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