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf
               | 
               | In chapter 5:
               | 
               |  _" Complete search is a general method that can be used
               | to solve almost any algorithm problem. The idea is to
               | generate all possible solutions to the problem using
               | brute force ..."_
               | 
               | And a bit further down chapter 5:
               | 
               |  _" We can often optimize backtracking by pruning the
               | search tree. The idea is to add "intelligence" to the
               | algorithm so that it will notice as soon as possible if a
               | partial solution cannot be extended to a complete
               | solution. Such optimizations can have a tremendous effect
               | on the efficiency of the search."_
               | 
               | Your mistake is that you for some reason believe that
               | _any_ search over solution space is a brute force
               | solution. But there are many ways to search over a
               | solution space. A  "dumb search" over solution space is
               | generally considered to be brute force, whereas a "smart
               | search" is generally not considered to be brute force.
               | 
               | Here's the Codeforces profile of the author:
               | https://codeforces.com/profile/pllk
               | 
               | edit 2:
               | 
               | Ok now I think I understand what causes your confusion.
               | When an author writes "One way to speed up a brute-force
               | algorithm ..." you think that the algorithm can still be
               | called "brute force" after whatever optimizations were
               | applied. No. That's not what that text means. This is
               | like saying "One way to make a gray car more colorful is
               | by painting it red". Is it still a gray car after it has
               | been painted red? No it is not.
        
               | killerstorm wrote:
               | You're asking for a definition of exhaustive search.
               | Exhaustive search, by definition, goes through the entire
               | search space. That's what word exhaustive means.
               | 
               | For a reference, check Cormen's "Introduction to
               | Algorithms". Every mention of brute-force search is
               | specifically to exhaustive search is which not feasible
               | for bigger spaces.
               | 
               | > I mean, the approach under discussion is literally
               | exactly this.
               | 
               | It's literally not. It DOES NOT REDUCE the candidate set.
               | It generates most likely candidates, but it doesn't
               | reduce anything.
               | 
               | You lack basic understanding. Solutions are pixels grids,
               | not Python programs. There's no search over pixel grids
               | in the article. Not every search is exhaustive search.
               | 
               | This is like saying theoretical physicists are "brute-
               | forcing" physics by generating candidate theories and
               | testing them. Ridiculous.
        
         | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
         | Ah, give it a rest. That's not "frontier AI research", neither
         | is it any kind of reasoning. It's the dumbest of the dumb
         | possible generate-and-test approach that spams a fire hose of
         | Python programs until it hits one that works. And still it gets
         | only 50% on the public eval.
         | 
         | How many thousands of Python programs does a human need to
         | solve a single ARC task? That's what you get with reasoning:
         | you don't need oodles of compute and boodles of sampling.
         | 
         | And I'm sorry to be so mean, but ARC is a farce. It's supposed
         | to be a test for AGI but its only defense from a big data
         | approach (what Francois calls "memorisation") is that there are
         | few examples provided. That doesn't make the tasks hard to
         | solve with memorisation it just makes it hard for a human
         | researcher to find enough examples to solve with memorisation.
         | Like almost every other AI-IQ test before it, ARC is testing
         | for the wrong thing, with the wrong assumptions. See the
         | Winograd Schema Challenge (but not yet the Bongard problems).
        
           | jononor wrote:
           | Do you have any suggestions for a better approach of testing
           | artificial intelligence? I mean, in a way that allows
           | comparing different approaches and being a reasonable metric
           | of progress.
        
             | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
             | I don't. I'm guessing -and it's nothing but a guess- that
             | for every problem that can be solved with intelligence
             | there exists a solution that does not require intelligence.
             | I'm guessing in other words that intelligence is the
             | ability to come up with solutions to arbitrary problems. If
             | that's true then there's no way to test for intelligence by
             | looking at the performance of a system at any particular
             | task, or any finite set of tasks, and so there's no way to
             | create a "test for intelligence".
             | 
             | My guess is supported by the experience that, in AI
             | research, every time someone came up with a plausible test
             | for intelligence, an AI system eventually passed the test
             | only to make it clear that the test was not really testing
             | intelligence after all (edit: I don't just mean formal
             | tests; e.g. see how chess used to "require intelligence"
             | right up until Deep Blue vs Kasparov).
             | 
             | Some people see that as "moving the goalposts" and it's
             | certainly frustrating but the point is that we don't know
             | what intelligence is, exactly, so it's very hard to test
             | for its existence or not, or to measure it.
             | 
             | My preference would be for everyone in AI research to
             | either stop what they're doing and try to understand what
             | the hell intelligence is in the first place, to create a
             | theory of intelligence so that AI can be a scientific
             | subject again, or to at least admit they're not interested
             | in creating artificial intelligence. I, for example, am
             | not, but all my background is in subjects that are
             | traditionally labelled "AI" so I have to suck it up, I
             | guess.
        
               | Nimitz14 wrote:
               | You're basically paraphrasing fchollet's paper on
               | intelligence and what he talked about in his most recent
               | podcast appearance with dwarkesh.
        
         | machiaweliczny wrote:
         | Do you accept such solutions as legit? It's obviously is easier
         | to generate program that to make prompt that will solve it
        
         | data_maan wrote:
         | It's not _that_ novel. Others have implemented this approach ,
         | in the context of mathematics.
         | 
         | Already the 2021 paper Drori (and many papers since) did
         | similar things.
         | 
         | It's a common idea in this space...
        
