LLMs are not “intelligent” in any meaningful biological sense.
Watch a spider modify its web to adapt to changing conditions and you’ll realize just how far we have to go.
LLMs sometimes echo our own reasoning back at us in a way that sounds intelligent and is often useful, but don’t mistake this for “intelligence”
You don't gotta work hard to break the illusion, either.
People really really really want to believe this thing and I do not understand why. I wish I did lol
But it would be more honest and productive imo if people would just say outright when they don’t think AGI is possible (or that AI can never be “real intelligence”) for religious reasons, rather than pretending there’s a rational basis.
until we got that AGI is just a magic word.
When we will have those two clear definitions that means we understood them and then we can work toward AGI.
Plenty of things could theoretically exist that aren't possible and likely will never be possible.
Like, sure, a Dyson sphere would solve our energy needs. We can't build one now and we almost certainly never will lol
"AGI" is theoretically feasible, sure. Our brains are just matter. But they're also an insanely complex and complicated system that came out of a billion years of evolution.
A little rinky dink statistical model doesn't even scratch the surface of it, and I don't understand why people think it does.
As are birds, yet we can still build airplanes.
Weak ass gotcha, hang your head in shame, call your mom and tell her what a fraud you are.
We clearly are replicating at least some significant aspects of human intelligence via LLMs, despite biological complexity. So we obviously don't need a 100% complete understanding of the corresponding biology to build things which achieve similar goals.
In other words, we can (conceivably) figure out how intelligence works and how to produce it independently of figuring out exactly how the human brain produces intelligence, just like we learned the laws of aerodynamics well enough to build airplanes independently of understanding everything about the biology of birds.
Whether we will achieve this or not to the point of AGI is a separate engineering question. I'm only pointing out how flawed these lines of argument are.
That's a very load-bearing "clearly". I don't think it's clear at all lol.
Again, you are vastly underestimating the scale here.
Heavier-than-air flight is (relatively) straightforward and it's easy for humans to build models. Also, you know when you're flying.
Building a star is theoretically also relatively straightforward -- just collect a lot of gas and dust in one area and wait for gravity to do its thing.
Actually doing that is left as an exercise to the reader.
Are you really disputing that LLMs can replicate some aspects of human intelligence? I mean, they're often passing the Turing test, writing non-trivial programs, and got a gold medal in the IMO.
Maybe you aren't well informed on their actual capabilities?
> Heavier-than-air flight is (relatively) straightforward and it's easy for humans to build models.
Actually, before the first airplanes were created, plenty of people were making arguments very similar to yours to dismiss human flight as impossible.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, 1895
Just kidding. Personally I don't think intelligence is a meaningful concept without context (or an environment in biology). Not much point comparing behaviours born in completely different contexts.
If I ask chatgpt how to get rid of spiders I'm probably going to get further than the spiders would scheming to get rid of chatgpt.
"Some tests can be cheesed by a statistical model" is much less sexy and clickable than "my computer is sentient", but it's what's actually going on lol
Because if we don't mix up "intelligence" the phenomenon of increasingly complex self-organization in living systems, with "intelligence" our experience of being able to mentally model complex phenomena in order to interact with them, then it becomes easy to see how the search speed you talk of is already growing exponentially.
In fact, that's all it does. Culture goes faster than genetic selection. Printing goes faster than writing. Democracy is faster than theocracy. Radio is faster than post. A computer is faster than a brain. LLMs are faster than trained monkeys and complain less. All across the planet, systems bootstrap themselves into more advanced systems as soon as I look at 'em, and I presume even when I don't.
OTOH, all the metaphysics stuff about "sentience" and "sapience" that people who can't tell one from the other love to talk past each other about - all that only comes into view if one were to what's happening with the search space if the search speed is increasing at a forever increasing rate.
Such as, whether the search space is finite, whether it's mutable, in what order to search, is it ethical to operate from quantized representations of it, funky sketchy scary stuff the lot of it. One's underlying assumptions about this process determine much of one's outlook on life as well as complex socially organized activities. One usually receives those through acculturation and may be unaware of what they say exactly.
They predict next likely text token. That we can do so much with that is an absolute testament to the brilliance of researchers, engineers, and product builders.
We are not yet creating a god in any sense.
I doubt it. Human intelligence evolved from organisms much less intelligent than LLMs and no philosophy was needed. Just trial and error and competition.