You can think of the brain as a set of modules, but sensors and the ability to adhere to a predefined grammar aren’t what define AGI if you ask me. We’re missing the most important module. AGI requires cognition, the ability to acquire knowledge and understanding. Such an ability would make larger language models completely redundant as it could just learn langue or even come up with one all on its own, like kids in isolation for example.

What I was trying to point out is that “neural networks” don’t actually learn in the way we do, using the world “learn” is a bit misleading, because it implies cognition. A neural network in the computer science sense is just a bunch of random operations in sequence. In goes a number, out goes a number. We then collect a bunch of input output pairs, the dataset, and semi randomly adjust these operations until they happen to somewhat match this collection. The reasoning is done by the humans assembling the input output pairs. That step is implicitly skipped for the AI. It doesn’t know why they belong together and it isn’t allowed to reason about why, because the second it spits out something else, that is an error and this whole process breaks. That’s why LLMs hallucinate with perfect confidence and why they’ll never gain cognition, because the second you remove the human assembling the dataset, you’re quite literally left with nothing but semi random numbers, and that’s why they degrade so fast when learning from themselves.

This technology is very impressive and quite useful, and demonstrates how powerful of a tool language alone is, but it doesn’t get us any closer to AGI.