Discussion

Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework

qsort: Those are crowdsourced benchmarks. We're calling them "cognitive" and "AGI" now, though. It's similar to when they made a benchmark and called them "GDP".To be clear, I think we've seen very fast progress, certainly faster than I would have expected, I'm not trying to peddle some "wall" rhetoric here, but I struggle to see how this isn't just the SWE-bench du jour.

hbarka: The two guys from Google get to set the rules?How will they measure wisdom or common sense (ability to make an exception)?https://youtu.be/lA-zdh_bQBo

wcgan7: Cool that we are at a stage where it is meaningful to start measuring progress toward AGI. Something I am wondering on the philosophical side: are we ever going to be able to tell if the system really "understands" and "perceives" the world?

quantummagic: We'll get as close as we can with anything else, like trying to decide if a given human really "understands" and "perceives" the world.

wewewedxfgdf: AGI feels like a vanity project.Who cares about AGI? Honestlky what's the gain.Maybe Google could actually make Gemini good instead of being about 10 miles behind Claude instead of trying to make AGI because of - well some reason - cause they want to be famous.

yellow_lead: It's kind of funny that Google's idea of evaluating AGI is outsourcing the work to a Kaggle competition.

pocketarc: When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space."When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence.And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.

Traubenfuchs: > A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

komali2: From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.

onlyrealcuzzo: The amount of things LLMs can do is insane.It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

NooneAtAll3: for example?

zug_zug: I'm sorry what even is this? Giving $10k rewards for significant advancements toward "AGI"?What does "making a framework" even mean, it feels like a nothing post.When I think of what real AGI would be I think:- Passes the turing test- Writes a New York Times Bestseller without revealing it was written by AI- Writes journal articles that pass peer review- Wins a Nobel Prize- Writes a successful comedy routine- Creates a new inventionAnd no, nobody is going to make an automated kaggle benchmark to verify these. Which is fine, because an LLM will never be AGI. An LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.

stingraycharles: I get the feeling that the original post was also written using LLMs, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.If an LLM like this is really intelligent, at the very least, I’d expect it to be able to invent.For example, train an LLM on a dataset only containing knowledge from before nuclear energy was invented, and see if it can invent nuclear energy.But that’s the problem: they’re not really training the model on intelligence, they’re training it on knowledge. So if you strip away the knowledge, you’re left with almost nothing.

raincole: > A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here todayIn other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?

komali2: 200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.

ahoka: I find it very interesting about the Turing test that as chatbots improve, so do humans get better at recognizing them.

pferde: That is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.

baggachipz: This is a long way to say "let's crowdsource the shifting of our goalposts".

21asdffdsa12: Its complicated. It depends.A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?Thus.

lucianbr: Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.

Havoc: Measuring something you can’t define or quantify seems somewhat dubious

boca_honey: Friendly reminder:Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.

beeflet: Who attuned your crystal ball?LLMs are already pretty general. They've got the multimodal ones, and aren't they using some sort of language-action-model to drive cars now? Who is to say AGI doesn't already exist?

airstrike: [delayed]

nutjob2: Thus the vague and unfounded criteria/framework.It's pretty easy for these people to pull something like this out of their collective asses, but it's much harder (maybe impossible) to rigorously define the how and why.

Traubenfuchs: > A human being has the potential for intelligence.Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now?Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?

applfanboysbgon: Of course they were. A human from 200,000 years ago would be almost genetically identical to one from today. That's what makes us homo sapiens. 200,000 years is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary timescale with generations as long as ours and reproduction rates as low as ours.

mhl47: How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

Peritract: Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.

