I honestly now believe that AGI already exists. This model may not have been it, and we will debate for hundreds of years* about whether the threshold was transformers or MLPs or multimodal, and which first model was really the first, in the same way we still debate which electronic computer was truly the first. But I do believe that it is here.
We do not have human-level machine intelligence (HLMI) yet. These systems still have a lot of limitations, in particular the context window and lack of memory. They are very limited in some domains such as robotics. However, it seems unlikely to me that we are not already in the takeoff.
* (assuming the debate doesn’t get abruptly stopped)
I agree it looks like the combination of multimodal learning and memory may be enough to reach AGI, and there’s an existing paper with a solution for memory. Human-level is such a hard thing to judge and so my threshold is basically human-level coding ability because that’s what allows recursive self-improvement which is where I predict at least 90% of the capability gain toward superhuman AGI will happen. I assume all the pieces are running in data centers now, presumably just not hooked together in precisely the right way (but an AGI model being trained by DeepMind right now would not surprise me much). I will probably update to a year sooner from median ~2026 to ~2025 for human-level coding ability and from there it’s almost certainly a fast takeoff (months to a few years) given how many orders of magnitude faster current LLMs are than humans at generating tokens which tightens the iteration loop on serial tasks. Someone is going to want to see how intelligent the AGI is and ask it to “fix a few bugs” even if it’s not given an explicit goal of self improvement. I hedge that median both because I am not sure if the next few multimodal models will have enough goal stability to pursue a long research program (memory will probably help but isn’t the whole picture of an agent) and because I’m not sure the big companies won’t balk somewhere along the path, but Llama 65B is out in the open now and close enough to GPT-3 and PaLM to give (rich) nerds in their basements the ability to do significant capability research.
The only reasonable debate at this point seems to me to be exponential vs superexponential.
When somebody tells you to buy into the S&p 500 what’s their reasoning? After a century or two of reliable exponential growth the most conservative prediction is for that trend to continue (barring existential catastrophe). We are in our second or third century of dramatic recursive technology improvement. AI is clearly a part of this virtuous cycle, so the safest money looks like it’d be on radical change.
I appreciate the perspectives of the Gary Marcuses of the world, but I’ve noticed they tend more towards storytelling (“Chinese room, doesn’t know what it’s saying”). The near-term singularity crowd tends to point at thirty different graphs of exponential curves and shrug. This is of course an overgeneralization (there are plenty of statistically-grounded arguments against short horizons), but it’s hard to argue we’re in an S curve when the rate of change is still accelerating. Harder still to argue that AI isn’t/won’t get spooky when it writes better than most Americans and is about to pass the coffee test.
Forgive my hypocrisy, but I’ll do a bit of storytelling myself. As a music ed major, I was taught by nearly every one of my professors to make knowledge transfers and to teach my students to transfer. Research on exercise science, psychology, film criticism, the experience of stubbing a toe; all of it can be used to teach music better if you know how to extract the useful information. To me this act of transfer is the boson of wisdom. If palm-e can use its internal model of a bag of chips to grab it for you out of the cabinet… Google doesn’t seem to be out of line to claim palm is transferring knowledge. The Chinese room argument seems to be well and truly dead.
I honestly now believe that AGI already exists. This model may not have been it, and we will debate for hundreds of years* about whether the threshold was transformers or MLPs or multimodal, and which first model was really the first, in the same way we still debate which electronic computer was truly the first. But I do believe that it is here.
We do not have human-level machine intelligence (HLMI) yet. These systems still have a lot of limitations, in particular the context window and lack of memory. They are very limited in some domains such as robotics. However, it seems unlikely to me that we are not already in the takeoff.
* (assuming the debate doesn’t get abruptly stopped)
I agree it looks like the combination of multimodal learning and memory may be enough to reach AGI, and there’s an existing paper with a solution for memory. Human-level is such a hard thing to judge and so my threshold is basically human-level coding ability because that’s what allows recursive self-improvement which is where I predict at least 90% of the capability gain toward superhuman AGI will happen. I assume all the pieces are running in data centers now, presumably just not hooked together in precisely the right way (but an AGI model being trained by DeepMind right now would not surprise me much). I will probably update to a year sooner from median ~2026 to ~2025 for human-level coding ability and from there it’s almost certainly a fast takeoff (months to a few years) given how many orders of magnitude faster current LLMs are than humans at generating tokens which tightens the iteration loop on serial tasks. Someone is going to want to see how intelligent the AGI is and ask it to “fix a few bugs” even if it’s not given an explicit goal of self improvement. I hedge that median both because I am not sure if the next few multimodal models will have enough goal stability to pursue a long research program (memory will probably help but isn’t the whole picture of an agent) and because I’m not sure the big companies won’t balk somewhere along the path, but Llama 65B is out in the open now and close enough to GPT-3 and PaLM to give (rich) nerds in their basements the ability to do significant capability research.
Could you link this?
The only reasonable debate at this point seems to me to be exponential vs superexponential.
When somebody tells you to buy into the S&p 500 what’s their reasoning? After a century or two of reliable exponential growth the most conservative prediction is for that trend to continue (barring existential catastrophe). We are in our second or third century of dramatic recursive technology improvement. AI is clearly a part of this virtuous cycle, so the safest money looks like it’d be on radical change.
I appreciate the perspectives of the Gary Marcuses of the world, but I’ve noticed they tend more towards storytelling (“Chinese room, doesn’t know what it’s saying”). The near-term singularity crowd tends to point at thirty different graphs of exponential curves and shrug. This is of course an overgeneralization (there are plenty of statistically-grounded arguments against short horizons), but it’s hard to argue we’re in an S curve when the rate of change is still accelerating. Harder still to argue that AI isn’t/won’t get spooky when it writes better than most Americans and is about to pass the coffee test.
Forgive my hypocrisy, but I’ll do a bit of storytelling myself. As a music ed major, I was taught by nearly every one of my professors to make knowledge transfers and to teach my students to transfer. Research on exercise science, psychology, film criticism, the experience of stubbing a toe; all of it can be used to teach music better if you know how to extract the useful information. To me this act of transfer is the boson of wisdom. If palm-e can use its internal model of a bag of chips to grab it for you out of the cabinet… Google doesn’t seem to be out of line to claim palm is transferring knowledge. The Chinese room argument seems to be well and truly dead.