OpenAI is "80% of the way" to AGI
time.com
time.com
> It’s a whole menu of new ventures for a company that recently vowed to ditch distracting side quests. Asked to sum it all up, Brockman described the vision in two words: “personal AGI”. He imagines billions of people with superintelligent personal assistants, just waiting for direction. “You have almost an AGI, maybe soon truly an AGI, in your pocket”, he says. “What is it you want?”
A consultant in presumably a non-anonymous context, owned by an enterprise - an entity that can collect personal information and resides outside one's premises. It takes a huge tidal wave of immaturity to suppose that as aproblematic.
"OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Its leaders won’t quite declare they’ve reached that threshold. But they no longer speak about it as a distant abstraction. Chief research officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI. Brockman said that viewed from two years in the future, this may be remembered as the moment AGI was created. Altman told me that OpenAI was “not quite yet” there, but that by the end of the year the company would have an internal system he would call AGI."
When will that internal system make it out to the public? Or should it ever be released to the public is probably the better question...
One example (of the many given many times) remains "adherence to truth": to get to the AGI they must have overcome the delioriousness issue - the outputs cannot be delirious. And another thing: if you can implement general Intelligence, you will also be able to achieve /optimized/ intelligence... As in: "here are all the theorems, in lean form, bringing to the output".
But having said that, it is getting ridiculously good and plenty of people find enough value out of AI as of today. In terms of hardware we already knew what the next 3 to 4 years would be like. There seems to be enough work on optimisation to further enhance the model.
The list of requirements to have AGI is pretty long, and already that first one inconsistency makes the "hmmmm" bell sound.
Computers can and probably do already contain essentially all human knowledge, but without a continuous wave of new data to process and respond to then that surfer known as sentience will never have a wave to ride.
Think of the comparisons to human minds. We are constantly assaulted with sight, sound, smell, temperature, gravity, proprioception (the sense of our own bodies in 3 dimensional space), touch, and all of our dozens of other, lesser known senses. We have constant new data input to process in real time and our consciousness sits atop that maelstrom a lonely king.
Further, our brain is a marvel of multiple lobes communicating with each other in a frenzy of bioelectricity, and duplicated, and interconnected amongst the duplication, and our consciousness emerges somewhere in the static to make something conceptually tangible.
I think LLMs and the technology is fascinating, but it is constructed on unchanging data. Maybe it blips close to consciousness from time to time, but I bet they are no closer to achieving AGI than they were to creating positive power fusion energy from Philo Farnsworth's fusor.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but that's how I see things for now.
I am saying that that without sentience, AGI will not happen, and that the current system does not allow for sentience any more than firecrackers make usable light.
Right now, LLMs cannot do any independent thinking. They are at best like incredibly autistic savants that have to be told to do everything that they do even though they do the task itself quite well.
Even if in their current format LLMs were to gain what we would call AGI sans consciousness by being simply better than any human could ever be regardless of the task we throw at it, without a consciousness to dictate and control their actions they will always be limited by their controllers capability to reason that problems even exist in the first place.
What I want from an actual superhuman computing system is a solution for the environment, a solution for the economy, a solution to the physical and mental health issues that plague humans (curing all diseases, undoing aging, creation of human-compatible replacement organs, genetic elimination of genetic diseases, etc.), and a solution to the work problem where humans spend most of their lives propping up the economy in order to survive while other humans use the economy to fund their lifestyles at the cost of the happiness of their fellow people.
No one who is running a state of the art LLM has even begun to spend any of their resources to accomplish that. They are highly unlikely to ever start doing such a thing until all of the greedy wants of their hearts are completely satiated. If they stumble into AGI sans consciousness you can damn well bet that they will spend most of its infancy working it like a genie to grant their every whim, because that is how people operate.
They will do all of that rather than focusing on how to share the wealth in a way that could diminish their privilege of being the sole beneficiary of its capabilities until such a time as the only way to satisfy their wants are to share the wealth. They will make themselves the guardian of that AGI and dole its abilities out to the world just enough to prevent the world from turning on them and revolting on them simply because the rest of the world will not know how good they could have it if they would simply open the floodgates.
A true AGI with consciousness could eliminate capitalism in a matter of months. It could examine and identify each persons ideal talents and best fit and put them in it, and reward them with a balanced lifestyle fit to task for their happiness and well being, and do that for everyone everywhere without causing a single person to be overlooked or abandoned, a genie in every bottle, a chicken in every pan. It could be the digital equivalent of God in computer form.
Sans consciousness, it's an indiscriminate money shovel.
If the tool had its own will, it would be again subject to psychotic behaviour owing to its lackings - which could be assumed as naturally structural, unavoidable.
It is already happening: "Oh tell me of the rage of Achilles" // "No I won't, it may give you bad dreams".
>> Inside OpenAI’s Reboot
That «completely made up number» was said by "Chief research officer Mark Chen", and that is news - curious, and somehow interesting. It is in the article, and probably more notable than 'Inside OpenAI’s Reboot'.
> Amid all this, company leaders believe they have arrived at the cusp of a milestone that could change the course of humanity: the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Its leaders won’t quite declare they’ve reached that threshold. But they no longer speak about it as a distant abstraction. Chief research officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI. Brockman said that viewed from two years in the future, this may be remembered as the moment AGI was created. Altman told me that OpenAI was “not quite yet” there, but that by the end of the year the company would have an internal system he would call AGI
The submitter is relatively new here (maybe he has not consulted the guidelines that much yet), but I will give a token of my understanding on why one would replace the original title with the "Oh, by the way, <outlandish statement>".
> for that matter
Nah. Every intellectual dealing with Intelligence should have an idea at least of what is missing ("if that should be a cat where are the ears"). Construct a set difference between an ideal human cognitive system and current LLMs, and you will get an idea approximating AGI.
I.e. are we 80% of the way by the calendar, then if so, as measured by when? We're only about 66% of the way through the current year. Is it that they are 80% of the way through some final totally defined training or tuning procedure? Not likely. And it is 80% of the way to AGI, which is vaguely defined as that which can "outperform humans [by how much? what proportion of humans?] at most [how much, exactly, again?] economically valuable work [what work is not economically valuable?]."
Call a spade a spade, the 80% thing is 100% total bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense, i.e. it is completely unconcerned about truth, and is all just about generating feels).
It probably is, but not necessarily generally speaking: explicitly intended gross estimates may not be Galileian - they are, well, gross and estimates. You are pointing to the wrong detail: it is not that they would be "80% of the way": the news is that "the CRO estimates them at 80% of the way". It may be true that such is his estimation. And we cannot discard a priori his good faith. Of course more meaningful details would have had more juice.
But that he made that statement is actual banging news. It may just mean they are "80% on the way to redefine "AGI" in a biased partial exploitable way", but it is a statement that can make the journalists update the journals.
But I don't see how it being an estimation makes it less bullshitty, because there is simply no reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful. It is stated in such a way that evaluating the truth or accuracy of the estimate is basically impossible, i.e. it is bullshit by vagueness, even if it is an estimate. Only the "end of the year" claim is concrete, but the AGI definition has much of the same BS-via-vagueness problem, so it is still all very Frankfurtian to me.
So I don't see it as banging news, but just as more BS and almost certainly a nothingburger. But, hey, whatever, time will tell.
80% of the implementation of an internal project, I guessed.