Comment on AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher
rollin@piefed.social 2 days agothanks for this very yummy response. I'm having to read up about the technicalities you're touching on so bear with me!
According to wiki, the neocortex is only present in mammals but as I'm sure you're aware mammals are not the only creatures to exhibit intelligence. Are you arguing that only mammals are capable of "general intelligence"? I can get on board with what you're saying as *one way* to develop AGI - work out how brains do it and then copy that - but I don't think it's a given that that is the *only* way to AGI, even if we were to agree that only animals with a neocortex can have "general intelligence". Hence the fact that a given class of machine architecture does not replicate a neocortex would not in my mind make that architecture incapable of ever achieving AGI.
As for your point about the importance of sensorimotor integration, I don't see that being problematic for any kind of modern computer software - we can easily hook up any number of sensors to a computer, and likewise we can hook the computer up to electric motors, servos and so on. We could easily "install" an LLM inside a robot and allow it to control the robot's movement based on the sensor data. Hobbyists have done this already, many times, and it would not be hard to add a sensorimotor stage to an LLM's training.
I do like what you're saying and find it interesting and thought-provoking. It's just that what you've said hasn't convinced me that LLMs are incapable of ever achieving AGI for those reasons. I'm not of the view that LLMs *are* capable of AGI though, it's more like something that I don't personally feel well enough informed upon to have a firm view. It does seem unlikely to me that we've currently reached the limits of what LLMs are capable of, but who knows.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 2 days ago
For a snappy reply all I can say is that I did qualify that a “conventional” LLM likely cannot become intelligent. I’d like to see examples of LLMs paired with sensorimotor systems, if you know of any. Although I have been often inclined to describe human intelligence as merely a bag of tricks that, taken together, give the impression of a coherent whole, we have a rather well developed bag of tricks that can’t easily be teased apart. Merely interfacing a Boston Dynamics robo-dog with the OpenAI API may have some amusing applications, but nothing could compel me to admit it as an AGI.
rollin@piefed.social 2 days ago
I think current LLMs are already intelligent. I'd also say cats, mice, fish, birds are intelligent - to varying degrees of course.
If you're referring to my comment about hobbyist projects, I was just thinking of the sorts of things you'll find on a search of sites like YouTube, perhaps this one is a good example (but I haven't watched it as I'm avoiding YouTube). I don't know if anyone has tried to incorporate a "learning to walk" type of stage into LLM training, but my point is that it would be perfectly possible, if there were reason to think it would give the LLM an edge.
The matter of how intelligent humans are is another question, and relevant because AFAIK when people talk about AGI now, they're talking about an AI that can do better on average than a typical human at any arbitrary task. It's not a particularly high bar, we're not talking about super-intelligence I don't think.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve watched a couple of these. You might find FreeTube useful for getting YT content without the ugly ads and algo stuff.
There are shortcomings that keep an LLM from approaching AGI in that way. They aren’t interacting (experiencing) with the world in a multisensory or realtime way, they are still responding to textual prompts within their frame of reference in a more discrete, turn-taking manner. They still require domain-specific instructions, too.
An AGI that is directly integrated with its sensorimotor apparatus in the same way we are would, for all intents and purposes, have a subjective sense of self that stems from the fact that it can move, learn, predict, and update in real time from its own fixed perspective.
Jeff Hawkins’ work still has me convinced that the fixed perspective to which we are all bound is the wellspring of subjectivity, and that any intermediary apparatus (such as an AI subsystem for recognizing pictures that feeds words about those pictures to an LLM that talks to another LLM etc, in order to generate a semblance of complex behaviour) renders the whole as a sort of Chinese room experiment, and the LLM remains a p-zombie. It may be outwardly facile at times, even enough to pass Turing tests and many other such standards of judging AI, but it would never be a true AGI because it would never have a general facility of intelligence.
I do hope you don’t find me churlish, I hasten to admit that these chimerae are interesting and likely to have important considerations as the technology ramifies throughout society and the economy, but I don’t find them to be AGI. It is a fundamental limitation of the LLM technology.
rollin@piefed.social 1 day ago
I did say that I don't