orangebread: As an engineer who is also spiritual at the core, it seems obvious to me the missing piece: consciousness.Hear me out.I love AI and have been using it since ChatGPT 3.5. The obvious question when I first used it was "does this qualify as sentience?" The answer is less obvious. Over the next 3 years we saw EXPONENTIAL intelligence gains where intelligence has now become a commodity, yet we are still unable to determine what qualifies as "AGI".My thoughts: As humans, we possess our own internal drive and our own perspective. Think of humans as distilled intelligence, we each have our own specialty and motivations. Einstein was a genius physicist but you wouldn't ask him for his expertise on medicine.What people are describing as AGI is essentially a godlike human. What would make more sense is if the AGI spawned a "distilled" version with a focused agenda/motivation to behave autonomously. But even then, there are limitations. What is the solution? A trillion tokens of system prompt to act as the "soul"/consciousness of this AI agent?This goes back to my original statement, what is missing is a level of consciousness. Unless this AGI can power itself and somehow the universe recognizes its complexity and existence and bestows it with consciousness I don't think this is phsyically attainable.

the_real_cher: This is an interesting perspective.A follow up is maybe this is a feature not a bug: Do we want AI to have its own intrinsic goals, motivations, and desires, i.e. conciousnessIm imagining having to ask ChatGPT how its day was and respect its emotions before I can ask it about what I want.

orangebread: I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.

fnoef: What is it with humans that we tend to speedrun into the extinction of our own race?

nutjob2: It's a trick statement, because AGI is undefined.

beeflet: I think LLMs are at least name-worthy given that they're artificial and somewhat smart in a generality of domains. Albeit the "smartness" comes from training in a massive corpus of text in those domains. So maybe it's really a specific intelegence but for so many specific tasks it seems general.But at some point you have to throw in the towel when these things are going to be walking and talking around us. Some people move the goalposts of "AGI" to mean that the machine totally emulates a person. Including curiosity and creativity, of which these models are currently lacking.

Traubenfuchs: Evolutionary brain development.We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so.What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago?ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn spoken language if brought up by modern parents.But I prefer human answers over AI slop.

adrian_b: The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached its peak long before 200k years ago.Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of big animals.

next_xibalba: Well, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff of science fiction.

ArekDymalski: It's good to have some kind of benchmark at least to structure the ongoing, fruitless discussion around "are we there already?".However I must admit that including the last point that is partially hinting at the emotional or rather social intelligence surprised me. It makes this list go beyond usual understanding of AGI and moves it toward something like AGI-we-actually-want. But for that purpose this last point isn't ok narrow, too specific. And so is the whole list.To be actually useful the AGI-we-actually-want benchmark should not only include positive indicators but also a list of unwanted behaviors to ensure this thing that used to be called alignment I guess.

gotwaz: Unwanted behavior or what? Like why does a rose need so many petals eh? What about a peacock and all those feathers? Why should anyone dance in the shower? Or dance at all? The rabbit hole is deep Alice.

guerrilla: It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.

danielbln: Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter.With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.

applfanboysbgon: You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.

beeflet: I think the accomplishment of difficult real-world tasks requires that it does so. But I hope that we're able to reach a level of introspection to produce a satisfactory answer (and avoid doomsday), but I think that requires a more educated question. The premise of conciousness as we understand it now could be misleading.In the same way that studying alien life would reveal more about how life in general canonicially forms and exists. Studying this artificial intellegence could unlock a new understanding of our own minds.

dist-epoch: Capability and alignment are orthogonal.Stalin was AGI-level.

ArekDymalski: "Stalin was AGI-level" perfectly catches the core of my concerns. Thanks!

tmoravec: Yes. Some important parts of the software, like complex tools, art, or the use of symbols only appeared between 100.000 and 50.000 years ago, however.

Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situations

lvoudour: Social cognition: processing and interpreting social information and responding appropriately in social situationsIs social cognition really a measure of intelligence for non-social entities?

lnenad: It is not. Why is that relevant to social entities?

lvoudour: How well you interact with other members of a society increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge acquisition, ie. it makes sense as a measure of intelligence

LogicFailsMe: It's a pretty ambiguous definition. The most powerful man in the world right now is not someone I consider a role model for social cognition and yet there he is with the football for the second time demonstrating grandmaster skill at social cognition to get there.

lvoudour: You don't have to be empathetic and nice, just good at navigating society.