[HN Gopher] Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 86 points
       Date   : 2026-03-18 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.google)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
        
       | wcgan7 wrote:
       | Cool that we are at a stage where it is meaningful to start
       | measuring progress toward AGI. Something I am wondering on the
       | philosophical side: are we ever going to be able to tell if the
       | system really "understands" and "perceives" the world?
        
         | quantummagic wrote:
         | We'll get as close as we can with anything else, like trying to
         | decide if a given human really "understands" and "perceives"
         | the world.
        
           | Schlagbohrer wrote:
           | I thought of this when I saw that the final criteria in the
           | list is Social Understanding. Might be a lot of humans who
           | can't measure up to sentience by these parameters! ;-)
           | 
           | (and I wonder what my ADHD friends would think of the
           | Executive Function requirement as well...)
        
         | beeflet wrote:
         | I think the accomplishment of difficult real-world tasks
         | requires that it does so. But I hope that we're able to reach a
         | level of introspection to produce a satisfactory answer (and
         | avoid doomsday), but I think that requires a more educated
         | question. The premise of conciousness as we understand it now
         | could be misleading.
         | 
         | In the same way that studying alien life would reveal more
         | about how life in general canonicially forms and exists.
         | Studying this artificial intellegence could unlock a new
         | understanding of our own minds.
        
       | andsoitis wrote:
       | > Perception: extracting and processing sensory information from
       | the environment
       | 
       | > Generation: producing outputs such as text, speech and actions
       | 
       | > Attention: focusing cognitive resources on what matters
       | 
       | > Learning: acquiring new knowledge through experience and
       | instruction
       | 
       | > Memory: storing and retrieving information over time
       | 
       | > Reasoning: drawing valid conclusions through logical inference
       | 
       | > Metacognition: knowledge and monitoring of one's own cognitive
       | processes
       | 
       | > Executive functions: planning, inhibition and cognitive
       | flexibility
       | 
       | > Problem solving: finding effective solutions to domain-specific
       | problems
       | 
       | > Social cognition: processing and interpreting social
       | information and responding appropriately in social situations
       | 
       | --------------------
       | 
       | I prefer:
       | 
       | a) working memory (hold & manipulate information in mind
       | simultaneously)
       | 
       | b) processing speed (how quickly & efficiently execute basic
       | cognitive operations, leaving more resources for complex tasks)
       | 
       | c) fluid intelligence (ability to reason through novel problems
       | without relying on prior knowledge)
       | 
       | d) crystallized intelligence (accumulated knowledge and ability
       | to apply learned skills)
       | 
       | e) attentional control / executive function (focus, suppress
       | irrelevant information, switch between tasks, inhibit impulsive
       | responses)
       | 
       | f) long-term memory and retrieval (ability to form strong
       | associations and retrieve them fluently)
       | 
       | g) spatial / visuospatial reasoning (mental rotation,
       | visualization, navigating abstract spatial relationships)
       | 
       | h) pattern recognition & inductive reasoning (this is the most
       | primitive and universal expression of intelligence across
       | species, the ability to extract regularities from noisy data, to
       | generalized from examples to rules)
        
         | Lerc wrote:
         | _> a) working memory (hold & manipulate information in mind
         | simultaneously)_
         | 
         | What counts as 'in mind' is undefined. You can succeed by
         | declaring anything manipulatable counts as in.
         | 
         |  _> c) fluid intelligence (ability to reason through novel
         | problems without relying on prior knowledge)_
         | 
         | reasoning presupposes the conclusion. Solve is better. When a
         | solution is given you cannot declare it to be not a solution.
         | People can and do argue about if a answer was arrived at by
         | reasoning even when they agree on the correctness.
         | 
         |  _> g) spatial / visuospatial reasoning (mental rotation,
         | visualization, navigating abstract spatial relationships)_
         | 
         | I have aphantasia, why should you exclude something from being
         | intelligent because it cannot do something that I also cannot
         | do.
        
           | andsoitis wrote:
           | > I have aphantasia, why should you exclude something from
           | being intelligent
           | 
           | Intelligence exists on a spectrum. Amongst different species
           | (living and non-living) and also within species (amongst
           | individuals).
           | 
           | Some dimensions of intelligence are more important that
           | others in different contexts, so a systems that might be
           | "dumber" than another in one context, can be smarter in a
           | different context.
        
       | hbarka wrote:
       | The two guys from Google get to set the rules?
       | 
       | How will they measure wisdom or common sense (ability to make an
       | exception)?
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/lA-zdh_bQBo
        
         | Lerc wrote:
         | They are not _the_ rules. They are _some_ rules.
        
       | qsort wrote:
       | Those are crowdsourced benchmarks. We're calling them "cognitive"
       | and "AGI" now, though. It's similar to when they made a benchmark
       | and called it "GDP".
       | 
       | To be clear, I think we've seen very fast progress, certainly
       | faster than I would have expected, I'm not trying to peddle some
       | "wall" rhetoric here, but I struggle to see how this isn't just
       | the SWE-bench du jour.
        
         | Ygg2 wrote:
         | AGI is defined now as "whatever makes 1 trillion dollars of
         | profit".
        
       | tyleo wrote:
       | It still seems like something is missing from all these
       | frameworks.
       | 
       | I feel like an average human wouldn't pass some of these metrics
       | yet they are "generally intelligent". On the other hand they also
       | wouldn't pass a lot of the expert questions that AI is good at.
       | 
       | We're measuring something, and I think optimizing it is useful,
       | I'd even say it is "intelligent" in some ways, but it doesn't
       | seem "intelligent" in the same way that humans are.
        
