> "So... what does the thinking?"

> "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

> "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

This is meant to be some kind of Chinese room argument? Surely a 1e18 context window model running at 1e6 tokens per second could be AGI.

Personally I'm hoping for advancements that will eventually allow us to build vehicles capable of reaching the moon, but do keep me posted on those tree growing endeavors.

Tree growing?

And I don't follow, we've had vehicles capable of reaching the moon for over 55 years

Excuse me for the bad joke, but it seems like your context window was too small.

The Tree growing comment was a reference to another comment earlier in the comment chain.

It's not a tree though

It's about the immutability of the network at runtime. But I really don't think this is a big deal. General-purpose computers are immutable after they are manufactured, but can exhibit a variety of useful behaviors when supplied with different data. Human intelligence also doesn't rely on designing and manufacturing revised layouts for the nervous system (within a single human's lifetime, for use by that single human) to adapt to different settings.

LLMs, considered as a function of input and output, are not immutable at runtime. They create tokens that change the function when it is called again. That breaks most theoretical arguments

Sure. Another view is that an LLM is an immutable function from document-prefixes to next-token distributions.

But that view is wrong, the model outputs multiple tokens.

The right alternative view is that it's an immutable function from prefixes to a distribution over all possible sequences of tokens less than (context_len - prefix_len).

There are no mutable functions that cannot be viewed as immutable in a similar way. Human brains are an immutable function from input sense-data to the combination (brain adaptation, output actions). Here "brain adaptation" doing a lot of work, but so would be "1e18 output tokens". There is much more information contained within the latter

"Surely a 1e18 context window model running at 1e6 tokens per second could be AGI."

And why?

Because that's quite a bit more information processing than any human brain

I don't think it is quantity that matters. Otherwise supercomputers are smart by definition.

Well no, that's not what anyone is saying.

The claim was that it isn't possible in principle for "DAGs" or "immutable architectures" to be intelligent. That statement is confusing some theoretical results that aren't applicable to how LLMs work (output context is mutation).

I'm not claiming that compute makes the m intelligent. I'm pointing out that it is certainly possible, and at that level of compute it should be plausible. Feel free to share any theoretical results you think demonstrate the impossibility of "DAG" intelligence and are applicable

I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying it might be possible, but far from plausible with the current approach of LLMs in my experience with them.

This argument works better for state space models. A transformer would still steps context one token at a time, not maintain an internal 1e18 state.

That doesn't matter, are you familiar with any theoretical results in which the computation is somehow limited in ways that practically matter when the context length is very long? I am not

Thank you. It's maddening how people keep making this fundamental mistake.

It doesn't feel particularly interesting to keep dismissing "these LLMs" as incapable of reaching AGI.

It feels more interesting to note that this time, it is different. I've been watching the field since the 90s when I first dabbled in crude neural nets. I am informed there was hype before, but in my time I've never seen progress like we've made in the last five years. If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing. And it keeps improving incrementally, and I do not think that is going to stop. The state of AI today is the worst it will ever be (trivially obvious but still capable of shocking me).

What I'm trying to say is that the shocking success of LLMs has become a powerful engine of progress, creating a positive feedback loop that is dramatically increasing investment, attracting top talent, and sharpening the focus of research into the next frontiers of artificial intelligence.

>If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing

90's? It's mind blowing to me now.

My daily driver laptop is (internally) a Thinkpad T480, a very middle of the road business class laptop from 2018.

It now talks to me. Usually knowledgeably, in a variety of common languages, using software I can download and run for free. It understands human relationships and motivations. It can offer reasonably advice and write simple programs from a description. It notices my tone and tries to adapt its manner.

All of this was inconceivable when I bought the laptop - I would have called it very unrealistic sci-fi. I am trying not to forget that.