       | asperous wrote:
       | Having tons of people employ human ingenuity to manipulate
       | existing LLMs into passing this one benchmark kind of defeats the
       | purpose of testing for "AGI". The author points this out as it's
       | more of a pattern matching test.
       | 
       | Though on the other hand figuring out which manipulations are
       | effective does teach us something. And I think most problems boil
       | down to pattern matching, creating a true, easily testable AGI
       | test may be tough.
        
         | janalsncm wrote:
         | Perhaps if we don't know how to create an evaluation that can't
         | be "gamed" it tells us something about how special our
         | intelligence really is?
        
           | lucianbr wrote:
           | I don't know how to create a liver, or test one, so what does
           | that say about my liver? Pretty much nothing.
        
         | opdahl wrote:
         | Wouldn't the real AGI test be that an AI would be able to do
         | what the author did here and write this blog post?
        
           | atroche wrote:
           | Yep, but a float is more useful than a bool for tracking
           | progress, especially if you want to answer questions like
           | "how soon can we expect (drivers/customer support
           | staff/programmers) to lose their jobs?"
           | 
           | Hard to find the right float but worth trying I think.
        
             | opdahl wrote:
             | I agree, but it does seem a bit strange that you are
             | allowed to "custom-fit" an AI program to solve a specific
             | benchmark. Shouldn't there be some sort of rule that for
             | something to be AGI it should work as "off-the-shelf" as
             | possible?
        
               | soist wrote:
               | If OpenAI had an embedded python interpreter or for that
               | matter an interpreter for lambda calculus or some other
               | equally universal Turing machine then this approach would
               | work but there are no LLMs with embedded symbolic
               | interpreters. LLMs currently are essentially probability
               | distributions based on a training corpus and do not have
               | any symbolic reasoning capabilities. There is no
               | backtracking, for example, like in Prolog.
        
           | killerstorm wrote:
           | I won't be surprised if GPT-5 would be able to do it: it
           | knows that it's LLM, so it knows its limitations. It can
           | write code to pre-process input in a format which is better
           | understood, etc.
           | 
           | https://chatgpt.com/share/2fde1db5-00cf-404d-9ae5-192aa5ac90.
           | ..
           | 
           | GPT-4 created a plan very similar to the article, i.e. it
           | also suggested using Python to pre-process data. It also
           | suggested using program synthesis. So I'd say it's already
           | 90% there.
           | 
           | > "Execute the synthesized program on the test inputs."
           | 
           | > "Verify the outputs against the expected results. If the
           | results are incorrect, iteratively refine the hypotheses and
           | rules."
           | 
           | So people saying that it's ad-hoc are wrong. LLMs know how to
           | solve these tasks, they are just not very good at coding, and
           | iterative refinement tooling is in infancy.
        
         | sheeshkebab wrote:
         | Show me a test and I'll show you a neural network that passes
         | it... used to be an saying.
        
         | worstspotgain wrote:
         | Let me play devil's advocate for a second. Let's suppose that
         | with LLMs, we've actually invented an AGI machine that also
         | happens to produce useful textual responses to a prompt.
         | 
         | This would sound more far-fetched if we knew exactly how they
         | work, bit-by-bit. We've been training them statistically, via
         | the data-for-code tradeoff. The question is not yet
         | satisfactorily answered.
         | 
         | In this hypothetical, for every accusation that an LLM passes a
         | test because it's been coached to do so, there's a counter that
         | it was designed for "excessively human" AGI to begin with,
         | maybe even that it was designed for the unconscious purpose of
         | having humans pass it preferentially. The attorney for the
         | hypothetical AGI in the LLM would argue that there are tons of
         | "LLM AGI" problems it can solve that a human would struggle
         | with.
         | 
         | Fundamentally, the tests are only useful insofar as they let us
         | improve AI. The evaluation of novel approaches to pass them
         | like this one should err in the approaches' favor, IMO. A
         | 'gotcha' test is the least-useful kind.
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | There's every reason to believe that AGI is meaningfully
           | different from LLMs because humans do not take anywhere near
           | this amount of training data to create inferences (that and
           | executive planning and creative problem solving are clear
           | weak spots in LLMs)
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | >There's every reason to believe that AGI is meaningfully
             | different from LLMs because humans do not take anywhere
             | near this amount of training data to create inferences
             | 
             | The human brain is millions of years of brute force
             | evolution in the making. Comparing it to a transformer or
             | any other ANN really which essentially start from scratch
             | relatively speaking doesn't mean much.
        
               | infgeoax wrote:
               | Plus it's unclear if the amount of data used to "train" a
               | human brain is really less than what GPT4 used. Imagine
               | all the inputs from all the senses of a human over a
               | lifetime: the sound, light, touches, interactions with
               | peers, etc.
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | But that is of little help when you want to train an LLM
               | to do the job at your company. A human requires just a
               | little bit of tutorials and help, an LLM still require an
               | unknown amount of data to get up to speed since we
               | haven't reached that level yet.
        
               | infgeoax wrote:
               | Yeah humans can generalize much faster than LLM with far
               | fewer "examples" running on sandwiches and coffee.
        
               | logicchains wrote:
               | >Yeah humans can generalize much faster than LLM with far
               | fewer "examples" running on sandwiches and coffee.
               | 
               | This isn't really true. If you give an LLM a large prompt
               | detailing a new spoken language, programming language or
               | logical framework with a couple examples, and ask it to
               | do something with it, it'll probably do a lot better at
               | it than if you just let an average human read the same
               | prompt and do the same task.
        