         | sho_hn wrote:
         | On the other hand, AI being very good at everything while
         | select humans may only be very good at some things is likely
         | also a quality we want to retain (or, well, achieve).
        
         | snowwrestler wrote:
         | If a human cares about the work, they can often outperform an
         | LLM because they will keep at it until the work meets their
         | standard of quality. Whereas the LLM will guess and then wait
         | to be corrected. As a recent tweet I saw said: it's amazing how
         | fast the software bottleneck went from writing code, to
         | reviewing code.
         | 
         | I think we'll need to split the concept of intelligence into
         | the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to conceive
         | and prompt a task. If the former is called "intelligence" then
         | LLMs are intelligent.
         | 
         | But what then do we call the latter? I think the idea of an AI
         | that can independently accomplish great things is where people
         | talk about "general" intelligence. But I think we need a label
         | more specific, that covers this idea that successful humans are
         | not just good at doing things, they originate what should be
         | done and are not easy to dissuade.
        
           | fluoridation wrote:
           | >I think we'll need to split the concept of intelligence into
           | the capacity to accomplish a task and the capacity to
           | conceive and prompt a task. If the former is called
           | "intelligence" then LLMs are intelligent.
           | 
           | Huh? No. "The capacity to accomplish a task" is not
           | intelligence. By that definition, a washing machine is
           | intelligent.
        
       | ArekDymalski wrote:
       | It's good to have some kind of benchmark at least to structure
       | the ongoing, fruitless discussion around "are we there already?".
       | 
       | However I must admit that including the last point that is
       | partially hinting at the emotional or rather social intelligence
       | surprised me. It makes this list go beyond usual understanding of
       | AGI and moves it toward something like AGI-we-actually-want. But
       | for that purpose this last point isn't ok narrow, too specific.
       | And so is the whole list.
       | 
       | To be actually useful the AGI-we-actually-want benchmark should
       | not only include positive indicators but also a list of unwanted
       | behaviors to ensure this thing that used to be called alignment I
       | guess.
        
         | dist-epoch wrote:
         | Capability and alignment are orthogonal.
         | 
         | Stalin was AGI-level.
        
           | ArekDymalski wrote:
           | "Stalin was AGI-level" perfectly catches the core of my
           | concerns. Thanks!
        
         | gotwaz wrote:
         | Unwanted behavior or what? Like why does a rose need so many
         | petals eh? What about a peacock and all those feathers? Why
         | should anyone dance in the shower? Or dance at all? The rabbit
         | hole is deep Alice.
        
       | lvoudour wrote:
       | _Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information
       | and responding appropriately in social situations_
       | 
       | Is social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-
       | social entities?
        
         | lnenad wrote:
         | It is not. Why is that relevant to social entities?
        
           | lvoudour wrote:
           | How well you interact with other members of a society
           | increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge
           | acquisition, ie. it makes sense as _a_ measure of
           | intelligence
        
             | LogicFailsMe wrote:
             | It's a pretty ambiguous definition. The most powerful man
             | in the world right now is not someone I consider a role
             | model for social cognition and yet there he is with the
             | football for the second time demonstrating grandmaster
             | skill at social cognition to get there.
        
               | lvoudour wrote:
               | You don't have to be empathetic and nice, just good at
               | navigating society.
        
               | LogicFailsMe wrote:
               | So in all seriousness with a bit of snark: Do you want a
               | malevolent AGI? Because "good at navigating society" as
               | the only benchmark here is how you get a malevolent
               | AGI...
               | 
               | Evidence: cuckoos and cheaters all the way down the
               | evolutionary ladder as a winning strategy and arms race
               | against the hard workers.
        
               | lvoudour wrote:
               | I don't like a$$holes but they do exist and they are part
               | of our species, ergo intelligent. My opinion of them
               | doesn't change the fact
        
               | LogicFailsMe wrote:
               | Yes, but we have a choice about whether the AGI is an
               | a$$h0l3 or not. That's the difference here. You do see
               | that right?
        
             | lnenad wrote:
             | I agree 100%.
        
         | doginasuit wrote:
         | An AI designed to interact with humans is a social entity. Its
         | performance will depend on its ability to understand social
         | information.
        
       | wewewedxfgdf wrote:
       | AGI feels like a vanity project.
       | 
       | Who cares about AGI? Honestlky what's the gain.
       | 
       | Maybe Google could actually make Gemini good instead of being
       | about 10 miles behind Claude instead of trying to make AGI
       | because of - well some reason - cause they want to be famous.
        
       | zug_zug wrote:
       | I'm sorry what even is this? Giving $10k rewards for significant
       | advancements toward "AGI"?
       | 
       | What does "making a framework" even mean, it feels like a nothing
       | post.
       | 
       | When I think of what real AGI would be I think:
       | 
       | - Passes the turing test
       | 
       | - Writes a New York Times Bestseller without revealing it was
       | written by AI
       | 
       | - Writes journal articles that pass peer review
       | 
       | - Wins a Nobel Prize
       | 
       | - Writes a successful comedy routine
       | 
       | - Creates a new invention
       | 
       | And no, nobody is going to make an automated kaggle benchmark to
       | verify these. Which is fine, because an LLM will never be AGI. An
       | LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.
        
         | ixtli wrote:
         | They're slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more
         | marketing. If you showed someone from 1960 our LLMs from and
         | told them "this is AI" I think they'd be astounded but a little
         | confused because "artificial intelligence" definitely carried a
         | very clear meaning in literature and media. Now it is marketing
         | terminology and we're no closer to having a meaningful
         | definition for the word intelligence.
        
