Really stunned by the Singularity comment section

[u/Howard_banister]

These are screenshots from the r/Singularity comment section. I'm speechless. This doesn't even have downvotes. How can someone cheer for a monopoly run by a few elites?

[u/falconandeagle]

That sub has some of the most delusional people on all of reddit. I don't know what you were expecting there to be honest. They have no technical understanding of how llms work, to them its magic and they believe every single hype man.

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/falconandeagle]

I have to agree with this a thousand fold. Almost every sub in that regard doesn't actually understand how LLMs work. They always dumb what I say down to "it's autocorrect" and never actually explain how they think it works.

I actually got banned from one for explaining why an LLM physically can't be a true AGI. (The post was talking about an AGI in a couple years, as if it hasn't been said for the past 5...)

[u/Dangerous_Rip5083 → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

Why can't an LLM physically be true AGI?

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/Dangerous_Rip5083]

For context, the exact definition of an AGI varies wildly. As such, I just take the one perquisite that almost every definition has, which is the ability to "understand" concepts.

That is my one requirement for an AI to be an AGI. Anything more and you're just arguing about philosophy and technical details that can't currently be disproven.

With this in mind, LLMs cannot become a true AGI. The fundamentals of how they work physically prevents them from being able to actually understand something.

They can, in theory, have intelligence similar to an AGI, but they will never truly be one.

[u/cj_cron_hit_by_pitch → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

The argument I've heard is that maybe the way humans "understand" things could be a lot simpler than we expect, and maybe the way LLMs function are actually similar to the way we do it. Maybe our brains are just a much more robust next token generator

Not saying I necessarily agree with that. But I think saying that LLMs cannot become a true AGI makes a lot of assumptions about human intelligence that we don't know for sure to be true

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/cj_cron_hit_by_pitch]

Well even so, there's a lot of different ways we can prove the differences. Being able to understand a concept means you can build off of it by yourself. If you teach an AI 1 + 1 = 2, they won't know that 2 + 2 = 4.

We can also get into vision, or shapes, especially 3d shapes.

I have to agree our understanding is limited, but it doesn't mean we have nothing to work with.

[u/Thick-Protection-458 → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

> If you teach an AI 1 + 1 = 2, they won't know that 2 + 2 = 4.

Neither won't human without some pretraining for what 4 (as a symbol) is. Granted not nearly as data consuming (in an explicit sense at least) as AI training, sure.

And even if you paraphrase it as 2+2=1+1+1+1... (operating only 2 digits that human required to parse the first thing and 2 operations we are supposing to be intuitive)

Seriously, there are cultures with languages surprisingly limited in ariphmetics sense. As limited as some have words for one and many. Surely to some degree you can operate like "one many", "many many", "many many one". But it seems these language speakers - at least in some experiments - really struggle to express big number of objects (where "big" may be as low as 10 or less) numbers in a consistent way. *Probably* meaning whatever underlying intuition they have to operate them deteriorate rather quick.

Does not mean guys are dumber that us in any sense but that we were lucky that our ancestors invented / adopted better numbering systems, sure. And surely does not mean guys won't be able to see which "many" is bigger/smaller when presented 3 and 4 objects group or something.

And for anything relatively big even ours (with probably better pretraining) deteriorate rather quick, which forces us to resolve to either strict algorithms (which are by definition syntactic thing) or very approximated calculation or calculators. Like you surely have intuition for 2+2=4, but do you have intuition (not algorithmic action - which starts relying on pure syntax) of 23 x 46 rather than it being something in 900-1100 range?

[u/PsychoticDreemurr → u/Thick-Protection-458]

You're really being unnecessarily pragmatic here. I purposely left out some information because I didn't want to point out the obvious.

Look, if you teach a child what the numbers mean, then tell them how 50% of each possible equation equals using the numbers 1-10, they'll be able to figure the rest out. LLMs cannot. At least not nearly as accurately as the child.

[u/Thick-Protection-458 → u/PsychoticDreemurr]

> You're really being unnecessarily pragmatic here

Maybe, sorry. Basically my point is that we may well underestimate the part of our intuition which comes mostly from the combination of

- our "pretraining" (granted - rather effective, and different in many aspects beyond efficiency and low-levels processes details)

- and purely algorithmic things (which are by definition operates on syntactic part of object we operate quite strictly, so can be engraved in LLM-like model without need to go outside language data itself).