Any of this kinda talk these days is just part of the hype train for the LLM companies tulipomania pyramid scheme.

Afaik no-one that is actually working on AGI is anywhere close atm.

Even in the LLM dept: LLMs are the most general AI systems to date, and the performance only ever goes up.

Whether adding +5% per model release is enough to get a broadly superhuman system remains to be seen. But my take is that there's no such thing as "not working on AGI" in the frontier labs. Everything that's being put into modern frontier systems is AGI groundwork, one way or the other.

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cevn 11 days ago | parent [-]

What's 1.05 x 0? Even if you run it 1000 times, it's still 0.

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ACCount37 11 days ago | parent [-]

Are you trying to say that the capability of modern LLMs is zero?

Because if so, I'm pretty sure any frontier LLM is better at evaluating AI capabilities than you are.

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cevn 11 days ago | parent [-]

Claims of AGI imply that LLM's have intelligence. They don't, they are fancy probability machines. They don't THINK the way we do, they just do 200 matrix multiplications until their training data is massaged into what you need. They don't dream, they don't remember what you tell them. Even if you write one sentence, 'attention' means they will ignore half of what you say and key in on the wrong thing. This just happened to me today on a frontier model.

I'm not saying that AGI is impossible, but the focus on LLM's is probably not the right approach. I don't think we will ever make it until we understand the human mind better.

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ACCount37 11 days ago | parent [-]

Do you think your brain doesn't do a type of gradient descent, trying to fit its little predictive algorithms to its senses? Do you think you aren't a fancy probability machine with overinflated self-esteem?

An average LLM of today has better reading comprehension than an average human, and the gap only grows release to release.

"Understand the human mind" turned out to be a distractor. The bitter lesson won: you can take a "good enough" AI architecture, burn a shitton of data into it with an unholy amount of training compute, and get halfway to AGI - no "understand the brain" required. LLMs are so fried in imitation learning on human-generated data they even inherit humanlike failure modes.

	▲	Morromist 11 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean I can write a non-llm program that "has better reading comprehension than an average human" depending on what you think reading comprehension means. Today I went to ask an LLM some very simple questions, stuff you can google and "do these lines have X word in it" and it failed to answer pretty spectacularly several times in a row, so I'm just not feeling the LLMs are superior intellgence today.