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Comment by ultrarunner | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read MacKay's work, so maybe this is naive, but I think the belief is that compression is a deterministic endeavor, whereas AGI may not be. The ability to recall information is incredibly useful; the ability to do so in convenient and flexible ways doubly so. The level of complexity being proportional to the GPT's ability to interpret means that compression is not necessarily a simple problem, like you say.

However, if intelligence involves nondeterministic traits, i.e. something in the vein of creation of the present, AGI could be a significantly different problem to solve than compression. I think there's at least an intuition that this is the case, which explains the belief that compression is a simpler/weaker problem.

As an aside, I'm currently unsure of my position on this.

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I'm convinced that deterministic AI will never fully replicate human intelligence. I will attempt to explain my reasoning.

I can say with absolute certainty that I have subjective experience. If my behaviour is deterministic, I can imagine a philosophical zombie version of me that behaves the same but doesn't have subjective experience. That zombie, using the exact same reasoning as me, down to individual particle interactions, will (incorrectly) determine with absolute certainty that it has subjective experience and is not a philosophical zombie. Its reasoning, which is my reasoning, is thus flawed. Therefore, in order to believe my behaviour is deterministic, I must doubt my ability to reason.

(Some claim that philosophical zombies aren't possible to imagine. But I can imagine them, so if that's impossible then my reasoning is still flawed just for a different reason.)

I believe the same argument applies even if I assume my behaviour is non-deterministic but follows a probability distribution which is a function of the past -- the philosophical zombie has the same probability of reasoning that it has subjective experience as I do, and the rest of the argument is similar. Thus, I believe my behaviour is not only non-deterministic, but mathematically ineffable, and thus outside the realm of what computers can do.

If you have subjective experience which works similar to mine, maybe you can follow my reasoning. If you don't, the argument may appear to be nonsense due to the ineffability of subjective experience.

I don’t quite understand your zombie argument but imagine it would be quite easy to inject randomness into an AI agent.

We are already doing it, as all LLMs are fully deterministic. So we are adding random seed to prompts and control temperature.

Actually, due to parallel execution they are not running deterministically. Even if the temperature is zero some randomness is left in. You can run a model deterministically, but this is incredibly slow.

psuedo-randomness.

Your “experience” of subjectivity is really just an illusion.

Your subconscious mind makes very deterministic decisions milliseconds before your conscious mind is even made aware of it, and it feels like you’re deciding consciously but you’re actually absolutely not based on many studies.

And critically, those deterministic, predictable, mechanical responses still give rise to conscious experience of self (Which for me brings into doubt the possibility of p zombies).

Your argument assumes that p-zombies can exist, which is unproven and I consider highly specious.

It’s also unproven anyone is conscious except me.

> that compression is a deterministic > endeavor, whereas AGI may not be.

Fabrice Bellard famously made a compression tool using a Transformer [1]. So if transformers can be deterministic... why not AGI?

[1] https://bellard.org/nncp/

LLMs are deterministic in principle. It’s like JPEG where it’s a lossy compression plus some deliberate injection of noise to add variety.

I’m unsure human intelligence is nondeterministic.

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