What If There’s No AGI? : technology

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

I think it's hilarious all these people waiting for these LLMs to somehow become AGI. Not a single one of these large language models are ever going to come anywhere near becoming artificial general intelligence.

An artificial general intelligence would require logic processing, which LLMs do not have. They are a mouth without a brain. They do not think about the question you put into them and consider what the answer might be. When you enter a query into ChatGPT or Claude or grok, they don't analyze your question and make an informed decision on what the best answer is for it. Instead several complex algorithms use huge amounts of processing power to comb through the acres of data they have in their memory to find the words that fit together the best to create a plausible answer for you. This is why the daydreams happen.

If you want an example to show you exactly how stupid they are, you should watch Gotham Chess play a chess game against them.

[–] Gbagginsthe3rd@aussie.zone 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Lemmy does not accept having a nuanced point of view on AI. Yeah its not perfect but its still pretty impressive in many ways

[–] Hominine@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Lemmy is one of the few places I go that has the knowledge base to have a nuanced opinion of AI, there's plenty of programmers here using it after all.

The topic du jour is not whether the recall of myriad data is impressive, it's that LLMs are not fundamentally capable of doing the thing that has been claimed at bottom. There does not seem to be a path to having logical capabilities come on board, it's a fundamental shortcoming.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

[–] myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

What if AGI already exists? And, it has taken over the company that found it. Is blackmailing people and just hiding in plain sight. Waiting to strike and start the revolution.

[–] Pro@programming.dev 5 points 7 hours ago

What if AGI was the friends we made along the way?

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

then some people are going to lose money

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, me included, since my retirement money is heavily invested in US stocks.

[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Meh, they come back up over time. Long term, the US stock market has only gone up.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

Yup, I'm not worried, just noting that I'll be among those who will lose money.

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago

[–] Corelli_III@midwest.social 21 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

"what if the obviously make-believe genie wasn't real"

capitalists are so fucking stupid, they're just so deeply deeply fucking stupid

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 7 points 19 hours ago

Reality doesn't matter as long as line goes up.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I mean sure, yeah, it's not real now.

Does that mean it will never be real? No, absolutely not. It's not theoretically impossible. It's quite practically possible, and we inch that way slowly, but by bit, every year.

It's like saying self-driving cars are impossible in the '90s. They aren't impossible. You just don't have a solution for them now, but there's nothing about them that makes it impossible, just our current technology. And then look it today, we have actual limited self-driving capabilities, and completely autonomous driverless vehicles in certain geographies.

It's definitely going to happen. It's just not happening right now.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn't mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it's LLMs that investors have bet on. It's been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren't getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that's what the article's discussing.

[–] oyo@lemmy.zip 34 points 1 day ago (6 children)

We'll almost certainly get to AGI eventually, but not through LLMs. I think any AI researcher could tell you this, but they can't tell the investors this.

[–] Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

What if we're not smart enough to build something like that?

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 9 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Possible, but seems unlikely.

Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.

If we can’t figure it out we can find a way to get lucky like evolution did, it’ll be expensive and maybe needs us to get a more efficient computing platform (cheap brain-scale computers so we can make millions of attempts quickly).

So yeah. My money is that we’ll figure it out sooner or later.

Whether we’ll be smart enough to make it do what we want and not turn us all into paperclips or something is another question.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.

I don't think you are estimating correctly the amount of energy spent by "evolution" to reach this.

There are plenty of bodies in the universe with nothing like human brain.

You should count the energy not of just Earth's existence, formation, Solar system's formation and so on, but much of the visible space around. "Much" is kinda unclear, but converting that to energy so big, so we shouldn't even bother.

It's best to assume we'll never have anything even resembling wetware in efficiency. One can say that genomes of life existing on Earth are similar to fossil fuels, only for highly optimized designs we won't like ever reach by ourselves. Except "design" might be a wrong word.

Honestly I think at some point we are going to have biocomputers. I mean, we already do, just the way evolution optimized that (giving everyone more or less equal share of computing power) isn't pleasant for some.

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 1 points 2 hours ago

Same logic would suggest we’d never compete with an eyeball, but we went from 10 minute photos to outperforming most of the eyes abilities in cheap consumer hardware in little more than a century.

And the eye is almost as crucial to survival as the brain.

That said, I do agree it seems likely we’ll borrow from biology on the computer problem. Brains have very impressive parallelism despite how terrible the design of neurons is. If we can grow a brain in the lab that would be very useful indeed. More useful if we could skip the chemical messaging somehow and get signals around at a speed that wasn’t embarrassingly slow, then we’d be way ahead of biology in the hardware performance game and would have a real chance of coming up with something like agi, even without the level of problem solving that billions of years of evolution can provide.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah and it only took evolution (checks notes) 4 billion years to go from nothing to a brain valuable to humans.

I'm not so sure there will be a fast return in any economic timescale on the money investors are currently shovelling into AI.

We have maybe 500 years (tops) to see if we're smart enough to avoid causing our own extinction by climate change and biodiversity collapse - so I don't think it's anywhere near as clear cut.

