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0 pointskenjackson4mo ago0 comments

"vision had decades of head start, yet LLMs leapfrogged it in just a few years."

From an evolutionary perspective though vision had millions of years head start over written language. Additionally, almost all animals have quite good vision mechanisms, but very few do any written communication. Behaviors that map to intelligence don't emerge concurrently. It may well be there are different forms of signals/sensors/mechanical skills that contribute to emergence of different intelligences.

It really feels more and more like we should recast AGI as Artificial Human Intelligence Likeness (AHIL).

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adamzwasserman4mo ago

From a terminology point of view, I absolutely agree. Human-likeness is what most people mean when they talk about AGI. Calling it what it is would clarify a lot of the discussions around it.

However I am clear that I do not believe that this will ever happen, and I see no evidence to convince that that there is even a possibility that it will.

I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

andoando4mo ago

>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

adamzwasserman4mo ago

You're actually proving Wittgenstein's point. We share the same physical world, but we don't encounter the same problems. A lion's concerns - territory, hunting, pride hierarchy - are fundamentally different from ours: mortgages, meaning, relationships.

And here's the kicker: you don't even fully understand me, and I'm human. What makes you think you'd understand a lion?

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goatlover4mo ago

We haven't been able to decode what whales and dolphins are communicating. Are they using language? A problem SETI faces is whether we would be able to decode an alien signal. They may be too different in their biology, culture and technology. The book & movie Contact propose that math is a universal language. This assumes they're motivated to use the same basic mathematical structures we do. Maybe they don't care about prime numbers.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem explores an alien ocean that so different humans utterly fail to communicate with it, leading to the ocean creating humans from memories in brain scans broadcast over the ocean, but it's never understood why the ocean did this. The recreated humans don't know either.

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Retric4mo ago

This is all really arbitrary metrics across such wildly different fields. IMO LLMs are where computer vision was 20+ years ago in terms of real world accuracy. Other people feel LLMs offer far more value to the economy etc.

adamzwasserman4mo ago

I understand the temptation to compare LLMs and computer vision, but I think it’s misleading to equate generative AI with feature-identification or descriptive AI systems like those in early computer vision. LLMs, which focus on generating human-like text and reasoning across diverse contexts, operate in a fundamentally different domain than descriptive AI, which primarily extracts patterns or features from data, like early vision systems did for images.

Comparing their 'real-world accuracy' oversimplifies their distinct goals and applications. While LLMs drive economic value through versatility in language tasks, their maturity shouldn’t be measured against the same metrics as descriptive systems from decades ago.

Retric4mo ago

I don’t think it’s an oversimplification as accuracy is what constrains LLMs across so many domains. If you’re a wealthy person asking ChatGPT to write a prenup or other contract to use would be an act of stupidity unless you vetted it with an actual lawyer. My most desired use case is closer, but LLMs are still more than an order of magnitude below what I am willing to tolerate.

IMO that’s what maturity means in AI systems. Self driving cars aren’t limited by the underlying mechanical complexity, it’s all about the long quest for a system to make reasonably correct decisions hundreds of times a second for years across widely varying regions and weather conditions. Individual cruse missiles on the other hand only needed to operate across a single short and pre-mapped flight in specific conditions, therefore they used visual navigation decades earlier.

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adamzwasserman4mo ago

From a terminology point of view, I absolutely agree. Human-likeness is what most people mean when they talk about AGI. Calling it what it is would clarify a lot of the discussions around it.

However I am clear that I do not believe that this will ever happen, and I see no evidence to convince that that there is even a possibility that it will.

I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

andoando4mo ago

>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

adamzwasserman4mo ago

And here's the kicker: you don't even fully understand me, and I'm human. What makes you think you'd understand a lion?

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goatlover4mo ago

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Retric4mo ago

adamzwasserman4mo ago

Retric4mo ago

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