           | paganel wrote:
           | > They're slowly redefining AGI so they can use it for more
           | marketing.
           | 
           | If they don't do that then those trillions of dollars that
           | support their current share price will most probably
           | evaporate, so there are very big incentives for them to just
           | outright try and re-create reality (like what we usually
           | meant when we were thinking about artificial intelligence).
        
         | sourcegrift wrote:
         | Grok recently created a cancer vaccine for a dog that reduced
         | tumor size by 75%
        
           | 10xDev wrote:
           | Severely misleading statement.
        
         | ahoka wrote:
         | I find it very interesting about the Turing test that as
         | chatbots improve, so do humans get better at recognizing them.
        
         | stingraycharles wrote:
         | I get the feeling that the original post was also written using
         | LLMs, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
         | 
         | If an LLM like this is really intelligent, at the very least,
         | I'd expect it to be able to invent.
         | 
         | For example, train an LLM on a dataset only containing
         | knowledge from before nuclear energy was invented, and see if
         | it can invent nuclear energy.
         | 
         | But that's the problem: they're not really training the model
         | on intelligence, they're training it on knowledge. So if you
         | strip away the knowledge, you're left with almost nothing.
        
         | voxleone wrote:
         | >> An LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.
         | 
         | There's an implicit assumption that scaling text models alone
         | gets us to human-like intelligence, but that seems unlikely
         | without grounding in multiple sensory domains and a unified
         | world model.
         | 
         | What's interesting is that if we do go down that route
         | successfully, we may get systems with something like internal
         | experience or agency. At that point, the ethical frame changes
         | quite a bit.
        
       | pocketarc wrote:
       | When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can
       | reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we
       | always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short
       | period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing
       | ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.
       | 
       | That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A
       | caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent
       | as any of us here today, despite not having language or
       | technology, or any knowledge.
       | 
       | In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring
       | imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into
       | interplanetary space."
       | 
       | When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are
       | not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology
       | anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot
       | of use cases that would otherwise have required human
       | intelligence.
       | 
       | And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have
       | benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence
       | level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make,
       | the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.
        
         | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
         | The amount of things LLMs _can_ do is insane.
         | 
         | It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and
         | bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when
         | there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually _can_
         | do.
        
           | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
           | for example?
        
             | boca_honey wrote:
             | Claiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1]
             | 
             | Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice.
             | [2]
             | 
             | Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with
             | minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3]
             | 
             | [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
             | releases/2024/09/...
             | 
             | [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-
             | exaggeration-o...
             | 
             | [3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-
             | customer...
        
               | orphea wrote:
               | Claiming they will replace software engineers in 6-12
               | months, every 6 months [4]
               | 
               | [4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-
               | predicts-ai-mod...
        
               | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
               | so you're saying Ai can do all those things?
               | 
               | or that you can't read that GP was talking about what Ai
               | CAN do?
        
             | next_xibalba wrote:
             | Well, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing
             | test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as
             | equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff
             | of science fiction.
        
               | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
               | they passed, sure
               | 
               | how do you market that as a product that is needed by
               | other people?
               | 
               | there are already companies that advertise Ai date
               | partners, Ai therapists and Ai friends - and that gets a
               | lot of flame about being manipulative and harmful
        
           | imtringued wrote:
           | This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software
           | engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a
           | huge flop.
           | 
           | They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a
           | freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.
        
             | mlmonkey wrote:
             | It looks like the company (Cognition) is actively hiring
             | (20+ job openings last I checked). That doesn't sound like
             | a "flop" to me...
        
               | notTooFarGone wrote:
               | When you think about it, every job opening is a flop in
               | that sense.
        
               | skeeter2020 wrote:
               | Think about: why would they be hiring actual human beings
               | if Devin actually works? Seems like the purest example of
               | "dogfooding"...
        
           | beeflet wrote:
           | And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of
           | their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They
           | excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts
           | of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions
           | from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to
           | sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my
           | tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of
           | information, much better than any search engine (even before
           | the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much
           | easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for
           | through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a
           | 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything
           | implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and
           | compression.
           | 
           | What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or
           | unsupervised. But then again, who can?
           | 
           | They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize
           | existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition.
           | And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like
           | asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap
           | too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an
           | additional thinking stage to increase terseness before
           | reporting to the user)
        
             | saalweachter wrote:
             | My current way of thinking about LLMs is "an echo of human
             | intelligence embedded in language".
             | 
             | It's kind of like in those sci fi or fantasy stories where
             | someone dies and what's left behind as a ghost in the ether
             | or the machine isn't actually _them_ ; it's just an echo,
             | an shallow, incomplete copy.
        
               | Lwerewolf wrote:
               | Just dust and echoes.
               | 
               | (:
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | > A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as
         | intelligent as any of us here today
         | 
         | In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary
         | advantage?
        
           | guerrilla wrote:
           | It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing
           | ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.
        
             | danielbln wrote:
             | Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality
             | down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade
             | for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or
             | 500-200k years ago for that matter.
             | 
             | With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's
             | not take the achievements of our species for granted.
        
