(2024-09-29, 07:14 AM)Laird Wrote: What do you mean by "truly self-learning" and why do you think it remains out of reach for now? When and why will that change?
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is often considered a vague concept, primarily because we lack a clear definition of human intelligence. Without understanding what human intelligence truly entails, how can we hope to define AGI?
Current AI models learn from data by minimizing an error or loss function, which is carefully defined by humans. In contrast, a newborn human learns through experience. A newborn "knows" very little, aside from basic impulses like feeding. However, through curiosity—another concept we have yet to fully define—humans begin exploring the world using their five senses. Almost magically, around the age of two, a child begins to recognize their own reflection in a mirror and starts to realize they are independent beings, separate from their parents. Some people even remember this profound moment of self-awareness.
AI systems, on the other hand, lack the ability to independently explore new ideas or concepts beyond their training data and parameters. They don't spontaneously generate hypotheses or conduct experiments in their environment like humans do. Furthermore, AIs suffer from catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon where learning new data can cause previously learned information to be lost. In humans, however, learning new knowledge does not erase old memories or understanding.
The new ChatGPT model operates using a method called reinforcement learning, which is akin to iterative trial and error—similar to how we approach problem-solving in mathematics. Yet, the outcome in AI is driven by the optimization of a human-specified reward function. This approach, while effective, appears to limit the generality of the model. In fact, there are certain tasks that earlier versions of ChatGPT can perform better than the newer versions, likely due to these limitations in generalization.
I’m uncertain whether AGI is truly achievable, but it is clear that the current strategies for AI are far from reaching AGI, especially given that we don't even have a clear definition of what AGI really means.