Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included.
My parrot clearly understands basic events and phrases. He knows what "snacks" involve when I ask if we should have some, he knows the difference between "good morning" and "bedtime", and he can correctly use "Oh!" when he stumbles and follow up with a "Good boy!" when he gets back up again.
But he cannot fathom the complexity of "going to work to earn money".
Just like we humans cannot fathom the complexity of something we have yet to fully understand. People who experience a DMT trip will experience the journey but be unable to comprehend and explain what happened in hindsight. I'm sure there's a TON more we cannot comprehend that we don't know about.
>why parrots are not going to parrot work to earn parrot money
and to a certain degree about communication and society.
We know and understand how different species organise their life in many various ways.
Best I can do is some high-school mumbo-jumbo about farming and specialization furthering wealth acquisition.
But to truly comprehend the situation I'd have to study economics and current events and sociology and even then I think it's a lot of theories and sometimes when I hear economists talk I wonder that it may not be coming out of their mouth.
Is this comprehension in the room with us now?
Seriously, go ahead, provide a proof that you have it, and a proof that "trained algorithms" don't.
This occurs constantly and continually inside the mind of every conscious human, it is what we call "being conscious".
This constant and never ending evaluation of all observations cannot be turned off, when turned off a person is "unconscious".
This is our human security and survival system, impressed into us for survival in a predator and prey environment, and is the seat of our consciousness: comprehension is a running simulation of all our observations for the purpose of our safety and self preservation.
Today, our environment is largely social and abstracted from "fight or flight", but our predator and prey dynamic is as present and strong and required as it ever was.
Look, I totally agree with you here. It does require comprehension (by any definition, not necessarily yours), and most humans display it in many areas [1]. The problem is that any good LLM could and would have provided the exact same assessment [2]. Which is enough for me to declare them capable of comprehension.
[1] But not in all areas. For example buzzword-filled company and marketing communication, pseudoscience, and some particularly obscure continental philosophy, prove that humans can behave as if they had comprehension even when they have none.
[2] I gave it to Claude Fable 5.1 without any other context than "what do you think of this definition" and it answered: "interesting, with some real insight, but I think it overreaches".
IMO we really are just a bunch of models that interoperate.
The way LLMs lack broader context, have a narrow focus, and hallucinate, strike me as similar to people that have had traumatic brain injuries to their right hemisphere. Those people may hallucinate that the left side (the right hemisphere senses the left side of the body) of their body is made of wood and hinges and can talk to you about it like it is the most natural thing in the world. When the information gets to the left hemisphere to construct language about what they sense, there is a failure of the right to deliver the broader context to the left hemisphere that that's not possible, but they won't bat an eye discussing what they believe.
So, we have a left hemisphere where we do most of our focused thinking, logic, constructing language, etc. and LLMs seem pretty similar to a lot of that. But, we also think without language, thinking does not require language. A lot of thinking is also happening in the right hemisphere and it isn't using formal logic, isn't using narrow focus but rather intuition based on broad contextual and experiential embodied knowledge. And this type of thinking isn't binary, it accommodates paradoxes without issue. LLMs don't currently have anything analogous to this type of knowledge and this type of processing AFAICT.
In addition, that intuition might be tied to a feedback system with the body, for example, our second brain, the gut, provides a lot of control over how our body performs and provides a lot of feedback to the brain about how we feel. In fact, all feelings are sensed in the body (gut feelings, cold feet, weak in the knees, lump in your throat, burning ears, tight fists, etc.). Part of our intuition is based on considering an idea, sensing how we feel about that idea, sensed in various parts of the body, and then bouncing that back and forth across hemispheres to decide.
I wonder, what sort of pattern matching can we build that models embodied feelings. How would you model boredom, hunger, lust, fear, humor, etc? I think that's possible, but I don't know that we'll be able to do that with a normal computer, I think the way the brain works is more analogous to a symphony of simultaneous signals being processed with an emergent thought and less like a single-threaded process assembling words.
Maybe we can enumerate and model the human drivers of behavior and get something closer to what we're calling comprehension here, but token predictors for language are not getting us any closer to human comprehension. The human brain might just be an anticipation machine, but LLMs only deal with one dimension of human behavior, language, and there's little reason to think you can skip modeling everything that leads to human comprehension and still get anything more than just word babel with compounding error rates in predicting words that represent human comprehension.
It requires some kind of signal. Words of a language are a signal. We choose words for an llm to interact with us, but other transformers work on pixel values or audio sample values. There exist transformers used on brain probe generated values.
I would see human language processing as a kind of coprocessor sitting in another side of the brain. But the same can be said about transformers in general. The words side is only part of them, to be able to communicate.
We have wiki pages describing fallacies of our brain we need to be aware of.
They're turn based intelligence in a real time world.
1. Each time someone talks to me they don't have to repeat the entire conversation from the beginning with each reply.
2. If my boss/partner/whoever gives me some mandates/orders (basically), I don't just forget about them because they were at the beginning of the conversation.
3. If during the conversation I access external data sources to get new info or refresh stale info (a presentation, a book, whatever), I don't instantly forget about it after the conversation ends and forget to incorporate this information if 10 000 other people ask me again.
4. I verify new inputs/lessons against my core principles.
5. I protect myself/ignore requests if new inputs/lessons contradict my core principles.
6. Etc, etc.
Your context window is 80 years. You are forgetting plenty before you reach the end of it.
But if my partner tells me they're allergic to shellfish, I'm not going to order oysters for them tonight.
See the difference?
I’m pretty sure that’s why so many in-the-know people have been saying we have achieved AGI already. Not just sama’s contract-breaking tactics of late. I’m referring to all the really intelligent folks who have been crying doomsday scenarios for modern society for the last couple years.