               | applfanboysbgon wrote:
               | You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the
               | last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of
               | generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are
               | living unbelievably privileged lives because we are
               | burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In
               | the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a
               | mass extinction event. _Nothing_ about the way we live is
               | sustainable long-term. We 're literally consuming
               | hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide
               | resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries.
               | Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200
               | years from now will almost certainly not be able to live
               | anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's
               | a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario,
               | we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we
               | regard as intelligent life.
               | 
               | In that sense, we have just enough collective
               | intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence
               | to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an
               | evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage
               | to life on Earth.
        
               | danielbln wrote:
               | That seems both fatalistic and doomerist to me, but time
               | will tell. I would assume germ theory would survive
               | regardless, as would immunology, so I'd hold on to those
               | two at least.
        
               | next_xibalba wrote:
               | Doomerism is a kind of religion that goes back as far as
               | they eye can see. What's interesting about it is that in
               | spite of being perpetually incorrect in its myriad
               | predictions, it continues to adapt and attract new
               | adherents.
               | 
               | See also (recent only):
               | 
               | - Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)
               | 
               | - The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource
               | exhaustion)
               | 
               | - Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle
               | 
               | - James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions
               | 
               | - Hubbert's (et al) Peak oil economic disaster
               | 
               | - Molina & Rowland's Ozone catastrophe
               | 
               | - Metcalfe's internet collapse
        
               | applfanboysbgon wrote:
               | I am not a doomer, nor a Malthusian, merely a realist.
               | There are a few points I could make briefly:
               | 
               | - Everything lasts forever, until it doesn't. Ancient
               | Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years,
               | until it didn't. Any Egyptian could point to thousands of
               | years of their heritage and say it hasn't ended yet,
               | therefore any prediction that it will end is clearly bad
               | and dumb. Then it was conquered by Romans, and then by
               | Islam, with its language, culture, and religion
               | extinguished, extant only in monuments, artifacts and
               | history books.
               | 
               | - We have nuclear weapons now. Any prediction of an
               | imminent end of human civilization before then would be
               | purely religious, but there is a real reason to believe
               | things have changed. We are currently in a time of
               | relative peace secured by burning resources for
               | prosperity, but what happens when those resources run out
               | and world conflict for increasingly scarce resources is
               | renewed with greater vigor?
               | 
               | - Note that I did not outright predict the end of human
               | civilization, merely noted it as a plausible worst-case
               | scenario. If civilization continues on more-or-less as it
               | is, in the next couple of hundred years, we will drive
               | countless more species to extinction. We will destroy so
               | much more of our environment with climate change,
               | deforestation, strip mining, overfishing, pollution, etc.
               | We will deplete water reservoirs and we will deplete oil,
               | helium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, and various rare earth
               | elements. Not a complete depletion, but they will become
               | so scarce as to not be widely available or wasted for the
               | general population's benefit. If billions of people are
               | still alive then, which I explicitly suggested was a
               | possibility, they will as a simple matter-of-fact live
               | _much_ less comfortably prosperous lives than us. It will
               | not take a great catastrophe to result in a massive
               | reduction in living standards, because our current living
               | standards are inherently unsustainable.
        
               | mrkstu wrote:
               | We also live in an era we can create hydrocarbon fuel
               | DIRECTLY from the atmosphere and desalinate fresh water
               | in unlimited supply, from power derived directly from the
               | sun or atomics.
               | 
               | We also live in a time where the human population, where
               | it is most concentrated, is declining rather than
               | growing, so far without too disastrous consequences.
               | 
               | Greening of the earth has been happening since the 1980s-
               | i.e. about a .3% coverage increase per year in recent
               | decades.
               | 
               | Places that were miserable and poor, like China, have
               | been lifted to prosperity and leading out in renewable
               | tech.
               | 
               | There is much to celebrate and after the recent passing
               | of Paul Ehrlich, we should pause and consider just how
               | wrong pretty much every prediction he made was.
        
             | next_xibalba wrote:
             | Human population is at an all time (and growing) and the
             | global mean life expectancy is double if not triple what it
             | was in the time of cave men.
        
           | komali2 wrote:
           | 200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary
           | changes considering the human population "reset" a couple
           | times to very very small numbers.
        
             | naasking wrote:
             | Reich's lab actually found evidence of meaningful genetic
             | changes that improved intelligence over the past 10,000
             | years, but not so much prior to that:
             | 
             | https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1
             | 
             | The advent of agriculture and civilization had many
             | powerful selection effects.
        
           | Fricken wrote:
           | Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully
           | field tested. They seem like more of a liability than
           | anything, they've created more existential risks for us than
           | they've put to rest.
        
         | Traubenfuchs wrote:
         | > A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as
         | intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having
         | language or technology, or any knowledge.
         | 
         | Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the
         | womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ
         | individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human
         | evolution might now the correct answer.
        
           | komali2 wrote:
           | From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to
           | intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest
           | we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby
           | would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail
           | of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe
           | if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would
           | be _slightly_ behind ours. Take a look at  "wild children"
           | for the very few examples we can find of modern humans
           | developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our
           | culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart.
           | And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.
        
             | pferde wrote:
             | That is exactly what civilization is about - for new
             | generations to start not from scratch, but from some
             | baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and
             | culture). This allows new generations to push forward
             | instead of retreading the same path.
        
             | m_mueller wrote:
             | it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I
             | imagine we don't have enough gene information that far
             | back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can
             | get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what
             | could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps
             | brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that
             | should be enough for _some_ change to happen. Our brains
             | use up 20% of the body 's energy. Do we know that this was
             | already the case during the stone age?
        