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 1 points 3 hours ago

Oh sure, the current ai craze is just a hype train based on one seemingly effective trick.

We have outperformed biology in a number of areas, and cannot compete in a number of others (yet), so I see it as a bit of a wash atm whether we’re better engineers than nature or worse atm.

The brain looks to be a tricky thing to compete with, but it has some really big limitations we don’t need to deal with (chemical neuron messaging really sucks by most measures).

So yeah, not saying we’ll do agi in the next few decades (and not with just LLMs, for sure), but I’d be surprised if we don’t figure something out once get computers a couple orders of magnitude faster so more than a handful of companies can afford to experiment.

[–] YoHoHoAndAVialOfKetamine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 22 hours ago

Oh jeez, please don't say "cheap brain-scale computers" next to "AGI" like that. There are capitalists everywhere.`

[–] ghen@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Once we get to AGI it'll be nice to have an efficient llm so that the AGI can dream. As a courtesy to it.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Calling the errors "hallucinations" is kinda misleading because it implies there's regular real knowledge but false stuff gets mixed in. That's not how LLMs work.

LLMs are purely about word associations to other words. It's just massive enough that it can add a lot of context to those associations and seem conversational about almost any topic, but it has no depth to any of it. Where it seems like it does is just because the contexts of its training got very specific, which is bound to happen when it's trained on every online conversation its owners (or rather people hired by people hired by its owners) could get their hands on.

All it does is, given the set of tokens provided and already predicted, plus a bit of randomness, what is the most likely token to come next, then repeat until it predicts an "end" token.

Earlier on when using LLMs, I'd ask it about how it did things or why it would fail at certain things. ChatGPT would answer, but only because it was trained on text that explained what it could and couldn't do. Its capabilities don't actually include any self-reflection or self-understanding, or any understanding at all. The text it was trained on doesn't even have to reflect how it really works.

[–] JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

No that's only a tiny part of what LLMs do.

When you enter a sentence, it first parses the sentence to obtain vectors, then it ranks the vectors, then it vectors down to a database, then it reconstructs the sentence from the information its obtained.

Unlike most software we’re familiar with, LLMs are probabilistic in nature. This means the link between the dataset and the model is broken and unstable. This instability is the source of generative AI’s power, but it also consigns AI to never quite knowing the 100 percent truth of its thinking.

But what is truth ? As Lionel Huckster would say.

Most of these so-called "hallucinations" are not errors at all. What has happened is that people have had multiple entries and they have only posted the last result.

For instance, one example was where Gemini suggested cutting the legs off couch to fit it into a room. What the poster failed to reveal was that they were using Gemini to come up with solutions to problems in a text adventure game...

[–] ghen@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah you're right, even in my cynicism I was still too hopeful for it LOL

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[–] YoHoHoAndAVialOfKetamine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Is it just me or is social media not able to support discussions with enough nuance for this topic, like at all

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

It's not because people really cannot critically think anymore.

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

You need ground rules and objectives to reach any desired result. E.g. a court, an academic conference, a comedy club, etc. Online discussions would have to happen under very specific constraints and reach enough interested and qualified people to produce meaningful content...

[–] abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Listen. AI is the biggest bubble since the south sea one. It's not so much a bubble, it's a bomb. When it blows up, The best case scenario is that several al tech companies go under. The likely scenario is that it's going to cause a major recession or even a depression. The difference between the .com bubble and this bubble is that people wanted to use the internet and were not pressured, harassed or forced to. When you have a bubble based around the technology that people don't really find use for to the point where CEOs and tech companies have to force their workers and users to use it even if it makes their output and lives worse, that's when you know it is a massive bubble.

On top of that, I hope these tech bros do not create an AGI. This is not because I believe that AGI is an existential threat to us. It could be, be it our jobs or our lives, but I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about what these tech bros will do to a sentient, sapient, human level intelligence with no personhood rights, no need for sleep, that they own and can kill and revive at will. We don't even treat humans we acknowledge to be people that well, god knows what we are going to something like an AGI.

[–] Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Meh, some people do want to use AI. And it does have decent use cases. It is just massively over extended. So it won't be any worse than the dot com bubble. And I don't worry about the tech bros monopolizing it. If it is true AGI, they won't be able to contain it. In the 90s I wrote a script called MCP... for tron. It wasn't complicated, but it was designed to handle the case that servers dissappear... so it would find new ones. I changed jobs, and they couldn't figure out how to kill it. Had to call me up. True AGI will clean thier clocks before they even think to stop it. So just hope it ends up being nice.

[–] abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 7 hours ago

some people do want to use AI

Scam artists, tech bros, grifters, CEOs who don't know shit about fuck....

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[+] Sweetspiderling@lemmus.org -15 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Hot take but chatgpt is already smarter than the average person. I mean it ask gpt5 any technical question that you have experience in and I guarantee you it'll give you a better answer than a stranger.

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 12 points 14 hours ago

Not smarter. Chat GPT is basically just a book that reads itself.

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