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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Intelligence and consciousness are not related in the way you seem to think.

  We've always known that you can have consciousness without a high level of intelligence (think of children, people with certain types of brain damage), and now for the first time, LLMs show us that you can have intelligence without consciousness.

  It's naive to think that as we continue to develop intelligent machines, suddenly one of them will become conscious once it reaches a particular level of intelligence. Did you suddenly become conscious once you hit the age of 14 or whatever and had finally developed a deep enough understanding of trigonometry or a solid enough grasp of the works of Mark Twain? No of course not, you became conscious at a very early age, when even a basic computer program could outsmart you, and you developed intelligence quite independently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I did say that I don't

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think current LLMs are already intelligent. I'd also say cats, mice, fish, birds are intelligent - to varying degrees of course.

  I'd like to see examples of LLMs paired with sensorimotor systems, if you know of any

  If you're referring to my comment about hobbyist projects, I was just thinking of the sorts of things you'll find on a search of sites like YouTube, perhaps this one is a good example (but I haven't watched it as I'm avoiding YouTube). I don't know if anyone has tried to incorporate a "learning to walk" type of stage into LLM training, but my point is that it would be perfectly possible, if there were reason to think it would give the LLM an edge.

  The matter of how intelligent humans are is another question, and relevant because AFAIK when people talk about AGI now, they're talking about an AI that can do better on average than a typical human at any arbitrary task. It's not a particularly high bar, we're not talking about super-intelligence I don't think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  thanks for this very yummy response. I'm having to read up about the technicalities you're touching on so bear with me!

  According to wiki, the neocortex is only present in mammals but as I'm sure you're aware mammals are not the only creatures to exhibit intelligence. Are you arguing that only mammals are capable of "general intelligence"? I can get on board with what you're saying as *one way* to develop AGI - work out how brains do it and then copy that - but I don't think it's a given that that is the *only* way to AGI, even if we were to agree that only animals with a neocortex can have "general intelligence". Hence the fact that a given class of machine architecture does not replicate a neocortex would not in my mind make that architecture incapable of ever achieving AGI.

  As for your point about the importance of sensorimotor integration, I don't see that being problematic for any kind of modern computer software - we can easily hook up any number of sensors to a computer, and likewise we can hook the computer up to electric motors, servos and so on. We could easily "install" an LLM inside a robot and allow it to control the robot's movement based on the sensor data. Hobbyists have done this already, many times, and it would not be hard to add a sensorimotor stage to an LLM's training.

  I do like what you're saying and find it interesting and thought-provoking. It's just that what you've said hasn't convinced me that LLMs are incapable of ever achieving AGI for those reasons. I'm not of the view that LLMs *are* capable of AGI though, it's more like something that I don't personally feel well enough informed upon to have a firm view. It does seem unlikely to me that we've currently reached the limits of what LLMs are capable of, but who knows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  because they are non-sensing, stationary, and fundamentally not thinking

  I don't follow, why would a machine need to be able to move or have its own sensors in order to be AGI? And can you define what you mean by "thinking"?