The debate about AGI is interesting from a philosophical perspective, but from a practical perspective AI doesn't need to get anywhere close to AGI to turn the world upside down.
I feel like GPT 3 was AGI, personally. It crossed some threshold that was both real and magical, and future improvements are relying on that basic set of features at their core. Can we confidently say this is not a form of general intelligence? Just because it’s more a Chinese Room than a fully autonomous robot? We can keep moving the goalposts indefinitely, but machine intelligence will never exactly match that of humans.
It crossed some threshold that was both real and magical
and future improvements are relying on that basic set of features at their core
Thats not a period, it's a full stop. There is no debate to be had here.
IF an LLM makes some sort of breakthrough (and massive data collation allows for that to happen) it needs to be "re trained" to absorb its own new invention.
But we also have a large problem in our industry, where hardware evolved to make software more efficient. Not only is that not happening any more but we're making our software more complex and to some degree less efficient with every generation.
This is particularly problematic in the LLM space: every generation of "ML" on the llm side seems to be getting less efficient with compute. (Note: this isnt quite the case in all areas of ML, yolo models working on embedded compute is kind of amazing).
Compactness, efficiency and reproducibility are directions the industry needs to evolve in, if it ever hopes to be sustainable.
We are approaching situation, where AI will make most decisions, and people will wear it as a skin suit, to fake competency!
Otherwise we would have to say that pre-literacy societies lacked intelligence, which would be silly since they are the ones that invented writing in the first place!
Obviously this quote would be well applied if we were at a stage where computers were better at everything humans can do and some people were saying "This is not AGI because it doesn't think exactly the same as a human". But we aren't anywhere near this stage yet.
Sure, and the question of whether AI can safely perform a particular task is interesting.
> Obviously this quote would be well applied if we were at a stage where computers were better at everything humans can do and some people were saying "This is not AGI because it doesn't think exactly the same as a human".
Why would that be required?
I used the quote primarily to point out that discussing the utility of AI is wholly distinct from discussing the semantics of words like "think", "general intelligence", or "swim". Knowing whether we are having a debate about utility/impact or philosophy/semantics seems relevant regardless of the current capabilities of AI.