I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.
Nah, at best we found a way to make one part of a collection of systems that will, together, do something like thinking. Thinking isn’t part of what this current approach does.
What’s most surprising about modern LLMs is that it turns out there is so much information statistically encoded in the structure of our writing that we can use only that structural information to build a fancy Plinko machine and not only will the output mimic recognizable grammar rules, but it will also sometimes seem to make actual sense, too—and the system doesn’t need to think or actually “understand” anything for us to, basically, usefully query that information that was always there in our corpus of literature, not in the plain meaning of the words, but in the structure of the writing.
The Emperor has no clothes.
What do you mean by novel? Almost all sentences it is prompted on are brand new and it mostly responds sensibly. Surely there's some generalization going on.
The sort of generalization these things can do seems to mostly be the trivial sort: substitution.
So if you present a novel problem it would need to be extremely simple, not something that you couldn't solve when drunk and half awake. Completely novel, but extremely simple. I think that's testable.
Anyway the novel problems I’m talking about are extremely simple. Basically they’re variations on the “farmer, 3 animals, and a rowboat” problem. People keep finding trivial modifications to the problem that fool the LLMs but wouldn’t fool a child. Then the vendors come along and patch the model to deal with them. This is what I mean by whack-a-mole.
Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment tells us that enough games of whack-a-mole could eventually get us to a pretty good facsimile of reasoning without ever achieving the genuine article.
Like, every time an LLM gets something right we assume they've seen it somewhere in the training data, and every time they fail we presume they haven't. But that may not always be the case, it's just extremely hard to prove it one way or the other unless you search the entire dataset. Ironically the larger the dataset, the more likely the model is generalizing while also making it harder to prove if it's really so.
To give a human example, in a school setting you have teachers tasked with figuring out that exact thing for students. Sometimes people will read the question wrong with full understanding and fail, while other times they won't know anything and make it through with a lucky guess. If LLMs (and their vendors) have learned anything it's that confidently bullshitting gets you very far which makes it even harder to tell in cases where they aren't. Somehow it's also become ubiquitous to tune models to never even say "I don't know" because it boosts benchmark scores slightly.