alt Hacker NewsWhen people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.
That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.
In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space."
When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence.
And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.
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> That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better.
I would be happy to agree if we had the solutions for the societal problems that will create in hand.
> caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language
There is evidence to the contrary. Not having language puts your mental faculties in a significant disadvantage. Specifically, left brain athropy. See the critical period hypothesis. Perhaps you mean lacking spoken language rather than having none at all?
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/curtiss/1974%20-%20The%2...
I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.
This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.
> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today
In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?
How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.
>In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.
>That's not what's happening here ...
On the contrary, it very much is.
I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting.
However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff immediately after arriving at the first.
Just, you know—potential mass unemployment on a scale never seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify as AGI is largely semantics.
That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.
> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.
Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.
Having met cavemen, and Australians, I disagree
The amount of things LLMs can do is insane.
It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.