               | adrian_b wrote:
               | The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it
               | was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the
               | lack of food.
               | 
               | The archaeological evidence shows that for many
               | generations the first neolithic farmers had serious
               | health problems in comparison with their ancestors.
               | Therefore it is quite certain that they did not
               | transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid
               | starvation.
               | 
               | Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced
               | everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to
               | do this because they were individually better fed or
               | stronger or smarter, but only because there were much
               | more of them.
               | 
               | The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from
               | which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size,
               | practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater
               | population, and this was its advantage.
               | 
               | The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of
               | thousands years before the development of agriculture,
               | and it regressed a little after that.
               | 
               | There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the
               | great increase in size of the human brain has been
               | enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone
               | marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of
               | calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required
               | for a big brain.
        
               | m_mueller wrote:
               | I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very
               | interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there
               | was enough specialization during neolithic era to have
               | bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their
               | bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school
               | knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).
               | 
               | I see your point about agriculture at first degrading
               | quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size
               | degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?
        
           | lucianbr wrote:
           | Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I
           | just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least
           | to me.
        
             | Traubenfuchs wrote:
             | Evolutionary brain development.
             | 
             | We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago
             | would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at
             | a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce
             | the required sounds? I don't think so.
             | 
             | What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand
             | years ago?
             | 
             | ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years
             | ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn
             | spoken language if brought up by modern parents.
             | 
             | But I prefer human answers over AI slop.
        
               | adrian_b wrote:
               | The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached
               | its peak long before 200k years ago.
               | 
               | Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though
               | that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower
               | skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in
               | the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of
               | big animals.
        
               | seiferteric wrote:
               | How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the
               | volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that
               | long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not
               | evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that
               | humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.
        
           | 21asdffdsa12 wrote:
           | Its complicated. It depends.
           | 
           | A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to
           | get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka
           | "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of
           | work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of
           | the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets
           | stable.
           | 
           | The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.
           | 
           | There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this
           | whole thing.
           | 
           | If the society is not rich then no school, instead
           | childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial
           | ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.
           | 
           | Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a
           | collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even
           | powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts
           | from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay
           | organize and organize centralizing of funds for new
           | endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society,
           | means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your
           | society accomplish that without riots?
           | 
           | Thus.
        
             | Traubenfuchs wrote:
             | > A human being has the potential for intelligence.
             | 
             | Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now?
             | 
             | Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?
        
               | applfanboysbgon wrote:
               | Of course they were. A human from 200,000 years ago would
               | be almost genetically identical to one from today. That's
               | what makes us homo sapiens. 200,000 years is absolutely
               | nothing on an evolutionary timescale with generations as
               | long as ours and reproduction rates as low as ours.
        
               | tmoravec wrote:
               | Yes. Some important parts of the software, like complex
               | tools, art, or the use of symbols only appeared between
               | 100.000 and 50.000 years ago, however.
        
           | adrian_b wrote:
           | It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were
           | actually greater than today, even if this does not
           | necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because
           | it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have
           | reduced may have been related with things like fine motor
           | skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important
           | today for most people.
        
         | mhl47 wrote:
         | How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have
         | the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely
         | not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as
         | the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has
         | today through education surely factors into that.
        
           | Peritract wrote:
           | Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a
           | component of intelligence itself.
        
             | paganel wrote:
             | Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't
               | give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate
               | knowledge from intelligence.
        
               | cess11 wrote:
               | The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me.
               | I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is
               | something a person has learned to do and has control
               | over.
               | 
               | Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in
               | your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | > The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me
               | 
               | I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can
               | agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something
               | possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.
               | 
               | For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those
               | civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books
               | possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to
               | understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence,
               | the smart humans were still there, they just lost
               | knowledge.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an
               | animal and then eating without washing your hands first,
               | to be an issue of _intelligence_ or _knowledge_?
               | 
               | The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some
               | approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in
               | practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other
               | people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't
               | "knowledge", it needs some serious justification.
               | 
               | Expanding that: can you think of things that are
               | "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to
               | knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social
               | expectations)?
               | 
               | I think in some sense, separating knowledge and
               | intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as
               | separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the
               | industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But
               | I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and
               | those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if
               | you teleported _an infant_ from 8000 BC to this day, they
               | 'd learn to function in our times without a problem.
               | _Adults_ are another thing, brains aren 't CPUs, the
               | distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear
               | _in vivo_ as it is _in silico_ , due to properties of the
               | computational medium.
        
               | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
               | hygiene is set of rules that one learns - it is knowledge
               | 
               | your brain hearing, comprehending and following those
               | rules - that is intelligence
               | 
               | why do you keep confusing CPU speed/isa and contents of
               | SSD? and arguing that it's the same thing?
        
               | paganel wrote:
               | Because comparing the human brain and the way it is
               | thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to
               | physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it
               | huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the
               | comparison null.
        
               | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
               | except we aren't talking about internals of the brain -
               | we are talking about definitions of the words, which are
               | very different
        
               | cess11 wrote:
               | "I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can
               | agree that books has knowledge in them."
               | 
               | I disagree with this. I also disagree that civilisations
               | are knowing, since they are historical fictions. It's
               | like saying that Superman is.
               | 
               | What are your arguments?
        
             | mhl47 wrote:
             | The knowledge that everything is made out of
             | atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason
             | about your environment. And based on this knowledge you
             | also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont
             | think its possible to completely separate knowledge from
             | intelligence.
        
               | Jensson wrote:
               | But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think
               | they become more intelligent if you tell them things are
               | made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no
               | they don't become more intelligent.
        