               | alchemist1e9 wrote:
               | Don't forget all the lifetimes of all ancestors as well.
               | A lot of our intelligence is something we are born with
               | and a result of many millions of years of evolution.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | How many attempts have there been for humans to solve math
             | or science outstanding problems? We're also kind of
             | spamming with ideas until one works out
        
               | vlovich123 wrote:
               | I'll give you as much time as you want with an LLM and am
               | 100% sure that it won't solve a single outstanding
               | complex math problem.
        
               | danielbln wrote:
               | I can say the same about myself, and I would probably
               | consider myself generally intelligent.
        
               | vlovich123 wrote:
               | There's a meaningful difference between a silicon
               | intelligence and an organic one. Every silicon
               | intelligence is closer to an equally smart clone whereas
               | organic ones have much more variance (not to mention
               | different training).
               | 
               | Anyway, my point was that humans butter direct their
               | energy than randomly spamming ideas, at least with the
               | innovation of the scientific method. But an LLM struggles
               | deeply to perform reasoning.
        
               | coolspot wrote:
               | > I'll give you as much time as you want with an LLM
               | 
               | With infinite amount of time you can LLM brute force
               | whole search space. Infinite monkeys with typewriters.
        
             | bongodongobob wrote:
             | Our compute architecture has been brute forced via an
             | revolutionary algorithm over a billion years. An LLM
             | approaching our capabilities in like a year is pretty
             | fucking good.
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | its LLM grade school. let them cook, train these things to
         | match utility in our world. I'm not married to the "AGI" goal
         | if there is other utility along the way.
        
       | trott wrote:
       | Francois Chollet says LLMs do not learn in-context. But Geoff
       | Hinton says LLMs' few-shot learning compares quite favorably with
       | people!
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWWgr2rN45o&t=46m20s
       | 
       | The truth is in the middle, I think. They learn in-context, but
       | not as well as humans.
       | 
       | The approach in the article hides the unreliability of current
       | LLMs by generating thousands of programs, and still the results
       | aren't human-level. (This is impressive work though -- I'm not
       | criticizing it.)
        
         | hackpert wrote:
         | I'm not sure how to quantify how quickly or well humans learn
         | in-context (if you know of any work on this I'd love to read
         | it!)
         | 
         | In general, there is too much fluff and confusion floating
         | around about what these models are and are not capable of
         | (regardless of the training mechanism.) I think more people
         | need to read Song Mei's lovely slides[1] and related work by
         | others. These slides are the best exposition I've found of neat
         | ideas around ICL that researchers have been aware of for a
         | while.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~songmei/Presentation/Algorith...
        
       | TheDudeMan wrote:
       | "Vision is an especially large weakness."
       | 
       | But you can have GPT write code to reliably convert the image
       | grid into a textual representation, right? And code to convert
       | back to image and auto-verify.
        
         | p1esk wrote:
         | GPT-4o might not have been trained on a sufficiently large
         | amount of visual data to develop advanced spatial intelligence.
         | Perhaps it needs to see a lot more images, or perhaps it needs
         | to be trained differently (e.g. predict the next frame in a
         | video). I suspect SORA has more spatial intelligence internally
         | than 4o.
        
       | gibsonf1 wrote:
       | Isn't 50% kind of a failing grade?
        
         | p1esk wrote:
         | It's only been a week since the million dollar prize was
         | offered. Let's see what the SOTA is in a month.
        
       | badrunaway wrote:
       | When we talk about system 2; is it possible that [generating
       | large number of programs; evaluating them of the task; choosing
       | top K outcomes; feeding it back to Neural net] can act as system
       | 2 for a AGI? Isn't that how we think intelligently as well- by
       | making lot of hypothesis internally and evaluating them - and
       | updating our model?
        
         | awwaiid wrote:
         | I think it's more like humans are a chaotic choir of subsystems
         | all doing their thing and tossing up their directives until
         | some sort of "win" happens or the volume is loud enough in some
         | direction that it then gets reverse engineered into a
         | "thought". But yes.
        
           | badrunaway wrote:
           | like darwin selection between the subsystem approaches? Put
           | in a lot of different kind of LLMs and let them play the same
           | game inside with each other.. whosoever wins the simulation
           | is allowed to externally present the approach... something
           | like that?
        
         | spencerchubb wrote:
         | Possibly
         | 
         | I think we need those pieces, and also a piece for determining
         | hypotheses in an efficient manner. Monte Carlo Tree Search
         | could be that piece. Probabilistically choose a node to search,
         | and then backpropagate the probabilities back to the root node.
        
           | badrunaway wrote:
           | Intuitively I feel efficiency is the outcome of existing
           | world model.. approach can look like yours - I don't see why
           | there has not been efforts on scaling monte carlo tree search
           | for extending the existing world model via tree search. My
           | guess is that it would diverge to hallucinations too fast
           | because it doesn't have a strong logical building block
           | already
        
         | bshanks wrote:
         | Yes, I think it's very possible that human brains unconsciously
         | generate-and-test surprisingly large numbers of small candidate
         | programs when solving a problem.
         | 
         | This approach is
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel, which is
         | a good fit for biological neural architectures, which have very
         | many computing nodes but each node is very slow (compared to
         | electronic computer CPUs/GPUs).
        
