Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I think AGI is a long way off. LLMs are a dead-end, IMO. They are easy to improve with the tech we have today and they can be very useful, so there’s a ton of hype around them. They’re also easy to build tools around, so everyone in tech is trying to get their piece of AI now.
However, LLMs are chat interfaces to searching a large dataset, and that’s about it. Even the image generators are doing this, the dataset just happens to be visual. All of the results you get from a prompt are just queries into that data, even when you get a result that makes it seem intelligent. The model is finding a best-fit response based on billions of parameters, like a hyperdimensional regression analysis. In other words, it’s pattern-matching.
A lot of people will say that’s intelligence, but it’s different; the LLM isn’t capable of understanding anything new, it can only generate a response from something in its training set. More parameters, better training, and larger context windows just refine the search results, they don’t make the LLM smarter.
AGI needs something new, we aren’t going to get there with any of the approaches used today. RemindMe! 5 years to see if this aged like wine or milk.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yeah LLMs might very well be a dead-end when it comes to AGI but just like chatGPT seemingly came out of nowhere and took the world by surprise, this might just aswell be the case with an actual AGI aswell. My comment doesn’t really make any claims about the timescale of it but rather just tires to point out the inevitability of it.