This makes sense if we're trying to recreate a human mind artifically, but I don't think that's the goal?
There's no reason an equivalent or superior general intelligence needs to be similar to us at all
There's no reason an equivalent or superior general intelligence needs to be similar to us at all
Besides which we already defined "artificial intelligence" to mean non-intelligence: are we now going to attain "artificial general intelligence" by the same process? Should we add another letter to the acronym, like move on to "genuine artificial general intelligence"?
Consider the difference in intelligence between a kid who skipped five years of school vs one who was held back a year: if both got the same grade in the end, the one who skipped five years was smarter.
Looking at it solely on rate of learning has LLMs way smarter than humans already which doesn't seem right to say
Sure, but "rate" also has two meanings, both useful, but importantly different: per unit of wall-clock time, and per example.
Transistors are just so much faster than synapses, that computers can (somewhat) compensate for being absolutely terrible by the latter meaning — at least, in cases where there's enough examples for them to learn from.
In cases where the supply of examples is too small (and cannot be enhanced with synthetic data, simulations and so on), state of the art AI models still suck. In cases where there is sufficient data, for example self-play in games of chess and go, the AI can be super-human by a substantial margin.
It is supposed to be super, but superhuman. Able to interact with us.
Which leads us to the Turing Test (also, not a test... "the imitation game" is more of a philosophical exploration on thinking machines).
My comment assumes this is already understood as Turing explained.
If the thing is not human, then there's absolutely no way we can evaluate it. There's no way we can measure it. It becomes an impossible task.
Birds and planes both fly and all
Once we step into any other problem, then you need to measure that other problem as well. Lots of problems are concerned with how an intelligent being could fail. Our society is built on lots of those assumptions.
From this perspective, "100% AGI" is achieved when AI can do any job that happens primarily on a computer. This can be extended to humanoid robots in the obvious way.
Failing like a human would is not a cute add-on. It's a fundamental requirement for creating AIs that can replace humans.
Some things fail, or fail to meet their initial overblown expectations.
The microwave oven was indeed a commercial success. And that's fine, but it sucks at being an oven. Everyone knows it.
Now, this post is more about the scientific part of it, not the commercial one.
What makes an oven better than a microwave oven? Why is pizza from an oven delicious and microwave pizza sucks?
Maybe there's a reason, some Maillard reaction that requires hot air convection and can't be replicated by shaking up water molecules.
We are talking about those kinds of things. What makes it tick, how does it work, etc. Not if it makes money or not.
Damn, the thing doesn't even make money yet. Why talk about a plus that the technology still doesn't have?
What makes it tick is probably a more interesting question to me than to the AI skeptics. But they can't stop declaring a special quality (consciousness, awareness, qualia, reasoning, intelligence) that AI by their definition cannot ever have and that this quality is immeasurable, unquantifable, undefinable... This is literally a thought stopper semantic deadend that I feel the need to argue against.
Finally, it doesn't make money the same way Amazon or Uber didn't make money for a looong time, by making lots of money, reinvesting it and not caring about profit margins for a company in its growth stage. Will we seriously go through this for every startup? It's already at $10-20b a year at least as an industry and that will keep growing.
What exists is LLMs, transformers, etc. Those are the microwave oven, that results in rubbery cheese and cardboard dough.
It seems that you are willing to cut some slack to the terrible microwave pizza. I am not.
You complained about immensurable qualities, like qualia. However, I gave you a very simple measurable quality: failing like a decent human would instead of producing jibberish hallucinations. I also explained in other comments on this thread why that measurable quality is important (it plays with existing expectations, just like existing expectations about a good pizza).
While I do care about those more intangible characteristics (consciousness, reasoning, etc), I decided to concede and exclude them from this conversation from the get-go. It was you that brough them back in, from who-knows-where.
Anyway. It seems that I've addressed your points fairly. You had to reach for other skeptic-related narratives in order to keep the conversation going, and by that point, you missed what I was trying to say.