       | Imnimo wrote:
       | To me the big take-aways here are:
       | 
       | 1) Most of the heavy lifting is being done by search. We're
       | talking about having the LLM generate _thousands_ of candidate
       | solutions, and they 're mostly bad enough that "just pick the
       | ones that get kinda close on the examples" is a meaningful
       | operation.
       | 
       | 2) More samples improves performance despite the fact that
       | GPT-4o's vision is not capable of parsing the inputs. I'm curious
       | how much performance would degrade if you shuffled the images
       | passed to the model (but used the correct images when evaluating
       | which candidates to keep).
       | 
       | 3) It's definitely true that the LLM has to be giving you
       | something more than random programs. At the very least, the LLM
       | knows how to craft parsimonious programs that are more likely to
       | be the solution. It may be that it's providing more than that,
       | but it's not clear to me exactly how much information on the
       | correct search space is coming from the hand-crafted examples in
       | the prompt.
       | 
       | Overall, the work to get this far is very impressive, but it
       | doesn't really move the needle for me on whether GPT-4 can do ARC
       | puzzles. It does, however, show me that search is surprisingly
       | powerful on this task.
        
       | bearjaws wrote:
       | Seems that Arc-AGI is more flawed rather than GPT-4o is more AGI.
       | 
       | Maybe a AI version of Hanlons Razor. Never attribute to AGI what
       | could be easily explained by being in the training set.
        
       | bjornsing wrote:
       | Can we be sure GPT-4o hasn't been trained on the public test set?
        
         | ivalm wrote:
         | It has been trained on public test set as it's on github
        
           | free_bip wrote:
           | This isn't necessarily true, OpenAI isn't open about how
           | their data cleaning process works.
        
       | atleastoptimal wrote:
       | I'll say what a lot of people seem to be denying. GPT-4 is an
       | AGI, just a very bad one. Even GPT-1 was an AGI. There isn't a
       | hard boundary between non AGI and AGI. A lot of people wish there
       | was so they imagine absolutes regarding LLM's like "they cannot
       | create anything new" or something like that. Just think: we
       | consider humans a general intelligence, but obviously wouldn't
       | consider an embryo or infant a general intelligence. So at what
       | point does a human go from not generally intelligent to generally
       | intelligent? And I don't mean an age or brain size, I mean suite
       | of testable abilities.
       | 
       | Intelligence is an ability that is naturally gradual and emerges
       | over many domains. It is a collection of tools via which general
       | abstractive principles can be applied, not a singular universally
       | applicable ability to think in abstractions. GPT-4, compared to a
       | human, is a very very small brain trained for the single purpose
       | of textual thinking with some image capabilities. Claiming that
       | ARC is the absolute market of general intelligence fails to
       | account for the big picture of what intelligence is.
        
         | blharr wrote:
         | The "general" part of AGI implies it should be capable across
         | all types of different tasks. I would definitely call it real
         | Artificial Intelligence, but it's not general by any means.
        
           | FeepingCreature wrote:
           | It's capable of _attempting_ all types of different tasks.
           | That is a novel capability on its own. We 're used to GPT's
           | amusing failures at this point, so we forget that there is
           | absolutely no input you could hand to a chess program that
           | would get it to try and play checkers.
           | 
           | Not so with GPT. It will try, and fail, but that it tries at
           | all was unimaginable five years ago.
        
             | dahart wrote:
             | Its amusing to me how the very language used to describe
             | GPT anthropomorphizes it. GPT wont "attempt" or "try"
             | anything on its own without a human telling it what to try,
             | it has no agenda, no will, no agency, no self-reflection,
             | no initiative, no fear, and no desire. It's all A and no I.
        
               | FeepingCreature wrote:
               | Do you agree that "there is absolutely no input you could
               | hand to a chess program that would get it to try and play
               | checkers", but there _is_ an input you can hand to GPT-3+
               | that will get it to try and play pretty much any game
               | imaginable, so long as you agree that its attempt will be
               | very poor?
               | 
               | I don't want to get into the weeds on what intelligence
               | is or what "attempt" means or "try" means (you can
               | probably guess I disagree with your position), but do you
               | have a disagreement on pure input/output behavior? Do you
               | disagree that if I put adequate words in, words will come
               | out that will resemble an attempt to do the task, for
               | nearly any task that exists?
        
               | dahart wrote:
               | You're trying to avoid addressing my point. What can GPT
               | do that's interesting without a human in the loop doing
               | the prompting?
               | 
               | Lol "very poor". You're attempting to argue that if
               | there's any output at all in response to an input prompt,
               | then GPT is "trying" and showing signs of intelligence,
               | no matter what the output is. By this logic, you
               | contradicted yourself: the chess engine can play
               | checkers, poorly. By this logic, asking the sky to play a
               | game means the sky is trying because it changes, or
               | asking a random number generator to play a game means it
               | resembles an attempt to play because there is "very poor"
               | output.
               | 
               | There are lots of games GPT can't play, like hide-and-
               | seek, tag, and tennis. Playing a game means playing by
               | the rules of the game, giving coherent output, and trying
               | to win. GPT can't play games it hasn't seen before, and
               | no I don't agree that "very poor" output counts. It
               | doesn't (currently) learn the rules from your prompts;
               | you can't teach it to play a new game by talking to it,
               | and the "very poor" output from a game it wasn't trained
               | on will never improve. And, to my actual point, GPT will
               | not play any games at all unless you ask it to.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | _What can GPT do that's interesting without a human in
               | the loop doing the prompting?_
               | 
               | Understand what the human in the loop doing the prompting
               | is asking for, for one thing.
               | 
               | The magical aspects of LLMs are on the _input_ side, not
               | the output.
        
