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Comment by AI_beffr | Hacker News Reader

the hype will never die. all the smartest people in industry and government believe that there is a very high probability that this technology is near the edge of starting the AGI landslide. you dont need AGI to start the AGI landslide, you just need AI tools that are smart enough to automate the process of discovering and building the first AGI models. every conceivable heuristic indicates that we are near the edge. and because of this, AI has now become a matter of national security. the research and investment wont stop, because it cant, because it is now an arms race. this wont just fizzle out. it will be probed and investigated to absolute exhaustion before anyone feels safe enough to stop participating in the race. if you have been keeping up you will know that high level federal bureaucrats are now directly involved in openAI.

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I am not among those smartest, so take my opinion with a mountain of salt. But I'm just not convinced that this is going in the direction of AGI.

The recent advances are truly jaw dropping. It absolutely merits being investigated to the hilt. There is a very good chance that it will end up being a net profit.

But intuitively they don't feel to me like they're getting more human. If anything I feel like the recent round of "get it to reason aloud" is the opposite of what makes "general intelligence" a thing. The vast majority of human behavior isn't reasoned, aloud or otherwise.

It'll be super cool if I'm wrong and we're just one algorithm or extra data set or scale factor of CPUs away from It, whatever It turns out to be. My intuition here isn't worth much. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was right despite that.

Did you criticize the turing test as being meaningless before it was easily passed by LLMs? if not i don't see how you can avoid updating on "this is getting more human" or at least "this is getting closer to intelligence" to avoid the human-bias

I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other. It never struck me as especially informative.

I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does.

LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifically do, the most "rational" parts of our brain. But they seem to jump past the basic, non-rational parts of the brain. And I don't think we'll see it as "true AGI" until it does that -- whatever that is.

I'm reminded of the early AI researchers who taught AI to play chess because it's what smart people do, but it couldn't do any of the things dumb people do. I think the biggest question right now is whether our present techniques are a misleading local maximum, or if we're on the right slope and just need to keep climbing.

> I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other

then how are you qualified to even discuss this? shouldn't you have to have actually had a thought about something before you pretend to know something about it? i mean its pretty clear from your comment that you havent thought about AI for more than a year or two

What do you think a dog or cat does that can't be replicated by LLMs?

I don't know. I know that any particular thing I say could be met with an LLM that did that thing. But at the moment an LLM doesn't seem to be capable of coding itself up that way. Yet.

I guess that was kind of my question when I thought about what you said. I could think of any things that a cat or dog do that _current_ LLMs can't do but nothing that seems fundamentally out of reach

continually learn with a fixed computational budget over massively extended task horizons.

No, but it could help me make such a thing.

Possibly, but as of now it's a completely unsolved problem and to my knowledge nobody has shown even a tiny model being able to perform it.

Based on the top page today I may even be able to make the argument we can't even simulate the abilities of a fruit fly.

The absolute frontier models can perform only a fraction of a fraction of what a typical work day looks like for a human. I calculated the chance that a frontier model today has about a 1^-29 chance of performing a single day of connected tasks based on GAIA benchmarks.

Act on its own?

What does it mean for something to "act on its own"? Every action taken is in some part due to what's happening in the environment right? I would argue that nothing "acts on it's own"

itll be super cool huh? no, it wont be super cool. AGI will cause the total and complete destabilization of the world and with almost mathematical certainty it can be said that it will lead to a global war. a war fueled by AGI is the last war humans will ever witness. AGI is something that everyone should be very afraid of. unfortunately, the only experience that most people have with AI is watching star trek, playing halo, and consuming other media that depict sentient machines in a benign and very positive light. dont be fooled. the machines will not be your friends. its an outcome that must be avoided at all costs.

AGI is PR. The money is in automating low-level customer service, coding and data science.

That's just the low hanging fruit. People are going to be moving further up the "intelligence" stack as systems integrating AI get more sophisticated.

I can't believe I'm reading this kind of stuff about crappy chat bots. The world has lost its mind.

if you think the latest models are crappy chatbots then you are truly and idiot

can you share some of these heuristics you referred to?

the turing test

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