Over half of all tech industry workers view AI as overrated::undefined
This is a growing pet peeve of mine. If and when actual AI becomes a thing, it’ll be a major turning point for humanity comparable to things like harnessing fire or electricity.
…and most people will be confused as fuck. “We’ve had this for years, what’s the big deal?” -_-
I also believe that will happen! We will not be prepared since many don’t understand the differences between what current models do and what an actual general AI could potentially do.
It also saddens me that many don’t know or ignore how fundamental abstract reasoning is to our understanding of how human intelligence works. And that LLMs simply aren’t intelligent in that sense (or at all, if you take a tight definition of intelligence).
I don’t get how recognizing a pattern is not AI. It recognizes patterns in data, and patterns in side of patterns, and does so at a massive scale. Humans are no different, we find patterns and make predictions on what to do next.
The human brain does not simply recognise patterns, though. Abstract reasoning means that humans are able to find solutions for problems they did not encounter before. That’s what makes a thing intelligent. It is not fully understood yet what exactly gives the brain these capabilities, btw. Like, we also do not understand yet how it is possible that we can recognize our own thinking processes.
The most competent current AI models mimic one aspect of the brain which is neural pathways. In our brain it’s an activity threshold and in a neural network AI it’s statistics which decide whether a certain path is active or not and then it crosses with other paths, etc. Like a very complex decision tree.
So that is quite similar between AI and brains. But we actually get something like an understanding of concepts that goes beyond the decision tree but isn’t fully understood yet, as described above.
For an AI to be actually intelligent it would probably need to at least get this ability, to trace back it’s own way through the decision tree. Maybe it even turns out that you in fact do need a consciousness to have reason.
I’ve seen it refered to as AGI bit I think itns wrong. Chat GPT isnt intelligent in the slightest, it only makes guesses on what word is statistically more likely to come up next. There is no thikinking or problem solving involved.
A while ago I saw an article that with a tittle along the lines of “spark of AGI in ChatGPT 4” because it chose to use a calculator tool when facing a problme that required one. That would be AI (and not AGI). It has a problem, it learns and uses available tools to solve it.
AGI would be on a whole other level.
Edit: Grammar
The argument “it just predicts the most likely next word” while true massively under values what it even means to predict the next word or token. Largely these predictions are based on sentences and ideas the model has trained on from its data sets. It’s pretty intelligent if you think about it. You read a text book then when you apply the knowledge or take a test you use what you read to form a new sentence in relation to the context of the question or problem. For the models “text prediction” to be correct it has to understand certain relationships between complex ideas and objects to some capacity. Yes it absolutely is not as good as human intelligence. But what it’s doing is much more advanced then text to type on your phone keyboard. It’s a step in the right direction, over hyped right now but the hype is funneling cash into research. The models are already getting more advanced. Right now half of what it says is hot garbage but it can be pretty accurate.
