AI megathread

It’s very far from human intelligence if this is the benchmark for agi. With that said I believe it’s only a matter of time before there will be world models that can recursively self-improve from continuous input. It’s certainly not possible to disprove we can build such thing.

My guess is we won't have AGI because humans intelligence isn't generally applicable.

Even mathematics and music, which seem to have some connection, doesn't by necessity produce great mathematicians who are also great musicians or vice-versa.

I think we'll have an improved version of what we have now - a general search function that can go to the necessary programs and produce output. 

For consciousness I think that we'll need to see if structure is necessary. I do think we will have synthetic (android) life but it won't be mere Turing Machines in structure. My guess is we'll need deep structures akin to what we have in our own brains and possibly the larger ecosystem of our bodies.

What I find remarkable about current LLMs is not that they can search for information or call tools. What's surprising is that a system trained only to predict the next token appears to acquire abstractions, world knowledge, planning abilities, coding skills, mathematical heuristics and many other capabilities that were never explicitly programmed into it.
Whether this ultimately scales to something resembling human-level intelligence remains an open question. But reducing today's models to "search functions" seems to miss the most interesting phenomenona - complex cognitive behaviour emerging from a surprisingly simple learning objective.

Nobody can explains why this happens - it just happens in these models.

The emergence of advanced cognitive abilities in purely physical systems should at least make us cautious about claiming that intelligence requires anything non-physical. Every year now seems to shrink the set of mental capabilities that appear to demand supernatural explanations.

The emergence of advanced cognitive abilities in purely physical systems should at least make us cautious about claiming that intelligence requires anything non-physical. Every year now seems to shrink the set of mental capabilities that appear to demand supernatural explanations.

If you define the "physical" as something that has no mental character, then it simply follows that thoughts are non-physical.

If anything LLMs would suggest Platonism, Panpsychism or Idealism are more plausible if they truly provide all the bonus features you claim they do.

It seems mental concepts are woven into the fabric of reality, recalling Wigner's question about the uncanny efficacy of maths.

If anything LLMs would suggest Platonism, Panpsychism or Idealism are more plausible if they truly provide all the bonus features you claim they do.

I actually don’t believe LLMs have any mental character.

An LLM is a very large collection of numbers. During inference, it performs a long sequence of matrix multiplications on numerical representations of text and produces the next token. That is all it does.

What unsettles me is how quickly their capabilities are evolving. Since the start of this thread, every three months seems to have brought another leap forward with increasingly impressive models. Yesterday, Claude Fable 5 was released and, judging from the early reactions, it appears to be another significant step forward.

While I remain cautious about whether these systems can truly invent something fundamentally new - such as proving a previously unproven theorem - I have to admit that I am less certain than I used to be.

I actually don’t believe LLMs have any mental character.

An LLM is a very large collection of numbers. During inference, it performs a long sequence of matrix multiplications on numerical representations of text and produces the next token. That is all it does.

What unsettles me is how quickly their capabilities are evolving. Since the start of this thread, every three months seems to have brought another leap forward with increasingly impressive models. Yesterday, Claude Fable 5 was released and, judging from the early reactions, it appears to be another significant step forward.

While I remain cautious about whether these systems can truly invent something fundamentally new - such as proving a previously unproven theorem - I have to admit that I am less certain than I used to be.

I'm still unconvinced any program running on a Turing Machine can become conscious, but if the fundamental nature of the world has mental aspect th[e]n it isn't that surprising patterns can emulate intelligence.

What I'm wary of is this idea that LLMs merely are word predictors, as if there isn't a lot of background human work to make them apply to multiple domain spaces.

I think we'd need a deep dive into *how* they work, made understandable to the public, before we decide exactly what level of intelligence they have.

I think we'd need a deep dive into *how* they work, made understandable to the public, before we decide exactly what level of intelligence they have.

Indeed. Right now, many believe that LLMs are, basically, "magic", and there lies all of my misgivings and worries ~ so many resources are being poured into it blindly. The LLM companies prey on this to make their billions from gullible fools who don't know how it works. The ignorance is part of what makes it work so well.

Which is why instead of replying to Laird, I thought that the above video would do a better job. Because unmasking the hype to get an understanding is crucial.