The ‘progress will be continuous’ argument, to apply to our near future, does depend on my other assumptions—mainly that the breakthroughs on that list are separable, so agentive behaviour and long-term planning won’t drop out of a larger GPT by themselves and can’t be considered part of just ‘improving up language model accuracy’.
We currently have partial progress on human-level language comprehension, a bit on cumulative learning, but near zero on managing mental activity for long term planning, so if we were to suddenly reach human level on long-term planning in the next 5 years, that would probably involve a discontinuity, which I don’t think is very likely for the reasons given here.
If language models scale to near-human performance but the other milestones don’t fall in the process, and my initial claim is right, that gives us very transformative AI but not AGI. I think that the situation would look something like this:
So there would be 2 (maybe 3?) breakthroughs remaining. It seems like you think just scaling up a GPT will also resolve those other milestones, rather than just giving us human-like language comprehension. Whereas if I’m right and also those curves do extrapolate, what we would get at the end would be an excellent text generator, but it wouldn’t be an agent, wouldn’t be capable of long-term planning and couldn’t be accurately described as having a utility function over the states of the external world, and I don’t see any reason why trivial extensions of GPT would be able to do that either since those seem like problems that are just as hard as human-like language comprehension. GPT seems like it’s also making some progress on cumulative learning, though it might need some RL-based help with that, but none at all on managing mental activity for longterm planning or discovering new action sets.
As an additional argument, admittedly from authority—Stuart Russell also clearly sees human-like language comprehension as only one of several really hard and independent problems that need to be solved.
A humanlike GPT-N would certainly be a huge leap into a realm of AI we don’t know much about, so we could be surprised and discover that agentive behaviour and having a utility function over states of the external world spontaneously appears in a good enough language model, but that argument has to be made, and you need that argument to hold and GPT to keep scaling for us to reach AGI in the next five years, and I don’t see the conjunction of those two as that likely—it seems as though your argument rests solely on whether GPT scales or not, when there’s also this other conceptual premise that’s much harder to justify.
I’m also not sure if I’ve seen anyone make the argument that GPT-N will also give us these specific breakthroughs—but if you have reasons that GPT scaling would solve all the remaining barriers to AGI, I’d be interested to hear it. Note that this isn’t the same as just pointing out how impressive the results scaling up GPT could be—Gwern’s piece here, for example, seems to be arguing for a scenario more like what I’ve envisaged, where GPT-N ends up a key piece of some future AGI but just provides some of the background ‘world model’:
Models like GPT-3 suggest that large unsupervised models will be vital components of future DL systems, as they can be ‘plugged into’ systems to immediately provide understanding of the world, humans, natural language, and reasoning.
If GPT does scale, and we get human-like language comprehension in 2025, that will mean we’re moving up that list much faster, and in turn suggests that there might not be a large number of additional discoveries required to make the other breakthroughs, which in turn suggests they might also occur within the Deep Learning paradigm, and relatively soon. I think that if this happens, there’s a reasonable chance that when we do build an AGI a big part of its internals looks like a GPT, as gwern suggested, but by then we’re already long past simply scaling up existing systems.
Alternatively, perhaps you’re not including agentive behaviour in your definition of AGI—a par-human text generator for most tasks that isn’t capable of discovering new action sets or managing its mental activity is, I think a ‘mere’ transformative AI and not a genuine AGI.
The ‘progress will be continuous’ argument, to apply to our near future, does depend on my other assumptions—mainly that the breakthroughs on that list are separable, so agentive behaviour and long-term planning won’t drop out of a larger GPT by themselves and can’t be considered part of just ‘improving up language model accuracy’.
We currently have partial progress on human-level language comprehension, a bit on cumulative learning, but near zero on managing mental activity for long term planning, so if we were to suddenly reach human level on long-term planning in the next 5 years, that would probably involve a discontinuity, which I don’t think is very likely for the reasons given here.
If language models scale to near-human performance but the other milestones don’t fall in the process, and my initial claim is right, that gives us very transformative AI but not AGI. I think that the situation would look something like this:
If GPT-N reaches par-human:
So there would be 2 (maybe 3?) breakthroughs remaining. It seems like you think just scaling up a GPT will also resolve those other milestones, rather than just giving us human-like language comprehension. Whereas if I’m right and also those curves do extrapolate, what we would get at the end would be an excellent text generator, but it wouldn’t be an agent, wouldn’t be capable of long-term planning and couldn’t be accurately described as having a utility function over the states of the external world, and I don’t see any reason why trivial extensions of GPT would be able to do that either since those seem like problems that are just as hard as human-like language comprehension. GPT seems like it’s also making some progress on cumulative learning, though it might need some RL-based help with that, but none at all on managing mental activity for longterm planning or discovering new action sets.
As an additional argument, admittedly from authority—Stuart Russell also clearly sees human-like language comprehension as only one of several really hard and independent problems that need to be solved.
A humanlike GPT-N would certainly be a huge leap into a realm of AI we don’t know much about, so we could be surprised and discover that agentive behaviour and having a utility function over states of the external world spontaneously appears in a good enough language model, but that argument has to be made, and you need that argument to hold and GPT to keep scaling for us to reach AGI in the next five years, and I don’t see the conjunction of those two as that likely—it seems as though your argument rests solely on whether GPT scales or not, when there’s also this other conceptual premise that’s much harder to justify.
I’m also not sure if I’ve seen anyone make the argument that GPT-N will also give us these specific breakthroughs—but if you have reasons that GPT scaling would solve all the remaining barriers to AGI, I’d be interested to hear it. Note that this isn’t the same as just pointing out how impressive the results scaling up GPT could be—Gwern’s piece here, for example, seems to be arguing for a scenario more like what I’ve envisaged, where GPT-N ends up a key piece of some future AGI but just provides some of the background ‘world model’:
If GPT does scale, and we get human-like language comprehension in 2025, that will mean we’re moving up that list much faster, and in turn suggests that there might not be a large number of additional discoveries required to make the other breakthroughs, which in turn suggests they might also occur within the Deep Learning paradigm, and relatively soon. I think that if this happens, there’s a reasonable chance that when we do build an AGI a big part of its internals looks like a GPT, as gwern suggested, but by then we’re already long past simply scaling up existing systems.
Alternatively, perhaps you’re not including agentive behaviour in your definition of AGI—a par-human text generator for most tasks that isn’t capable of discovering new action sets or managing its mental activity is, I think a ‘mere’ transformative AI and not a genuine AGI.