cross-posted from: https://lemmy.intai.tech/post/43759
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/949452
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sam Altman are in massive trouble. OpenAI is getting sued in the US for illegally using content from the internet to train their LLM or large language models
we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible.
I strongly suspect it is you who has misunderstood your CS courses. Can you provide some concrete evidence for why general AI is impossible?
Evidence, not really, but that’s kind of meaningless here since we’re talking theory of computation. It’s a direct consequence of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematical analysis of loops cannot be done because loops, in general, don’t take on any particular value; if they did, then the halting problem would be decidable. Given that writing a computer program requires an exact specification, which cannot be provided for the general analysis of computer programs, general AI trips and falls at the very first hurdle: being able to write other computer programs. Which should be a simple task, compared to the other things people expect of it.
Yes there’s more complexity here, what about compiler optimization or Rust’s borrow checker? which I don’t care to get into at the moment; suffice it to say, those only operate on certain special conditions. To posit general AI, you need to think bigger than basic block instruction reordering.
This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.
From what I’ve heard, the biggest hurdle for AI right now is the fact that computers only work with binary. They are incapable of actually “reading” the things they write - all they’re qctually aware of is the binary digits they manipulate, that represent the words they’re reading and writing. It could analyse War and Peace over and over, and even if you asked it who wrote it, it wouldn’t actually know.
Given that humans can write computer programs, how can you argue that the undecidability of the halting problem stops intelligent agents from being able to write computer programs?
I don’t understand what you mean about the borrow checker in Rust or block instruction reordering. These are certainly not attempts at AI or AGI.
What exactly does AGI mean to you?
This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.
This is not necessary. Please don’t reply if you can’t resist the temptation to call people who disagree with you stupid.
This is proof of one thing: that our brains are nothing like digital computers as laid out by Turing and Church.
What I mean about compilers is, compiler optimizations are only valid if a particular bit of code rewriting does exactly the same thing under all conditions as what the human wrote. This is chiefly only possible if the code in question doesn’t include any branches (if, loops, function calls). A section of code with no branches is called a basic block. Rust is special because it harshly constrains the kinds of programs you can write: another consequence of the halting problem is that, in general, you can’t track pointer aliasing outside a basic block, but the Rust program constraints do make this possible. It just foists the intellectual load onto the programmer. This is also why Rust is far and away my favorite language; I respect the boldness of this play, and the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
To me, general AI means a computer program having at least the same capabilities as a human. You can go further down this rabbit hole and read about the question that spawned the halting problem, called the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) to see that AI is actually more impossible than I let on.