               | dahart wrote:
               | This probably isn't what you meant, but if the magic is
               | on the input side, then everything interesting about
               | interacting with GPT is being provided by the human and
               | not GPT.
               | 
               | We don't have any strong evidence that GPT "understands"
               | its input in general. We absolutely have examples of GPT
               | failing to understand some inputs (and not knowing it,
               | and insisting on bogus output). And we know for a fact
               | that it was designed and built to produce statistically
               | plausible output. GPT is a mechanical device designed by
               | humans to pass the Turing test. We've designed and built
               | something that is exceptionally good at making humans
               | believe it is smarter than it is.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | _We've designed and built something that is exceptionally
               | good at making humans believe it is smarter than it is._
               | 
               | Yep, and even ELIZA could do that, to some extent. But at
               | some point you'll need to define what "understanding"
               | means, and explain why an LLM isn't doing it.
        
               | dahart wrote:
               | Totally, and that's a fair point. I don't know what
               | understanding means, not enough to prove an LLM can't,
               | anyway, and I think nobody has a good enough definition
               | yet to satisfy this crowd. But I think we can make
               | progress with nothing more than the dictionary definition
               | of "understand", which is the ability to perceive and
               | interpret. I think we can probably agree that a rock
               | doesn't understand. And we can probably also agree that a
               | random number generator doesn't understand. The problem
               | with @FeepingCreature's argument is that the quality of
               | the response does matter. The ability for a machine
               | that's specifically designed to wait for input and then
               | provide an output, to then provide a low quality
               | response, doesn't demonstrate any more intelligence than
               | a bicycle... right? I don't know where the line is
               | between my random writer Markov chain text generator from
               | college and today's LLMs. I'm told transformers are
               | fundamentally the same and just have an adaptive window
               | size. More training data then is the primary difference.
               | So then we are saying Excel's least-squares function
               | fitter does not understand, unless the function has a
               | billion data points? Or, if there's a line, what does it
               | look like and where is it?
        
               | lupusreal wrote:
               | That's not an interesting argument, all you're doing is
               | staking out words that are reserved for beings with souls
               | or something. It's like saying submarines can't swim.
               | It's an argument about linguistics, not capabilities.
        
               | dahart wrote:
               | Disagree. The ability to "try" is a capability, and GPT
               | doesn't have it. Everything in the world that we've
               | called "intelligent" up to this point has had autonomy
               | and self motivation, and GPT doesn't have those things.
               | GPT doesn't grow and doesn't learn from its mistakes. GPT
               | won't act without a prompt, this is a basic fact of its
               | design, and I'm not sure why people are suddenly confused
               | about this.
        
         | theptip wrote:
         | This seems to be so broad a definition as to no longer mean
         | anything useful.
         | 
         | People in general are interested in capabilities or economic
         | impact, and GPT-2 cleared no notable thresholds in those
         | regards.
         | 
         | I prefer the exact opposite approach: let's use a strict
         | definition, and have levels to make it really explicit what we
         | are talking about.
         | 
         | Here is a good one:
         | 
         | "Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to
         | AGI"
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462
        
           | sigmoid10 wrote:
           | People will never agree on this. We've known about the
           | concept of intelligence for much, much longer than computers
           | have been around and we still don't have a common definition
           | or set of rules to check. That also makes things like
           | consciousness and death pretty hard to define in medicine,
           | leading to inconsistent rules across jurisdictions. For AGI
           | in particular, I guarantee you that no matter which test gets
           | beaten, the majority of humanity will always just move the
           | goalpost and claim it's not "real" AGI because "reasons."
           | Because the opposite would mean they have to admit that they
           | are now the lesser intelligence on the planet.
        
         | surfingdino wrote:
         | > GPT-4 is an AGI, just a very bad one.
         | 
         | Then stop selling it as a tool to replace humans. A fast moving
         | car breaking through a barrier and flying off the cliff could
         | be called "an airborne means of transportation, just a very bad
         | one" yet nobody is suggesting it should replace school busses
         | if only we could add longer wings to it. What the LLM community
         | refuses to see is that there is a limit to the patience and the
         | financing the rest of the world will grant you before you're
         | told, "it doesn't work mate."
         | 
         | > So at what point does a human go from not generally
         | intelligent to generally intelligent?
         | 
         | Developmental psychology would be a good place to start looking
         | for answers to this question. Also, forgetting scientific
         | approach and going with common sense, we do not allow young
         | humans to operate complex machinery, decide who is allowed to
         | become a doctor, or go to jail. Intelligence is something that
         | is not equally distributed across the human population and some
         | of us never have much of it, yet we function and have a role in
         | society. Our behaviour, choices, preferences, opinions are not
         | just based on our intelligence, but often on our past
         | experiences and circumstances. It is also not the sole quality
         | we use to compare ourselves against each other. A not very
         | intelligent person is capable of making the right choices (an
         | otherwise obedient soldier refusing to press the button and
         | blow up a building full of children); similarly, a highly
         | intelligent person can become a hard-to-find serial criminal (a
         | gynecologist impregnating his patients).
         | 
         | What intelligent and creative people hold against LLMs is not
         | that they replace them, but that they replace them with a shit
         | version of them relegating thousands of years of human progress
         | and creativity to the dustbin of the models and layers of
         | tweaks to the output that still produce unreliable crap. I
         | think the person who wrote this sign summed it up best
         | https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1802378022361911711
        
           | bongodongobob wrote:
           | In response to the sign: then learn to code or make art that
           | is better than AI art.
           | 
           | It's an existential complaint. "Why won't the nerds make
           | something for meeeee." Do it yourself. Make that robot.
           | 
           | Sucks to think that you're not that special. Most art isn't.
           | Most music isn't. Any honest artist will agree. Most
           | professional artists are graphic designers, not brilliant
           | once in a generation visionaries. It's the new excuse for
           | starving artists. AI or no, they'd still be unsuccessful.
           | That's the way it's always been.
        
