AGI Is Here?
breaking-changes.blog
breaking-changes.blog
So the convo becomes - what is that "thing" and do we need to draw similarities between "it" and our own intelligence.
My uneducated guess is that it just means we save/remember (in a lossy way) inputs from our senses and then constantly decide what to do right now based on current and historical inputs, as well as contemplated future events.
I think the rest of our body greatly influences all of that as well, for example: we know running is healthy and we should do it, but we also decide not to run if we are busy, feel tired, or are in pain etc.
in french ...so in my own words:
1) Still unreliable at logic and general inference: try and try again seems to be SoTA...
2) Comically bad at pro-activity and taking the right initiative: eg. "You're right to be upset."
3) Most likely already reaching the end of the line in terms of available good training data: looking at the posted article here, I would tend to agree...
~2 years ago he made 3 statements that he considered failures at the time, and he was quite adamant that they were real problems:
1. LLMs can't do math
2. LLMs can't plan
3. (autoregressive) LLMs can't maintain a long session because errors compound as you generate more tokens.
ALL of these were obviously overcome by the industry, and today we have experts in their field using them for heavy, hard math (Tao, Knuth, etc), anyone who's used a coding agent can tell you that they can indeed plan and follow that plan, edit the plan and generally complete the plan, and the long session stuff is again obvious (agentic systems often remain useful at >100k ctx length).
So yeah, I really hope one of Yann, Ilya or Fei-Fei can come up with something better than transformers, but take anything they say with a grain of salt until they do. They often speak on more abstract, academic downsides, not necessarily what we see in practice. And don't dismiss the amout of money and brainpower going into making LLMs useful, even if from an academic pov it seems like we're bashing a square peg into a round hole. If it fits, it fits...
Intelligence is about being able to use information, make deductions, inferences or hypotheses. And presumably use that to inform action.
Consciousness is about having an internal experience. I would regard many living things as having consciousness but not a general intelligence.
But I think it actually supports my thesis: we either haven't defined AGI well enough, or we've met it and are now waiting for something beyond it that doesn't have a name yet - something with the common sense and situational intuition a human would have in a scenario like that. The goalposts keep moving because the definition was never solid to begin with.
Once ASI exists we'll still have people arguing whether it's actually AGI or not.
1. increases in consistency and quality to some specific measure
2. development of human-like qualities - "consciousness"? "Intuition"?
And then we toss the term AGI which is overloaded and ambiguous.
I think you're on to something - we need a measure of what is considered "human levels of competence" or some bar by which we say "ok this is consistent enough"
Not that this is my definition or anything, just pointing out that this is the one people actually care about, even if the acronym doesn’t say anything about economics or social change.
But the reality is that global unemployment levels are as of yet unaffected.
This is clearly the hardest bar to meet, but it’s also the most important.
If AI fully automates 5% of global jobs (or pick your number), I think it would be fair to say that this specific definition of AGI is achieved.
As a SWE, I feel immensely augmented by AI. But you can’t yet fully deploy an AI to do a job end to end without any human involvement.
I use like ~1b input tokens per week on codex or something like that, and while it does an insane amount of work, you have to have a skilled hand guide it.
This might not be the case for long, but it’s not here yet (in that narrow definition at least).
More humans publish non-replicable "science" in sociology -- your bar is way too high
A certain percentage of humans will never acknowledge that machines can be intelligent. Those people should be disqualified from the conversation for the same reason we disqualify biblical literalists from conversations about radio carbon dating.
Doesn't this assume there IS an objective, quantifiable definition of an "intelligent machine" that is agreed upon by most people? That instead sounds rather subjective to my ears.
Some people don't even have a subjective definition though. They'll continue to deny the machines are intelligent no matter where the line is drawn.
It's not worth debating those folks because to them it is a matter of faith and no amount of reason can convince the unreasonable.
I only get so many hours on earth, I'd rather not spend them debating what the definition of "is" is with someone who would rather litigate tautological nonsense than accept *any* level of evidence as sufficient.
I mentioned it to have a more complete set of definitions for AGI from across the community - but do agree that it is by far the weakest and more-so a measurement of human variability and gullibility than AI intelligence.