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Comment by keepquestioning | Hacker News Reader

DALL-E is truly magic. It got me believing we are close to AGI.

I wonder what Gary Marcus or Filip Pieknewski think about it. Surely they must be eating crow.

Machine learning just glues together existing things, which is how art is created. As amusing these pictures are, it's us humans who bring meaning to them, both when producing what these algorithms use as input and when consuming their output. We are the actual magic behind DALL-E.

An AGI wouldn't need us to this extent, or at all. An AGI would also be able to come up with new ways to represent ideas, even ways that are foreign to us.

When I see some of the bad pictures it produces I think we are nowhere near AGI

Most people would draw even worse pictures given the same prompts.

most neural networks would draw even worse pictures given the same prompts

This tells us little about AGI. It might seem like it does but this is an incredibly narrow specific set of technologies. They work together to produce some startling results (with many limitations) but this is just another narrow application.

I suspect AGI, depending on how its defined, will be with us in some form in the next few decades at most. Just a hunch. This is nothing to do with that mission though imho. Maybe you can read into it something like, "we are solving lots of discrete problems like this, maybe we can somehow glue them together into a higher level program"? That might give you something AI-esque? My guess is that 'true' AGI will have an elegant solution rather than a big bag of stuff glued together.

We're pretty much just a big bag of stuff glued together.

Yesterday I saw one of Gandalf eating samples at Costco. I was laughing hysterically for a minute. AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor. That was supposed to be the last province of the human, but it is quite awhile since a human made me laugh like that.

What was the prompt for that image?

What wrote the prompt?

But the prompt was not funny, only the image.

If I write a Python script that cuts together a bunch of pictures and the output makes you laught the script hardly deserves all the credit. It's us humans that create meaning.

> AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor.

And this AI doesn't. Your anecdote is totally unrelated to the idea of AGI in the gp post. The fact that it made you laugh is a happenstance. It was not "trying" to make you laugh.

It’s only unrelated if there’s no proto-AGI going on. Many images give me a moment of doubt, even though I absolutely know that I’m looking at nothing more than the output of a pile of model weights, says I the pile of neurons.

It's funny in the way that mad libs are funny. It's unexpected. The reason it is unexpected is because the computer is dumb, not because it is smart.

I think the humor came from the vibe, humiliation, dejection. Like seeing a beloved math teacher caught in an adult video store.

I also saw this one recently from Midjourney. Would not call the humor random.

https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/w73rhv/prompt_t...

I saw that on reddit. The face was horrific and not at all human like. It didn’t have a sense of humour - it just took a prompt and mashed some things together, but the prompt was funny and the image was horrifying. Not even uncanny valley shit, but “Gandalf was in a bad motorcycle and will never look like a human again” bad.

It’s still up on the dalle2 subreddit.

I don't think intelligence requires humor. It could be just a quirk of our brains.

> It got me believing we are close to AGI.

We are not. But maybe we are closer to replicating some of our internal brain workings.

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