Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

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AGI now means many different things to many different people. I don't think that's really any "common definition" anymore.

For some, it's simply Artificial and Generally Intelligent(perform many tasks, adapt). For some, it might mean any that it needs to do everything a normal human can. For some, non-biological life axiomatically cannot become AGI. For some, it must be "conscious" and "sentient".

For some, it might require literal omniscience and omnipotence and accepting anything as AGI means, to them, that they are being told to worship it as a God. For some, it might mean something more like an AI that is more competent than the most competent human at literally every task.

For some, acknowledging it means that we must acknowledge it has person-like rights. For some it cannot be AGI if it lies. For some it cannot be AGI if it makes any mistake. For some it cannot be AGI until it has more power than humans. These are several definitions and implications that are partially or wholly mutually conflicting but I have seen different people say that AGI is each different one of those.

I've got a much simpler definition: an AGI should be able to produce a better version of itself.

I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to the technological singularity: maybe it's somehow a dead end. Maybe the "better version of itself, which itself shall built a better version of itself" will be stuck at some point, hitting some limit that'd still make it less intelligent than the most intelligent humans. That I don't know.

But what I know is that an AI that is incapable of producing a better version of itself is less intelligent than the humans who created it in the first place.

I actually really like this definition and will be giving it some thought. But right off the bat, that’s not how most people will see it - and so while this definition is certainly thought-provoking and useful, it doesn’t specify much that’s relatable to other tasks and therefore I think will always be a niche definition.

An AI that can make a better version of itself may not be able to communicate in any human language for example; and that is now a de facto requirement for most people to see something as AI I think.

> an AGI should be able to produce a better version of itself.

So humans do not have GI?

They do. 99% of what you think as human intelligence is social, and has been obtained by previous generations and passed to the person. In a sense, we are hugely overfitted on distilled knowledge, actual biological capabilities are much less impressive.

As a somewhat narrow counter-example, genetic algorithms are able to produce better versions of themselves but do not qualify as AGI.

Are there any examples of genetic algorithms producing genetic algorithms outside of nature?

The classic synthetic way is a genetic algorithm producing increasingly better outputs.

> I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to the technological singularity:

You kinda are though: if it hits a limit and can no longer make a better version of itself, then your definition means the final one in the sequence isn't an AGI even though it's worse parent is.

> But what I know is that an AI that is incapable of producing a better version of itself is less intelligent than the humans who created it in the first place.

Neither necessary nor sufficient:

(1) they are made by teams of expert humans, so an AGI could be smarter than any one of them and still not as capable as the group (kinda like how humans are smarter than evolution, but not smart enough to make a superhuman intelligence even though evolution made us by having lots of entities and time)

(2) one that can do this can still merely be a special-purpose AI that's no good at anything else (like an optimising compiler told to compile its own source code)

(3) what if it can only make its own equal, being already at some upper limit?

Okay but in reality an AGI is just an agent that can learn new things and reapply existing knowledge to new problems. Generally intelligent, it doesn’t have to mean anything more nor does it imply godlike intelligence.

Everything you just mentioned seems to be some philosophy of sentience or something. A few years ago when ANNs become popular for everything, general intelligence just meant “can do things it wasn’t explicitly trained on”

This definition is itself tautological and also quite flawed. For example at what point in this machine’s development has it attained AGI? What if it learns to/is taught to stop learning? What if the machine is not capable of, e.g. math? What kind of knowledge is legitimate vs illegitimate? In many ways the concept of AGI masks a fundamental social context of the machine to obey standards and only adopt the “correct” knowledge. This is why, e.g. instruction tuning or RLHF was such a leap for the perception of intelligence, because the machines obeyed a social contract with users that was designed into them

This sounds a lot like "If we throw out everyone else's definition, then my definition is the obviously correct one".

Can you give any reason why your definition is correct, and/or why all those others should be dismissed?

This is one of the problems we've had with intelligence we've had for a very long time. We've not been able to break it down well into distinctive pieces for classification. You either have all the pieces of human intelligence, or you're not intelligent at all.

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