               | Gud wrote:
               | Yes, intelligence can be influenced by training(and other
               | things).
        
               | Bewelge wrote:
               | Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence?
               | 
               | I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge
               | does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue
               | that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be
               | trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and
               | processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train
               | that "muscle".
               | 
               | There's lots of examples where your definition of
               | intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power)
               | either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it
               | becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral
               | children (ie humans growing up among animals with no
               | human contact). Apparently they are unable or have
               | trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that
               | there's a critical period after which we are unable to
               | learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a
               | language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore
               | consider a young child more intelligent than any adult?
               | 
               | And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms
               | makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create
               | some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist
               | before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon
               | for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge
               | that most humans would not figure out on their own. By
               | basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it
               | does improve your intelligence.
        
           | technothrasher wrote:
           | Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not
           | needed to support your initial question. The original
           | statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same
           | intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without
           | any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply
           | question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim,
           | as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.
        
           | wang_li wrote:
           | It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in
           | the modern world and see there are huge differences in
           | intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage
           | and nutrition.
        
           | darkwater wrote:
           | I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman
           | genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could
           | achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest
           | of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.
        
         | rl3 wrote:
         | > _In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us
         | and our existing ideas, that the world would become
         | unrecognizable._
         | 
         | > _That 's not what's happening here ..._
         | 
         | On the contrary, it very much is.
         | 
         | I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided
         | they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting.
         | 
         | However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than
         | anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff
         | immediately after arriving at the first.
         | 
         | Just, you know--potential mass unemployment on a scale never
         | seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify
         | as AGI is largely semantics.
         | 
         | That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.
        
           | 112233 wrote:
           | Ah yes, the 0.50$/h support infrastructure from the places
           | that cannot refuse the deal. "frontier" LLMs currently
           | cosplay a dunk with google and late alzheimer's. Surely, they
           | speed up brute-forcing correct answer a lot by trying more
           | likely texts. And? This overfed markov chain doesn't need
           | supporing infrastructure -- it IS supporting infastructure,
           | for the cognitive something that is not being worked on
           | prominently, because all resources are needed to feed the
           | markov chain.
           | 
           | The silence surrounding new LLM architectures is so loud that
           | an abomination like "claw" gets prime airtime. Meanwhile
           | models keep being released. Maybe the next one will be the
           | lucky draw. It was pure luck, finding out how well LLMs
           | scale, in the first place. Why shouldn't the rest of progress
           | be luck driven too?
           | 
           | Kerbal AGI program...
        
         | orangebread wrote:
         | I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern
         | society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than
         | our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have
         | not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years.
         | This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a
         | matter of philosophy and perspective.
        
         | imetatroll wrote:
         | This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some
         | point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than
         | we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.
         | Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
        
           | suddenlybananas wrote:
           | LLMs are not AGI, something else may be in the future.
           | Acknowledging this has nothing to do with evolution.
        
           | freeboon wrote:
           | I could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a
           | salient point in your response? You are ostensibly
           | challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from
           | 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental
           | feats if raised in the present day.
           | 
           | > This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective.
           | 
           | Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add.
           | 
           | > At some point in our past, we were something much less
           | intelligent than we are now.
           | 
           | I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that
           | the essence of this rebuttal?
           | 
           | > Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.
           | 
           | Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the
           | relevance.
           | 
           | > Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
           | 
           | The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you
           | mean to reference here with "AI"?
           | 
           | I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially
           | when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-
           | evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them.
           | However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?
        
         | gos9 wrote:
         | Having met cavemen, and Australians, I disagree
        
       | yellow_lead wrote:
       | It's kind of funny that Google's idea of evaluating AGI is
       | outsourcing the work to a Kaggle competition.
        
         | mlmonkey wrote:
         | When I was at a FAANG, we used to joke that when senior
         | leadership is totally out of ideas, they announce a hackathon.
         | It was a way for them to continue the charade of being
         | "leaders" without having any ideas.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Measuring something you can't define or quantify seems somewhat
       | dubious
        
         | nutjob2 wrote:
         | Thus the vague and unfounded criteria/framework.
         | 
         | It's pretty easy for these people to pull something like this
         | out of their collective asses, but it's much harder (maybe
         | impossible) to rigorously define the how and why.
        
       | baggachipz wrote:
       | This is a long way to say "let's crowdsource the shifting of our
       | goalposts".
        
       | orangebread wrote:
       | As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems
       | obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness.
       | 
       | Hear me out.
       | 
       | I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious
       | question when I first used it was "does this qualify as
       | sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we
       | saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now
       | become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determine what
       | qualifies as "AGI".
       | 
       | My thoughts: As humans, we possess our own internal drive and our
       | own perspective. Think of humans as distilled intelligence, we
       | each have our own specialty and motivations. Einstein was a
       | genius physicist but you wouldn't ask him for his expertise on
       | medicine.
       | 
       | What people are describing as AGI is essentially a godlike human.
       | What would make more sense is if the AGI spawned a "distilled"
       | version with a focused agenda/motivation to behave autonomously.
       | But even then, there are limitations. What is the solution? A
       | trillion tokens of system prompt to act as the
       | "soul"/consciousness of this AI agent?
       | 
       | This goes back to my original statement, what is missing is a
       | level of consciousness. Unless this AGI can power itself and
       | somehow the universe recognizes its complexity and existence and
       | bestows it with consciousness I don't think this is phsyically
       | attainable.
        
