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> [..] we're not at AGI with this baseline tech

DAG architectures fundamentally cannot be AGI and you cannot even use them as a building block for a hypothetical AGI if they're immutable at runtime.

Any time I hear the goal being "AGI" in the context of these LLMs, I feel like listening to a bunch of 18th-century aristocrats trying to get to the moon by growing trees.

Try to create useful approximations using what you have or look for new approaches, but don't waste time on the impossible. There's no iterative improvements here that will get you to AGI.

kristjansson
> "So... what does the thinking?"

> "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

> "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

munksbeer
It doesn't feel particularly interesting to keep dismissing "these LLMs" as incapable of reaching AGI.

It feels more interesting to note that this time, it is different. I've been watching the field since the 90s when I first dabbled in crude neural nets. I am informed there was hype before, but in my time I've never seen progress like we've made in the last five years. If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing. And it keeps improving incrementally, and I do not think that is going to stop. The state of AI today is the worst it will ever be (trivially obvious but still capable of shocking me).

What I'm trying to say is that the shocking success of LLMs has become a powerful engine of progress, creating a positive feedback loop that is dramatically increasing investment, attracting top talent, and sharpening the focus of research into the next frontiers of artificial intelligence.

dTal
>If you showed it to people from the 90s, it would be mind blowing

90's? It's mind blowing to me now.

My daily driver laptop is (internally) a Thinkpad T480, a very middle of the road business class laptop from 2018.

It now talks to me. Usually knowledgeably, in a variety of common languages, using software I can download and run for free. It understands human relationships and motivations. It can offer reasonably advice and write simple programs from a description. It notices my tone and tries to adapt its manner.

All of this was inconceivable when I bought the laptop - I would have called it very unrealistic sci-fi. I am trying not to forget that.

AllegedAlec
Thank you. It's maddening how people keep making this fundamental mistake.
mgraczyk
This is meant to be some kind of Chinese room argument? Surely a 1e18 context window model running at 1e6 tokens per second could be AGI.
chmod775 OP
Personally I'm hoping for advancements that will eventually allow us to build vehicles capable of reaching the moon, but do keep me posted on those tree growing endeavors.
mgraczyk
Tree growing?

And I don't follow, we've had vehicles capable of reaching the moon for over 55 years

anonymoushn
It's about the immutability of the network at runtime. But I really don't think this is a big deal. General-purpose computers are immutable after they are manufactured, but can exhibit a variety of useful behaviors when supplied with different data. Human intelligence also doesn't rely on designing and manufacturing revised layouts for the nervous system (within a single human's lifetime, for use by that single human) to adapt to different settings. Is the level of mutability used by humans substantially more expressive than the limits of in-context learning? what about the limits of more unusual in-context learning techniques that are register-like, or that perform steps of gradient descent during inference? I don't know of a good argument that all of these techniques used in ML are fundamentally not expressive enough.
mgraczyk
LLMs, considered as a function of input and output, are not immutable at runtime. They create tokens that change the function when it is called again. That breaks most theoretical arguments
2 More Comments →
VonGallifrey
Excuse me for the bad joke, but it seems like your context window was too small.

The Tree growing comment was a reference to another comment earlier in the comment chain.

mgraczyk
It's not a tree though
lukan
"Surely a 1e18 context window model running at 1e6 tokens per second could be AGI."

And why?

mgraczyk
Because that's quite a bit more information processing than any human brain
lukan
I don't think it is quantity that matters. Otherwise supercomputers are smart by definition.
mgraczyk
Well no, that's not what anyone is saying.

The claim was that it isn't possible in principle for "DAGs" or "immutable architectures" to be intelligent. That statement is confusing some theoretical results that aren't applicable to how LLMs work (output context is mutation).

I'm not claiming that compute makes the m intelligent. I'm pointing out that it is certainly possible, and at that level of compute it should be plausible. Feel free to share any theoretical results you think demonstrate the impossibility of "DAG" intelligence and are applicable

lukan
I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying it might be possible, but far from plausible with the current approach of LLMs in my experience with them.
rar00
This argument works better for state space models. A transformer would still steps context one token at a time, not maintain an internal 1e18 state.
mgraczyk
That doesn't matter, are you familiar with any theoretical results in which the computation is somehow limited in ways that practically matter when the context length is very long? I am not

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