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Comment by liminvorous | Hacker News Reader

No one had built a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan project either.

Theoretical foundation was slowly built over decades before it started though. And correct me if I'm wrong, but calculations that it was feasible were present before the start too. They had to calculate how to do it, what will be the processes, how to construct it and so on, but theoretically scientists knew that this amount of material can start such process. On the other hand not only there is no clear path to AI today (also known as AGI, ASI, SI etc.), but even foundations are largely missing. We are debating what is intelligence, how it works, how to even start simulating it, or construct from scratch.

There are algorithms that should work, they're just galactic[0] or are otherwise expected to use far too much space and time to be practical.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm

That wiki article has nothing to do with AI. The whole AI space attracts BS talk

What do you think AI is? On that one page there's simulated annealing with a logarithmic cooling schedule, Hutter search, and Solomonoff induction, all very much applicable to AI. If you want a fully complete galactic algorithm for AI, look up AIXItl.

Edit: actually I'm not sure if AIXItl is technically galactic or just terribly inefficient, but there's been trouble making it faster and more compact.

The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 ). Training them on next-token-prediction is essentially training them to compress, and more optimal compression requires a more accurate model of the world, so they're being trained to model the world better and better. However you want to define intelligence, for practical purposes models with better and better models of the world are more and more useful.

The disagreement here seems merely to be about what we mean by “AGI”. I think there’s reasons to think current approaches will not achieve it, but also reason to think they will.

In any case anyone who is completely sure that we can/can’t achieve AGI is delusional.

this is not evidence in favor of your position. We could use this to argue in favor of anything such as “humans will eventually develop time travel” or “we will have cost effective fusion power”.

The fact is many things we’ve tried to develop for decades still don’t exist. Nothing is guaranteed

I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never easy to recreate what biology has done, but nature providing an "existence proof" goes a long way towards removing doubt about it being fundamentally possible.

Nature didn’t build intelligence with non biological activity. And we won’t either

Unless you have any evidence suggesting that one or more of the variations of the Church-Turing thesis is false, this is closer to a statement of faith than science.

Basically, unless you can show humans calculating a non-Turing computable function, the notion that intelligence requires a biological system is an absolutely extraordinary claim.

If you were to argue about conscience or subjective experience or something equally woolly, you might have a stronger point, and this does not at all suggest that current-architecture LLMs will necessarily achieve it.

There's a big difference between "this project is like time travel or cold fusion; it's doubtful whether the laws of physics even permit it" and "this project is like heavier-than-air flight; we know birds do it somehow, but there's no way our crude metal machines will ever match them". I'm confident which of those problems will get solved given, say, a hundred years or so, once people roll up their sleeves and get working on it.

"Biological activity" is just computation with different energy requirements. If science rules the universe we're complex automata, and biologic machines or non-biological machines are just different combinations of atoms that are computing around.

Humans are an existing proof of human level intelligence. There are only two fundamental possibilities why this could not be replicated in silicon:

1. There is a chemical-level nature to intelligence which prevents other elements like silicon from being used as a substrate for intelligence

2. There is a non material aspect to intelligence that cannot be replicated except by humans

To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence that either are true and there is already a large body of evidence that implies that intelligence happens at a higher level of abstraction than the individual chemical reactions of synapses, ie. the neural network, which does not rely on the existence of any specific chemicals in the system except in as much as they perform certain functions that seemingly could be performed by other materials. If anything, this is more like speculating that there is a way to create energy from sunlight using plants as an existence proof of the possibility of doing so. More specifically, this is a bet that an existing physical phenomenon can be replicated using a different substrate.

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