I don't know why, but my brain refuses to accept GPT-4 as something close to AGI. Maybe I am wrong. It is hard to believe that our brain is just a bunch of attention layers and neural nets.
But ultimately, our brains are still just made of neurons. As far as we know, there isn’t some sort of extreme molecular computing going on (ie memories directly stored in RNA or whatever) or any large scale quantum mechanics (temperature too high).
The differences between AI approaches like artificial neural networks and our animal meat brains could be just the difference between a propeller and flapping wings. Same base mechanics (airfoil producing lift as thrust), different substantiation.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surpri...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aab1785 - Somatic mutation in single human neurons tracks developmental and transcriptional history
(good luck simulating that)
Our brain isn't, but I'd wager the architectural complexity of a physical, neuronal brain is not optimized for all useful mental tasks, and has perhaps a fair amount of local maxima that are near vestigial in overall positive impact on cognition. Just because the human brain model of cognition is the only way nature has been able to create GI doesn't mean it's the only way GI can be attained.
The best kind of machine is the simplest one needed to produce a desired outcome.
GPT-4 could be AGI, but it feels like cheating to achieve AGI by feeding the entire internet. If someone can build AGI with only the data that humans consume in their lifetime, then that, imho, is the real AGI.
If it takes all the data on the internet (or more) to bootstrap AGI, but that system is then capable of leveraging its knowledge to solve new out-of-distribution tasks, that seems like a fair test to me.
I agree with the article that we see "sparks" of this generality with GPT4.
become more creative with a fraction of the data consumed by GPT-4
I don't think systems like GPT-4 can ever be truly intelligent, because they simply output randomly generated garbage from a specific distribution. Their output may eventually be indistinguishable from that of a truly intelligent system, but the causal mechanism behind them is not intelligent.
On the other hand, most people lose their ability to think when they are under sufficient pressure (such as fighting for their lives). It's plausible that people are fundamentally no different from systems like GPT-4 in such situations. Then a language model could be a key part of an AGI, but true intelligence would also need higher-level causal mechanisms.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634130-100-roger-pe...
Also, Penrose doesn't conver if I recall correctly about modelling the quantum part too. It's just statistics after all.
Note: This assumes that "conscious" as defined in this context is specific enough for the question to ever be meaningfully answered "Yes." This is a non-trivial assumption because there are criteria by which some would judge AIs as already conscious. Alternatively, some philosophers of mind have criteria by which they assert humans aren't conscious.
Let's consider a potential future conscious AGI created by advancing from something like ChatGPT.
The human brain is "always on". It's possible to have a digital system be always on, i.e. not just train once and then just respond, but constantly take new input.
The human brain has way more connections/layers than ChatGPT. It's possible to imagine the digital system getting the same number of connections.
The human brain gets real time sensory input. It's possible to add cameras, microphones, etc to that digital system so it gets a constant feed. Maybe even let it process what it saw during the day in a batch training/GC run (we could call that "sleep").
The human brain has a different topology. It's possible to alter the topology of a digital system neural network to mimick that, instead of using the ChatGPT topology. It's not like we're forever doomed to its simpler statistical model. But it's interesting that it already gets very significant emergent intelligence-like properties.
The human brain is self-conscious. This can very well be an emergent property of the above. I think all that's needed is the ability to have some form feedback mechanism.