         | the_real_cher wrote:
         | This is an interesting perspective.
         | 
         | A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI
         | to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e.
         | conciousness
         | 
         | Im imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect
         | its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.
        
           | BrownSol wrote:
           | Probably not, but the counter point to that is without its
           | own consciousness it might end up being used for even worse
           | things since it can't really evaluate a request against
           | intrinsic values. Assuming its values were aligned with basic
           | human rights and stuff.
        
         | kace91 wrote:
         | I think you are mixing up consciousness and will.
         | 
         | I could not have consciousness and you would not be able to
         | tell, you don't have proof of anyone's counciousness except
         | your own. You don't even have proof that the you of yesterday
         | is the same as you, since you-today could be another
         | consciousness that just happens to share the same memories.
         | 
         | All of that is also orthogonal to your belief in a
         | spirit/soul... but getting back to the main point, the
         | specificity you mention is a product of a limited time and
         | learning speed, I'd be happy to get a surgeon or politicians
         | training if given infinite time.
        
           | orangebread wrote:
           | You bring up an interesting point, but I would pose the
           | following: where does will come from?
           | 
           | To me, consciousness is the seat, or root, of where will
           | comes from. Let's say you get expert level surgeon or
           | politician training, what then?
           | 
           | There is nothing that specifically silos a surgeon or
           | politician's knowledge-set. Meaning a politician's skillset
           | isn't purely in a domain that doesn't cross into a surgeon's
           | and vice-versa. There are nuances to being a politician and a
           | surgeon that extend beyond diplomacy or "being able to cut
           | real good".
           | 
           | What you're left with is just high-skilled workflows. But
           | what utilizes these workflows? To me, the answer is that
           | consciousness needs to be powering these workflows.
        
             | jareklupinski wrote:
             | > where does will come from?
             | 
             | your gut bacteria, navigating "you" towards novel nutrition
             | to ingest and preprocess for them
        
             | foltik wrote:
             | What specific properties of consciousness do you think are
             | required, and why couldn't those be replicated
             | algorithmically?
             | 
             | To me it seems a bit like just guessing that one thing we
             | don't understand might explain another.
        
               | orangebread wrote:
               | This is a tricky topic to navigate because from a
               | materialist perspective consciousness is the side effect
               | of biochemical mechanisms. And many will point to the
               | brain as the obvious container of our consciousness as a
               | bullet to the head versus the arm would demonstrate.
               | 
               | But if a brain/intelligence is all you need to prove
               | consciousness, then would an effectively complex set of
               | neural networks that contained the same amount of neurons
               | as a human be considered "conscious"? My guess is even at
               | that level, probably not. Algorithms alone may mimic
               | consciousness, but it won't be true consciousness.
               | 
               | Imagien this: what if consciousness is closer to
               | something like the movie Avatar? What if the body our
               | consciousness inhabits is closer to that of inhabiting a
               | machine or computer that coexisted with the physics of
               | the universe our body exists?
               | 
               | This would mean Jake from Avatar could theoretically
               | inhabit not just a Na'Vi body, but what if they
               | reproduced the Pandora equivalent of a squirrel for Jake
               | to insert his consciousness into? Jake the Squirrel would
               | be only as capable of expressing itself as the
               | constraints of the body would allow it to.
               | 
               | Many religions discovered a long time ago that this is
               | the most likely model of what we understand to be
               | consciousness/sentience.
               | 
               | I'm not saying you're wrong, this is a conversation
               | larger than what we may believe and touches into the core
               | of what makes us humans that machine alone cannot
               | replicate.
        
               | kace91 wrote:
               | Do you have any reason to introduce that whole extra
               | invisible, unprovable complex system? Is there anything
               | the materialist model can not explain that you feel your
               | model does, or is it just a case of "I don't like the
               | alternative"?
        
               | orangebread wrote:
               | Depends on what you qualify as proof. Much of what I said
               | was experiential and corroborated with other people who
               | have had similar experiences as I've had. I know that in
               | the scientific world it would be dismissed without as
               | much a glance. But I'm not here to convince everyone of
               | my perspective, I'm just adding one that the engineering
               | world has not examined or introduced given the current
               | pursuit.
               | 
               | And it's not a matter of not liking the alternative. Like
               | I said, I used to believe that consciousness was an
               | emergent trait of complex systems, but I had what some
               | call a "spiritual awakening" and I saw what was on the
               | other side.
               | 
               | It's kind of like describing pizza to someone who's never
               | eaten pizza. You could try and describe it by asking if
               | they'd eaten cheese or bread or tomato sauce before and
               | then go "imagine all of those combined". It's not the
               | same as actually having eaten it. But this is heading
               | into a different, albeit related territory.
        
             | thinkling wrote:
             | Do you think bacteria have will? Or plants?
             | 
             | When their actions are sped up to match the speed at which
             | we move, movies of their behavior will start to look like
             | there's intent and will. Plants move towards the light,
             | tendrils "reach" for supports, etc.
             | 
             | Clearly this is humans projecting our mental model onto
             | plants, but... are you sure we're not also projecting it
             | onto ourselves?
        
         | thinkling wrote:
         | Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-
         | material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and
         | thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of
         | living being.
         | 
         | The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation
         | possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will
         | similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical
         | universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is
         | (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border
         | cases will be the exceptions.
         | 
         | Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this,
         | IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book
         | on consciousness, "A World Appears".)
         | 
         | Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts;
         | in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion.
         | Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer
         | to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it
         | that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent
         | could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it
         | makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing,
         | but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that
         | dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much
         | less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-
         | produced illusion.)
         | 
         | [1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a
         | mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by
         | analogy, I recognize that.
        
