Thank you for the clarification!
Of course, it is much more likely to be predictable a couple of days in advance than a year in advance, but even the former may conceivably be quite challenging depending on situational awareness of near-human-level models in training.
Do I understand correctly that you think that we are likely to only recognize AGI after it has been built? If so, how would we recognize AGI as you define it?
Do you also think that AGI will result in a fast take-off?
What would you expect the world to look like if AGI < 2030? Or put another way, what evidence would convince you that AGI < 2030?
What do you make of feral children like Genie? While there are not many counterfactuals to cultural learning—probably mostly because depriving children of cultural learning is considered highly immoral—feral children do provide strong evidence that humans that are deprived of cultural learning do not come close to being functional adults. Additionally, it seems obvious that people who do not receive certain training, e.g., those who do not learn math or who do not learn carpentry, generally have low capability in that domain.
the genetic changes come first, then the cultural changes come after
You mean to say that the human body was virtually “finished evolving” 200,000 years ago, thereby laying the groundwork for cultural optimization which took over form that point? Henrich’s thesis of gene-culture coevolution contrasts with this view and I find it to be much more likely to be true. For example, the former thesis posits that humans lost a massive amount of muscle strength (relative to, say, chimpanzees) over many generations and only once that process had been virtually “completed”, started to compensate by throwing rocks or making spears when hunting other animals, requiring much less muscle strength than direct engagement. This begs the question, how did our ancestors survive in the time when muscle strength had already significantly decreased, but tool usage did not exist yet? Henrich’s thesis answers this by saying that such a time did not exist; throwing rocks came first, which provided the evolutionary incentive for our ancestors to expend less energy on growing muscles (since throwing rocks suffices for survival and requires less muscle strength). The subsequent invention of spears provided further incentive for muscles to grow even weaker.
There are many more examples to make that are like the one above. Perhaps the most important one is that as the amount of culture grows (also including things like rudimentary language and music), a larger brain has an advantage because it can learn more and more quickly (as also evidenced by the LLM scaling laws). Without culture, this evolutionary incentive for larger brains is much weaker. The incentive for larger brains leads to a number of other peculiarities specific to humans, such as premature birth, painful birth and fontanelles.
How do LLMs and the scaling laws make you update in this way? They make me update in the opposite direction. For example, I also believe that the human body is optimized for tool use and scaling, precisely because of the gene-culture coevolution that Henrich describes. Without culture, this optimization would not have occurred. Our bodies are cultural artifacts.
Cultural learning is an integral part of the scaling laws; the scaling laws show that indefinitely scaling the number of parameters in a model doesn't quite work; the training data also has to scale, with the implication that that data is some kind of cultural artifact, where the quality of that artifact determines the capabilities of the resulting model. LLMs work because of the accumulated culture that goes into them. This is no less true for “thinking” models like o1 and o3, because the way they think is very heavily influenced by the training data. The fact that thinking models do so well is because thinking becomes possible at all, not because thinking is something inherently beyond the training data. These models can think because of the culture they absorbed, which includes a lot of examples of thinking. Moreover, the degree to which Reinforcement Learning determines the capabilities of thinking models is small compared to Supervised Learning, because, firstly, less compute is spent on RL than on SL, and, secondly, RL is much less sample-efficient than SL.
Current LLMs can only do sequential reasoning of any kind by adjusting their activations, not their weights, and this is probably not enough to derive and internalize new concepts à la C.
For me this is the key bit which makes me update towards your thesis.
This is indeed an interesting sociological breakdown of the “movement”, for lack of a better word.
I think the injection of the author’s beliefs about whether or not short timelines are correct distracting from the central point. For example, the author states the following.
there is no good argument for when [AGI] might be built.
This is a bad argument against worrying about short timelines, bordering on intellectual dishonesty. Building anti-asteroid defenses is a good idea even if you don’t know that one is going to hit us within the next year.
The argument that it’s better to have AGI appear sooner rather than later because institutions are slowly breaking down is an interesting one. It’s also nakedly accelerationist, which is strangely inconsistent with the argument that AGI is not coming soon, and in my opinion very naïve.
Besides that, I think it’s generally a good take on the state of the movement, i.e., like pretty much any social movement it has a serious problem with coherence and collateral damage and it’s not clear whether there’s any positive effect.
Ah, I see now. Thank you! I remember reading this discussion before and agree with your viewpoint that he is still directionally correct.
he apparently faked some of his evidence
Would be happy to hear more about this. Got any links? A quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything.
You talk about personhood in a moral and technical sense, which is important, but I think it’s important to also take into account the legal and economic senses of personhood. Let me try to explain.
I work for a company where there’s a lot of white-collar busywork going on. I’ve come to realize that the value of this busywork is not so much the work itself (indeed a lot of it is done by fresh graduates and interns with little to no experience), but the fact that the company can bear responsibility for the work due to its somehow good reputation (something something respectability cascades), i.e., “Nobody ever got fired for hiring them”. There is not a lot of incentive to automate any of this work, even though I can personally attest that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. (A respected senior colleague of mine plainly stated to me, privately, that most of it is bullshit jobs.)
By my estimation, “bearing responsibility” in the legal and economic sense means that an entity can be punished, where being punished means that something happens which disincentivizes it and other entities from doing the same. (For what it’s worth, I think much of our moral and ethical intuitions about personhood can be derived from this definition.) AI cannot function as a person of any legal or economic consequence (and by extension, moral or ethical consequence) if it cannot be punished or learn in that way. I assume it will be able to eventually, but until then most of these bullshit jobs will stay virtually untouchable because someone needs to bear responsibility. How does one punish an API? Currently, we practically only punish the person serving the API or the person using it.
There are two ways I see to overcome this. One way is that AI eventually can act as a drop-in replacement for human agents in the sense that they can bear responsibility and be punished as described above. With the current systems this is clearly not (yet) the case.
The other way is that the combination of cost, speed and quality becomes too good to ignore, i.e., that we get to a point where we can say “Nobody ever got fired for using AI” (on a task-by-task basis). This depends on the trade-offs that we’re willing to make between the different aspects of using AI for a given task, such as cost, speed, quality, reliability and interpretability. This is already driving use of AI for some tasks where the trade-off is good enough, while for others it’s not nearly good enough or still too risky to try.
That's alright. Would you be able to articulate what you associate with AGI in general? For example, do you associate AGI with certain intellectual or physical capabilities, or do you associate it more with something like moral agency, personhood or consciousness?