alt Hacker News> That's not going to reach AGI,
It has not been even 4 years since ChatGPT hit and LLMs + Transformers + Whatever they do has gotten us to solving millennium problems.
4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.
Now I don't know if what we have is AGI or not but I do not understand how you can see what has happened in the last 3 years and say "it will not get us there" no matter what "there" is.
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> 4 years ago, a program that could [...] we would have called it AGI
If you had told someone in the 1800s that a machine could instantly multiply 100 digit numbers, that would have been considered dazzlingly intelligent. And yet we are not that dazzled by our calculators today (despite how useful they might be!).
Superhuman performance at chess probably would have blown people’s minds in the 1950’s. We’ve since learned that sometimes intelligence can be narrow and sometimes it can be spiky, even if you can have a decent conversation.
It’s hard to point to anything and say it’s impossible. AGI doesn’t break any laws of physics. But some things like driverless cars can still be a long slog to get to widespread deployment.
Those are just the same capabilities than before, but with a much bigger compute power and training data behind it.
AGI can't be reached by "training harder" as, the way I see it at least, it requires a qualitative leap, not just quantitative.
We are getting a machine that better navigates across the information in its training data, we are not getting a machine that can think out of that training process, even if it can fool a few people at that.
The entire field has repeatedly said that for many decades.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...
> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.
No. General means general.
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> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.
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.