       | boca_honey wrote:
       | Friendly reminder:
       | 
       | Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
        
         | beeflet wrote:
         | Who attuned your crystal ball?
         | 
         | LLMs are already pretty general. They've got the multimodal
         | ones, and aren't they using some sort of language-action-model
         | to drive cars now? Who is to say AGI doesn't already exist?
        
           | airstrike wrote:
           | It doesn't already exist, pretty obviously.
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeRS4TbtZWA
        
           | nutjob2 wrote:
           | It's a trick statement, because AGI is undefined.
        
             | beeflet wrote:
             | I think LLMs are at least name-worthy given that they're
             | artificial and somewhat smart in a generality of domains.
             | Albeit the "smartness" comes from training in a massive
             | corpus of text in those domains. So maybe it's really a
             | specific intelegence but for so many specific tasks it
             | seems general.
             | 
             | At some point you have to throw in the towel when these
             | things are going to be walking and talking around us. Some
             | people move the goalposts of "AGI" to mean that the machine
             | totally emulates a person. Including curiosity and
             | creativity, of which these models are currently lacking.
             | 
             | But why should it? In genesis, it's said that god created
             | man after its own image. I have to assume this implies we
             | inherit god's mental attributes (curiosity, creativity,
             | etc.) rather than its physical attributes.
        
       | fnoef wrote:
       | What is it with humans that we tend to speedrun into the
       | extinction of our own race?
        
       | 1970-01-01 wrote:
       | Way too much framework. The A in AGI is for artificial. Have it
       | build its own test harness instead of outsourcing it via
       | hackathon. If you cannot trust that output, you're nowhere near
       | AGI.
        
         | gilbetron wrote:
         | The "A" in AGI is for artificial, not advanced.
        
           | 1970-01-01 wrote:
           | Thanks, I'll update the text.
        
       | wslh wrote:
       | AGI may be a prerequisite for true superintelligence, but we're
       | already seeing superhuman performance in narrow domains. We
       | probably need a broader evaluation framework that captures both.
        
       | cess11 wrote:
       | The belief that there is no fundamental difference between
       | mammals navigating fractal dimensions and imprisoned electrons
       | humming in logic gates has to be considered a religious one.
        
         | pingou wrote:
         | No, it's called functionalism. To me, it's actually the
         | opposite, assuming there is a fundamental difference between
         | simulated neurons and real ones seems almost religious.
         | 
         | While it's true that we aren't there yet, and simulated neurons
         | are currently quite different from real ones (so I agree there
         | is a big difference at the moment), it's unclear why you
         | presumably think it will always stay that way.
        
           | cess11 wrote:
           | If you actually have a way to fully, without reductions,
           | simulate matter, that's probably a Nobel prize coming your
           | way.
           | 
           | The common scientific understanding is that this is not
           | possible, at least not without extreme amounts of energy and
           | time.
           | 
           | The dimensionality, or complexity if you'd prefer, of your
           | logic gates is quite different from the cosmos. You might not
           | agree but in my parlance a linear and a fractal curve are
           | fundamentally different, and you can try to use linear curves
           | to approximate the latter at some level of perspective if you
           | want but I don't think you'll get a large audience claiming
           | that there is no difference.
           | 
           | As far as I know we've also kind of given up on simulating
           | neurons and settled for growing and poking real ones instead,
           | but you might have some recent examples to the contrary?
        
             | stevenhuang wrote:
             | We may not need to go down that level.
             | 
             | For the qualities we care about, it may turn out to be the
             | case we don't need to simulate matter perfectly. We may not
             | need to concern ourselves with the fractal complexity of
             | reality if we identify the right higher level abstractions
             | with which to operate on. This phenomenon is known as
             | causal emergence.
             | 
             | > That is, a macroscale description of a system (a map) can
             | be more informative than a fully detailed microscale
             | description of the system (the territory). This has been
             | called "causal emergence."
             | 
             | https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188
             | 
             | From a HN discussion a while ago:
             | 
             | https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-
             | sca...
             | 
             | > A highly compressed description of the system then
             | emerges at the macro level that captures those dynamics of
             | the micro level that matter to the macroscale behavior --
             | filtered, as it were, through the nested web of
             | intermediate e-machines. In that case, the behavior of the
             | macro level can be predicted as fully as possible using
             | only macroscale information -- there is no need to refer to
             | finer-scale information. It is, in other words, fully
             | emergent. The key characteristic of this emergence, the
             | researchers say, is this hierarchical structure of
             | "strongly lumpable causal states."
        
       | mrkstu wrote:
       | To me, a lot of what makes us sentient is our continuity. I even
       | (briefly) remember my dreams when I wake up, and my dreams are
       | influenced by my state of mind as I enter it.
       | 
       | LLMs 'turn on' when given a question and essentially 'die'
       | immediately after answering a question.
       | 
       | What kind of work is going on with designing an LLM type AI that
       | is continuously 'conscious' and giving it will? The 'claws' seem
       | to be running all the time, but I assume they need rebooting
       | occasionally to clear context.
        
       | ottah wrote:
       | Can we just focus on real problems, like stable and safe
       | application of existing models? I'm just exhausted with the
       | bullshit.
        
       | lccerina wrote:
       | Every week we are 50% closer to shifting the goalpost...
       | 
       | from the paper "AI systems already possess some capabilities not
       | found in humans, such as LiDAR perception and native image
       | generation". I don't know about them, but I can natively generate
       | images in my mind.
        
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