At what point do these companies stop releasing models and just use them to bootstrap AGI for themselves?
If it is smarter than all humans combined at everything why would any humans collectively control the ai?
All the ants in your backyard still make no decisions vs you
Moving beyond LLMs to AGI, not just better LLMs, is going to require architectural and algorithic changes. Maybe an LLM can help suggest directions, but even then it's up to a researcher to take those on board and design and automate experiments to see if any of the ideas pan out.
Companies are already doing this, but they are never going to stop releasing/selling models since that is the product, and the revenue from each generation of model is what helps keep the ship afloat and pay for salaries and compute to develop the next generation.
The endgame isn't "AGI, then world domination" - it's just trying to build a business around selling ever-better models, and praying that the revenue each generation of model generates can keep up with the cost to build it.
What i don't understand is how we quantify our ability to actually create something novel, truly and uniquely novel. We're discussing the LLMs inability to do that, yet i don't feel i have a firm grasp on what we even possess there.
When pressed i imagine many folks would immediately jest that they can create something never done before, some weird random behavior or noise or drawing or whatever. However many times it's just adjacent to existing norms, or constrained by the inversion of not matching existing norms.
In a lot of cases our incremental novelties feel, to some degree, inevitable. As the foundations of advancement get closer to the new thing being developed it becomes obvious at times. I suspect this form of novelty is a thing LLMs are capable of.
So for me the real question is at what point is innovation so far ahead that it doesn't feel like it was the natural next step. And of course, are LLMs capable of doing this?
I suspect for humans this level of true innovation is effectively random. A genius being more likely to make these "random" connections because they have more data to connect with. But nonetheless random, as ideas of this nature often come without explanation if not built on the backs of prior art.
So yea.. thoughts?
It should be clear from working with LLMs over the past 4 years that they are not consciousness.
Andrej's appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast is great.
I'm not convinced LLMs are anything amazing in their current form, but i suspect they'll push a self reflection on us.
But clearly i think humans are far more Input-Output than the average person. I'm also not educated on the subject, so what do i know hah.
Kinda makes me think of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
If the system (code base in this case) is changing rapidly it increases the probability that any given change will interact poorly with any other given change. No single person in those code bases can have a working understanding of them because they change so quickly. Thus when someone LGTM the PR was the LLM generated they likely do not have a great understanding of the impact it is going to have.