Ah, I understand you now. You don’t believe we’re close to AGI. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re moving at an incredible clip; AGI is the stated goal of the big AI players. Many experts think we are probably just one or two breakthroughs away. You’ve seen the surveys on timelines? Years to decades. Seems wise to think ahead to its implications rather than dismiss its possibility.
This is like saying putting logs on a fire is “one or two breakthroughs away” from nuclear fusion.
LLMs do not have anything in common with intelligence. They do not resemble intelligence. There is no path from that nonsense to intelligence. It’s a dead end, and a bad one.
See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.
Before Deep Learning recently shifted the AI computing paradigm, I would have written exactly what you wrote. But as of late, the opinion that we need yet another type of hardware to surpass human intelligence seems increasingly rare. Multimodal generative AI is already pretty general. To count as AGI for you, you would like to see the addition of continuous learning and agentification? (Or are you looking for “consciousness”?)
That said, I’m all for a new paradigm, and favor Russell’s “provably beneficial AI” approach!
Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.
Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines
What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.