             | earthnail wrote:
             | While that is 100% true, the real problem is that the risk
             | of finding out whether you can make special art has
             | significantly increased. Previously if you didn't make it
             | as an artist, you could still earn money with other art
             | related tasks - in graphics, many became illustrators. In
             | music, people made music for ads.
             | 
             | That plan B is now going away, and a music career will be
             | much more like a sports career: either you make it in
             | football, or you need to find another career where your
             | football skills won't be very useful.
             | 
             | That is obviously scary for many.
        
               | surfingdino wrote:
               | Artists who make it usually have a legend, a story to
               | tell or be told by their friends, associates, agents,
               | publishers, gallerists, etc. That story has a human
               | dimension that touches the rest of us and we somehow
               | connect to it. Van Gogh cut of his ear, we still keep
               | talking about it and wondering why? There is nothing AI
               | can tell us about itself, its "art". The artistic
               | struggle with AI is not about expressing your vision on a
               | canvas in a way that makes others feel what you want them
               | to feel but about forcing it to generate something it is
               | incapable of generating or programmed not to generate. We
               | got to the point where we are given crayons programmed to
               | not draw the things others do not want them to draw or to
               | draw HR-approved version of what the artist wants to
               | draw. The future is now and it's shit.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | Using van Gogh as an example of "artists who make it" is
               | insane.
               | 
               | Which I guess is appropriate, because he was literally
               | crazy. He suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions
               | and died from suicide, depressed and in poverty.
               | 
               | That's the opposite of "making it". It's zero consolation
               | that people like his work now, he never even knew.
        
               | surfingdino wrote:
               | > Using van Gogh as an example of "artists who make it"
               | is insane.
               | 
               | So is building a tool that will only generate "approved"
               | art. We need to be able to express our idea, feelings,
               | our perception of the world in ways that do not fit
               | corporate standards of text, audio, or visual
               | communication. It's part of being human.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | > So is building a tool that will only generate
               | "approved" art.
               | 
               | And so is eating ice cream with your forehead. Are we
               | just doing non sequiturs now? I didn't defend image
               | generation tools _in the slightest_.
               | 
               | > We need to be able to express our idea, feelings, our
               | perception of the world in ways that do not fit corporate
               | standards of text, audio, or visual communication.
               | 
               | I agree. My point started and ended with "van Gogh in an
               | awful example when talking about artist who 'made it'".
               | That's it. There is nothing in there to be extrapolated
               | to AI or any other subject.
        
               | bongodongobob wrote:
               | So don't use the tool or make your own. You don't get to
               | tell people what to use or like.
        
             | intended wrote:
             | The sign reads (paraphrased): "I want AI to do my dishes so
             | I can do art. Not do art so I can do my dishes"
             | 
             | Your response is "learn to art" "The nerds dont owe you
             | anything." "Most of You would be unsuccessful anyway"
             | 
             | You brought in absolutely unrelated items.
             | 
             | 1) Learn art - that is baked into what the Sign is saying.
             | There is no Terminal Point for being an artist.
             | 
             | 2) Nerds dont... - Where nerds come in as a class for this
             | conversation?
             | 
             | 2.1) if you can speak for all nerds, please note that I
             | sure as heck dont want Warhammer 40k, I want Star Trek.
             | 
             | 3) Most would be unsuccessful - so what?
             | 
             | Are they happy practicing their craft? Do they have the
             | choice to spend their time on those pursuits and enrich
             | their lives, and share their joys with others around them?
        
           | atleastoptimal wrote:
           | > What the LLM community refuses to see is that there is a
           | limit to the patience and the financing the rest of the world
           | will grant you before you're told, "it doesn't work mate."
           | 
           | The point about LLM's is they may have a lot of drawbacks
           | right now but they're improving at a rapid pace. They already
           | are very useful. There are hundreds of stories coming out of
           | companies effectively leveraging them to replace workers in
           | many natural-language related tasks. They're far more useful
           | than a car that goes off a cliff.
           | 
           | Nobody more useful than an LLM is being effectively replaced
           | by an LLM. Those few companies that jump the gun too early
           | are suffering for it.
           | 
           | >That sign
           | 
           | We already have dishwashers and washing machines. Companies
           | are working on making humanoid robots that can do those
           | things, it's just that it's harder to develop a fully-fledged
           | embodied humanoid than it is to create the diffusion models
           | and LLM's being used today. It's not some conspiracy to let
           | AI do all the fun stuff first.
           | 
           | Nobody is preventing anyone from making art or writing
           | poetry. If someone finds value in AI art or writing, either
           | you have to accept that they weren't the audience member you
           | wanted, or you have to accept that your ability to be
           | creative is a learnable algorithm same as anything else.
        
           | empath75 wrote:
           | > Then stop selling it as a tool to replace humans
           | 
           | I don't understand why people assume that the purpose of any
           | tool is to "replace humans". Automation doesn't replace
           | humans and never has and never will. It simply does certain
           | tasks that humans used to do, freeing people up to do
           | different tasks. There is not a limited amount of work that
           | can be done, there isn't a limited amount of _creative_ work
           | that can be done. Even if AIs were good enough to do every
           | creative task done by humans today (and they aren't and won't
           | be any time soon), that doesn't mean that humans will have
           | nothing of value to produce, or that humans will have been
           | "replaced". There is always going to be work for humans to
           | do, even in a universe where AI have super human capabilities
           | at all tasks.
           | 
           | In particular, human beings strongly value the opinions and
           | creative output of _human beings_ simply for the reason that
           | they are human and similar to them. That will never change,
           | no matter how intelligent that AIs get.
        