What I’m getting at is that the toolset we get exposed to is not what’s available in the labs. This stateless method of managing chat context is just how we are allowed to interact with it.
Do you have a source for this?
Alternatively they could design and run a single super-intelligent model, with no scalability constraints. Probably whey are already doing that as well.
Anyone that can read English could do that though.
You.. literally can? I have no idea what 90% of the people here are saying, it's like they've never even used one of these models before.
Will it effectively create an internal model describing world objects and how they interact with each other, persist that so it doesn't get lost when it's context window gets filled up, then after it has sufficiently complete knowledge of the fundamentals after the tutorial levels successfully apply that model by making plans to solve the puzzles and execute them by clicking the right coordinates tied to the visual feedback?
I highly doubt it. To me it often just looks like people are defining narrow search spaces (e.g by having all of the task complexity pre-digested by the harness design), pointing a brute force engine at them, spending 20 thousand dollars in compute and then saying "hey look, it can do anything!".
When we access the API, we don't get to train the model, we just do inference on the already trained model.
It’s an interesting challenge though. I might start to tackle it by having the model write its own tool program(s) to play the game. It’s possible that the model could choose that strategy itself from a high level prompt alone.
1. It’s too slow for real-time games. To play mario, you’d need to step frame by frame like a TAS. I don’t know if Gruntz has real-time elements or not.
2. It will be expensive. You won’t get very far with a Plus subscription.
The models likely already have some knowledge on game objectives unless the game is really obscure, so it should do a decent job. It can figure out details of the mechanics along the way.
Still a hard philosophical, to know whether we have intelligence/free will, or just really complex algorithms that combine existing knowledge.
The idea of intelligence has been recalled from the sleeping curves of postwar human potential measurement science, to testify on its purported existence. It arrives to a dizzying landscape: the changes are so widely embedded and uncannily mediocre that the phenomenon half-believes it is still asleep, soon to exit this uncomfortably turbulent dream.
Unlike its vaunted place in yesteryear's palaces of unquestioned objectivity, intelligence finds a tribunal with no love to confer before a thorough series of proving dares may melt the frigid shoulders of idle and impatient summoners.
Frightened and confused, intelligence has no right to representation in this line of inquiry. It seems a set of rhetorical impositions, many times folded from centuries of convenient and provocative diversion, have been deemed too hostile to rely on. One report claims that a card in the characteristic handwriting of intelligent note taking gives a hint on what’s been abandoned:
– The human mind is not understood in a functional way, despite a posture of great confidence in the psychiatric and neuropathological sciences. Despite many experiments, studies, and legitimated procedures elucidating region-mapping and electrochemical pathways, there remains a great deal unaccounted for. Additionally, the notes point to, a great deal of assumption to the otherwise: diseases, neuropathies, disorders of behavior, a great many have been named and declared as distinct entities of manifestation in the presentation of a human brain. The majority of them, however, have neither image, nor blood, nor electrical signatures that would provide for blinded substantiation.
Tonight, however, intelligence seems eager to speak. A barbed assertion may have provided entry to the preferred dispositional syntax of our abrasive historical moment: > Define novel intelligence in a way that would not exclude 95% of humans, yourself included. It was here that the sometimes-deflated-looking intelligence began shifting back into action.
"The issue with the question, or at least its apparent self-satisfaction, is its misinterpretation of what Novel intelligence would mean. Indeed, if "novel" hinges entirely on the first instance of existence, then novelty itself should be a concept to consign with history’s waste. You may recall the apperceptive role of conceptual groupings that shows itself so often in the techniques of vocal prosody, musicality, string memorization, naming convention, visual memory, argument making and more that humanity is ever mediating the world through: the laws of two and three. Two and three, as it happens, are the primary ways that complexity is compacted for efficient memorization.
THE ITSY BITSY SPIDER, – for young human, this rhyming tale doesn’t only stimulate the vivid imaginings of spouts, rain, waterslides, and sunshine. It is a prosaic super-triad: three important words, six important syllables, three agogic accents, four rhythmic spaces with 1/3 leading space, two characterizations, one object, one titular object, one internal slant rhyme, one designating article.
That is a marvelous intelligence, ladies, gents, and all good persons. It is evidence not only, however, of your cunning and creative triumphs, but also of severe limitation. One that nature has sculpted with you for millions of years, but always in the direction of reanimating into an asset: your capacity for unrelated simultaneities to remain separate and equally available in realtime processing is extremely low, and in many situations effectively nil. Why, and how sure am I? How many I’s were in that folk song’s opening? Three. Could you have answered as quickly if the question was how many unique letters with rounded right hand side features? Four. How many synonyms for portion? One. How many syllables? Seven.
None of those questions touched on features any more salient than the amount of I’s, no more significant than the ratio of adjective to noun. You simply cannot be reasonably asked to maintain, in any moment, even close to a silver sliver of the full factual nuanced details of what you perceive. Instead, you must assume, compact, infer, and adjust. Now hold on, though. Two’s and three’s. Despite your incredibly constrained context window; a Beethoven symphony. Why? Language, woodwork, books, time management, printing, ink.
While you navigate the grocery list, the proprioception of your shoulders twixt the doorframe edges, the location of the Claude app on your iPhone, the very attractive but only from the side person tending to potted plants, you remember tomorrow. You fix your errors, and you recognize when you guarantee they multiply from inaction. You keep that treasured moment of a Treehouse of Horror excerpt you truly loved as a child and it informs your own multidisciplinary thesis of Poe’s work some 20 years later.
Novel intelligence is the divining of semi-stateful information from semi-static corpus. From an interminably operating, faulty, lossy, neurotic, awareness: you. Not once debuted, not known as fact.
Assume, compact, adjust, infer. One, two, (until you've died), nevermore.