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BeetleB 3 hours ago

> As long as there is a gap between AI and human learning, we do not have AGI.

Back in the 90's, Scientific American had an article on AI - I believe this was around the time Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess.

One AI researcher's quote stood out to me:

"It's silly to say airplanes don't fly because they don't flap their wings the way birds do."

He was saying this with regards to the Turing test, but I think the sentiment is equally valid here. Just because a human can do X and the LLM can't doesn't negate the LLM's "intelligence", any more than an LLM doing a task better than a human negates the human's intelligence.

jonahx 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> As long as there is a gap between AI and human learning, we do not have AGI.

Don't read the statement as a human dunk on LLMs, or even as philosophy.

The gap is important because of its special and devastating economic consequences. When the gap becomes truly zero, all human knowledge work is replaceable. From there, with robots, its a short step to all work is replaceable.

What's worse, the condition is sufficient but not even necessary. Just as planes can fly without flapping, the economy can be destroyed without full AGI.

jwpapi 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You know what the G stands for in AGI? General intelligence. You could measure a plane on general versatility in air and it would lose against a bird. You could also measure it against energy consumption. There are a lot of things you can measure a lot of them are pointless, a lot of articles on HN are pointless.

There are very valid reasons to measure that. You wouldn’t ask a plane to drive you to the neighbor or to buy you groceries at the supermarket. It’s not general mobile as you are, but it increases your mobility

daemonologist 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or the classic from Dijkstra (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...):

> even Alan M. Turing allowed himself to be drawn into the discussion of the question whether computers can think. The question is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim.

(I am of the opinion that the thinking question is in fact a bit more relevant than the swimming one, but I understand where these are coming from.)

imiric an hour ago | parent [-]

I've come across that quote several times, and reach the same conclusion as you.

While I share Dijkstra's sentiment that "thinking machines" is largely a marketing term we've been chasing for decades, and this new cycle is no different, it's still worth discussing and... thinking about. The implications of a machine that can approximate or mimic human thinking are far beyond the implications of a machine that can approximate or mimic swimming. It's frankly disappointing that such a prominent computer scientist and philosopher would be so dismissive and uninterested in this fundamental CS topic.

Also, it's worth contextualizing that quote. It's from a panel discussion in 1983, which was between the two major AI "winters", and during the Expert Systems hype cycle. Dijkstra was clearly frustrated by the false advertising, to which I can certainly relate today, and yet he couldn't have predicted that a few decades later we would have computers that mimic human thinking much more closely and are thus far more capable than Expert Systems ever were. There are still numerous problems to resolve, w.r.t. reliability, brittleness, explainability, etc., but the capability itself has vastly improved. So while we can still criticize modern "AI" companies for false advertising and anthropomorphizing their products just like in the 1980s hype cycle, the technology has clearly improved, which arguably wouldn't have happened if we didn't consider the question of whether machines can "think".

NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me the whole are we there yet wrt AGI is already dead, since the tools we've had for ~1.5 years are already incredibly useful for me. So I just don't care anymore. For some people we're already there. For other we'll never get there. Definitions change, goalposts move, etc. In the meantime we're already seeing ASI stuff coming (self improvement and so on).

But the arc-agi competitions are cool. Just to see where we stand, and have some months where the benchmarks aren't fully saturated. And, as someone else noted elswhere in the thread, some of these games are not exactly trivial, at least until you "get" the meta they're looking for.

AuryGlenz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In the Expeditionary Force series of sci-fi novels pretty much every civilization treats their (very advanced, obviously AGI) AIs not as living beings. Humans are outliers in the story. I think there will always be a dichotomy. Obviously we aren't at the point where we should treat the models as beings, but even if we do get to that point there will be plenty of people that essentially will say they don't have souls, some indeterminate quality, etc.

WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's unlikely that intelligence comes in only human flavor.

It also doesn't actually matter much, as ultimately the utility of it's outputs is what determines it's worth.

There is the moral question of consciousness though, a test for which it seems humans will not be able to solve in the near future, which morally leads to a default position that we should assume the AI is conscious until we can prove it's not. But man, people really, really hate that conclusion.

unsupp0rted 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think there's some third baseline standard, which most humans and some AI can meet to be considered "intelligent". A lot of humans are essentially p-zombies, so they wouldn't meet the standard either. Possibly all humans. Possibly me too.

Raphael_Amiard 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The very obvious flaw with that argument is that flying is defined by, you know, moving in the air, whereas intelligence tends to be defined with the baseline of human intelligence. You can invent a new meaning, but it seems kind of dishonest