             | surfingdino wrote:
             | > I don't understand why people assume that the purpose of
             | any tool is to "replace humans".
             | 
             | Because of this
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070566
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | The definition of AGI that i am familiar with is that it can do
         | all (digital) tasks a human can do _at the level of an average
         | human_.
         | 
         | As long as this level hasn't been achieved in all domains, it
         | isn't AGI.
        
           | lupusreal wrote:
           | This seems like a problematic standard. For one, it's very
           | fuzzy. A human who is top 51% and one who's top 49% are very
           | similar to each other and could probably swap places
           | depending on how they're feeling that day; there's nothing
           | fundamentally different going on in their heads. Even at the
           | further ends of the scale, humans have essentially the same
           | kind of brains and minds as each other, some more capable
           | than others but still all belonging to the same category of
           | thinking things. Your AGI definition bifurcates the human
           | population into those that possess general intelligence and
           | those who don't, but this seems hard to justify. At least,
           | hard to justify when drawn there. If you put the line at
           | profound mental retardation where a person can no longer
           | function in society, that would make more sense. A slightly
           | below average human may not be exceptional in any regard but
           | I think they still possess what must be regarded as _general_
           | intelligence.
           | 
           | Furthermore, you're counting cases where humans do things the
           | computer cannot but ignoring cases where the computer does
           | things humans cannot. For instance, I doubt any human alive,
           | let alone _average humans_ can give reasonable explanations
           | for short snippets of computer code in as many languages as
           | GPT-4o, or formulate poetry in as many styles on arbitrary
           | topics, or rattle off esoteric trivia and opinions about
           | obscure historic topics, .... I think you get the point. It
           | has already surpassed average human abilities in many
           | categories of intellectually challenging tasks, but with your
           | definition if it fails at even one task an average human can
           | do, then it lacks  "general intelligence."
           | 
           | I suggest that your definition is one for "AHI" (Average
           | Human Intelligence), not one for "AGI" (Artificial _General_
           | Intelligence.)
        
         | dr_dshiv wrote:
         | Totally agree. So does Peter Norvig:
         | https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
        
         | lucianbr wrote:
         | "A car is a plane, just a very bad one. It can do the cruising
         | down the runway part, only the flying part is missing".
        
           | Fatalist_ma wrote:
           | Someone could say that, but we know and we can prove that a
           | car is not a plane. An example of a bad plane would be the
           | Wright Flyer.
        
         | killerstorm wrote:
         | Yes. GPT-3 was a clear AGI signal: "language models are few-
         | shot learners". I.e. they can figure a pattern from few
         | examples to apply it to something useful. That's general
         | intelligence.
         | 
         | But people choose to be in denial.
        
       | whiplash451 wrote:
       | The article jumps to the conclusion that "Given that current LLMs
       | can perform decently well on ARC-AGI" after having used multiple
       | hand-crafted tricks to get to these results, including "I also
       | did a small amount of iteration on a 100 problem subset of the
       | public test set" which is hidden in the middle of the article and
       | not mentioned in the bullet list at the top.
       | 
       | Adding the close-to ad-hominem attack on Francois Chollet with
       | the comics at the beginning (Francois never claimed to be a
       | neuro-symbolic believer), this work does a significant disservice
       | to the community.
        
         | z7 wrote:
         | >Francois never claimed to be a neuro-symbolic believer
         | 
         | His response:
         | 
         | "This has been the most promising branch of approaches so far
         | -- leveraging a LLM to help with discrete program search, by
         | using the LLM as a way to sample programs or branching
         | decisions. This is exactly what neurosymbolic AI is, for the
         | record..."
         | 
         | "Deep learning-guided discrete search over program space is the
         | approach I've been advocating, yes... there are many different
         | flavors it could take though. This is one of them (perhaps the
         | simplest one)."
         | 
         | https://x.com/fchollet/status/1802773156341641480
        
           | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
           | That kind of neuro-symbolic AI is a bit like British cuisine:
           | place two different things next to each other in the same
           | plate, like bangers and mash, and call it "a dish".
           | 
           | Nope. This is neurosymbolic AI:
           | 
           |  _Abductive Knowledge Induction From Raw Data_
           | 
           | https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/Papers/abdmetarawIJCAI.pdf
           | 
           | That's a symbolic learning engine trained in tandem with a
           | neural net. The symbolic engine is learning to label examples
           | for the neural net that learns to label examples for the
           | symbolic engine. I call that cooking!
           | 
           | (Full disclosure: the authors of the paper are my thesis
           | advisor and a dear colleague).
        
           | whiplash451 wrote:
           | Indeed. Francois Chollet himself said during his interview
           | with Dwarkesh that he is not against LLMs and in fact
           | believes that the long-term solution mixes LLMs with
           | something else which has not been discovered yet (his bet is
           | on discrete program search but is open to anything else).
           | 
           | Pitching him against LLMs in such a binary fashion is
           | deceiving and unfair.
        
         | bogtog wrote:
         | For what it's worth, the comic is based on a well-known meme,
         | and the author must've wanted to stick to the format:
         | https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E10AQFryt0thryEeA/image-...
        
