I'm finding it more bizarre, if compared to creating a virtual talking monkey from scratch, with a little bit of Python and a large calculator.
I always here things like "oh it's useful but dumb on some things", but it's just vague.
What is the test? What is a question that it fails at compared to humans? And no, you can't just say "find me the cure for cancer", but I believe there is probably enough intelligence in the weights that there is likely a cure in there with enough compute and the right questions.
Humans don't ask the right questions otherwise they could get the answers w enough compute. So humans aren't agi?
Again w the vagueness. It's not agi because it doesn't ask the right questions. What are the right questions? Who knows.
You're proving my point
Human intelligence does not consist of answering questions.
And every day I have to say "No, you stupid clanker ...", so if this is "general intelligence", it's the intelligence of an idiot savant who is good at calculations but sucks at most other forms of intelligence.
If that is the case, then it trivially follows that humanity will never be able to build AGI, because every time we build something new, we will understand how we built it, which disqualifies it from being an AGI.
But that doesn't seem like a useful definition to me.
Thing is, we don’t understand how LLMs work. Not really. And everyone at the forefront of this space has said so. We know how to grow them but that is not anything like the same thing as understanding why or how they actually function. Our level of understanding of LLM intelligence is only slightly ahead of our understanding of the neuroscience of human intelligence, and no one would say we understand that at all.
So I think describing LLMs as magic at this point is absolutely appropriate.
I keep seeing this idea and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.
I think it could be a bit like saying if you showed someone 500 years ago a smartphone they would likely conclude at first it was magic. But once you had some time to let them use it and tell them how it all worked on a high level they would eventually obviously realise, no, it's not magic.
I guess just in the same way if you presented current LLM tech out of nowhere a few years ago to someone who'd never seen it, I concede they may be likely to imagine it was AGI in that first conversation, depending on their background.
But after using it for a bit and learning what an LLM is etc they'd land exactly where everyone is today - a great technology useful for some things, not AGI, not magic.