"Artificial General Intelligence" or AGI if you’re on acronym terms, is the AI holy grail. The dream: build a true thinking machine that can learn, interpret and reason like a human, but better. LLM’s have brought us closer than ever before to that reality, with these models seemingly capable of understanding language, solving complex problems, writing code, and even showing signs of personalities. Much of what Asimov envisioned in his “Robots” series, with his “three laws safe” robots and their “positronic brains” feel closer than ever to being a reality.
But here’s the comedown: much of it is smoke and mirrors. Really sophisticated smoke. Really shiny mirrors. LLMs don’t think, they predict. Impressive party tricks built on prediction, not conscious comprehension, a kind of super advanced autocomplete, built on vast oceans of data. There isn’t a conscious ...
"Artificial General Intelligence" or AGI if you’re on acronym terms, is the AI holy grail. The dream: build a true thinking machine that can learn, interpret and reason like a human, but better. LLM’s have brought us closer than ever before to that reality, with these models seemingly capable of understanding language, solving complex problems, writing code, and even showing signs of personalities. Much of what Asimov envisioned in his “Robots” series, with his “three laws safe” robots and their “positronic brains” feel closer than ever to being a reality.
But here’s the comedown: much of it is smoke and mirrors. Really sophisticated smoke. Really shiny mirrors. LLMs don’t think, they predict. Impressive party tricks built on prediction, not conscious comprehension, a kind of super advanced autocomplete, built on vast oceans of data. There isn’t a conscious mind inside an LLM, and the bigger the models get, the fancier the autocomplete becomes, but still, AGI remains elusively out of reach. Don’t just take my word for it, listen to folks like François Chollet, who have been thinking and speaking about the problems of LLM’s when it comes to AGI. Link to a recent talk below.
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There’s no ghost in the shell, just math. Math that can't yet abstract reason like a person, But that's going to be just fine. How many tasks will really require abstract reasoning of the kind LLM’s struggle with? Less than you might expect I'd wager, and LLM’s won't be doing the heavy lifting all on their own.
At the core of the Humanoid Robot will be (and already is) a powerful multi-modal AI agent architecture. Complex sounding I know,...