         | killerstorm wrote:
         | I think this work is great.
         | 
         | A lot of top researchers claim that obvious deficiencies in LLM
         | training are fundamental flaws in transformer architecture, as
         | they are interested in doing some new research.
         | 
         | This work show that temporary issues are temporary. E.g. LLM is
         | not trained on grid inputs, but can figure things out after
         | preprocessing.
        
           | whiplash451 wrote:
           | My claim is _not_ that this work is not useful. But however
           | "great" your work is, misleading on the steps you took during
           | your experiments and overselling your results is never a
           | valid approach in research.
        
             | killerstorm wrote:
             | This is a blog post, sir. All details are written down.
             | He's very clear about methods, it seems you're 1) biased;
             | 2) have too high standards for blog posts.
        
         | kalkin wrote:
         | The comic at the beginning paints the "stack more layers" LLM
         | people as clowns, not neurosymbolic people or by proxy Chollet.
         | Yes, it suggests the "stack more layers" approach works anyway,
         | but in a self-deprecating way...
         | 
         | If this article wanted to attack Chollet, it could have made
         | more hay out of another thing that's "hidden in the middle of
         | the article", the note that the solution actually gets 72% on
         | the subset of problems on which humans get ~85%. The fact that
         | the claimed human baseline for ARC-AGI as a whole is based on
         | an easy subset is pretty suspect.
        
       | comfortabledoug wrote:
       | I'm glad someone else finally said it, those born blind cannot
       | possibly have AGI!
       | 
       | /sarcasm :D
        
       | nadam wrote:
       | Amazing work, prompt engineering at its finest. One future
       | direction for Arc AGI could be to use not Python, but a much more
       | concise programming language that is more suited for brute-force
       | methods like genetic mutations. The problem would be of course to
       | train an LLM that is proficient enough in such a language. I am
       | thinking about stack based languages. For this competition I
       | would develop a careful bit-level encoding of a variant of the
       | 'Joy' programming language.
       | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)) It
       | would be a considerable effort though which I don't have time
       | for, hence I post this idea publicly. A promising direction is a
       | mix of things in my opinion: Special stack-based concise
       | language, consulting LLMs like the OP did, and genetic algorithms
       | combined.
        
         | fire_lake wrote:
         | S expressions are great for making valid syntax more likely -
         | an old trick from Genetic Programming.
        
       | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
       | >> Claim 1 seems likely true to me for a reasonable notion of
       | "learning". I think Francois Chollet agrees here. Most of my
       | doubts about this claim are concerns that you can basically brute
       | force ARC-AGI without interestingly doing learning (e.g. brute-
       | force search over some sort of DSL or training on a huge array of
       | very similar problems). These concerns apply much less to the
       | kind of approach I used
       | 
       | The approach described in the article is exactly "brute-force
       | search over some sort of DSL". The "DSL" is a model of Python
       | syntax that GPT-4o has learned after training on the entire
       | internet. This "DSL" is locked up in the black box of GPT-4o's
       | weights, but just because no-one can see it, it doesn't mean it's
       | not there; and we can see GPT-4o generating Python programs, so
       | we know it is there, even if we don't know what it looks like.
       | 
       | That DSL may not be "domain specific" in the sense of being
       | specifically tailored to solve ARC-AGI tasks, or any other
       | particular task, but it is "domain specific" in the sense of
       | generating Python programs for some subset of all possible Python
       | programs that includes programs that can solve some ARC-AGI
       | tasks. That's a very broad category, but that's why it over-
       | generates so much: it needs to draw 8k samples total until one
       | works for just 50% of the public eval set.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | The expectation is that you'll have to have dynamically generated
       | benchmarks with better eval at some point given the potential for
       | brute forcing the private validation set.
        
       | sparsely wrote:
       | You can have a go at the problems here:
       | https://arcprize.org/play?task=00576224
       | 
       | None of them are terribly hard but some aren't trivial either, a
       | couple took me a bit of thinking to work out. By far the most
       | tedious part is inputting the result (I didn't bother after the
       | first) which is definitely something AI is better at!
        
       | killerstorm wrote:
       | FWIW GPT-4 is able to generate a plan very similar to one in the
       | article: also involves feature extraction, program synthesis,
       | iterative refinement.
       | 
       | https://chatgpt.com/share/2fde1db5-00cf-404d-9ae5-192aa5ac90...
       | 
       | So it's pretty close to being able to plan solution completely on
       | its own. It's just rather bad at coding and visual inputs, so it
       | doesn't know what it doesn't know.
        
       | uptownfunk wrote:
       | Arc agi is a small stepping stone to agi but is not agi.
       | 
       | Program search mimics what humans do to a certain extent but not
       | in entirety.
       | 
       | A more general world model and reference will be required for
       | agi.
        
       | cchance wrote:
       | LOL i looked at that first complex test sample and closed the
       | page, it made my brain hurt.
        
       | machiaweliczny wrote:
       | This challenge looks quite solvable but it's relies on physics
       | understanding and it's has a lot of human/world priors in sense
       | of space understanding and object boundaries.
       | 
       | Seems like it relies on identification of objects and then
       | mapping them somehow. Most of the cases so far that I've seen are
       | based on some transformation or relation between the objects.
       | 
       | So far it seems like some search among common transformatiosn and
       | relations could solve it. Plus some heuristics/computation for
       | counting order, wholeness(boundary) or pattern.
       | 
       | IMO it can be solved by search of programs that combine these +
       | some LLM to guide heuristics most likely.
       | 
       | The only hard one was applied noise or one testing understanding
       | of "gravity".
       | 
       | Did anyone test human baseline for this?
        
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