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I don't think AGI is right around the corner

(www.dwarkesh.com)
337 points mooreds | 2 comments | 06 Jul 25 20:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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raspasov ◴[06 Jul 25 23:54 UTC] No.44485275[source]▶
Anyone who claims that a poorly definined concept, AGI, is right around the corner is most likely:

- trying to sell something

- high on their own stories

- high on exogenous compounds

- all of the above

LLMs are good at language. They are OK summarizers of text by design but not good at logic. Very poor at spatial reasoning and as a result poor at connecting concepts together.

Just ask any of the crown jewel LLM models "What's the biggest unsolved problem in the [insert any] field".

The usual result is a pop-science-level article but with ton of subtle yet critical mistakes! Even worse, the answer sounds profound on the surface. In reality, it's just crap.

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richardw ◴[07 Jul 25 00:30 UTC] No.44485483[source]▶
They’re great at working with the lens on our reality that is our text output. They are not truth seekers, which is necessarily fundamental to every life form from worms to whales. If we get things wrong, we die. If they get them wrong, they earn 1000 generated tokens.
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jhanschoo ◴[07 Jul 25 02:06 UTC] No.44486058[source]▶
Why do you say that LLMs are not truth seekers? If I express an informational query not very well, the LLM will infer what I mean by it and address the possible well-posed information queries that I may have intended that I did not express well.

Can that not be considered truth-seeking, with the agent-environment boundary being the prompt box?

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sleepybrett ◴[07 Jul 25 02:41 UTC] No.44486263[source]▶
They keep giving me incorrect answers to verifiable questions. They clearly don't 'seek' anything.
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1. anonzzzies ◴[07 Jul 25 04:59 UTC] No.44486900[source]▶
Most on HN are tech people and it is tiring to see they did not just spend a sunday morning doing a Karpathy llm implementation or so. Somehow, like believing in a deity, even smart folk seem to think 'there is more'. Stop. Go to youtube or whatever and watch a video of practically implementing a gpt like thing, and code along. It takes very little time and your hallucinations about agi with these models shall be exorcized.
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2. jhanschoo ◴[07 Jul 25 05:33 UTC] No.44487079[source]▶
I don't know if you are indirectly referring to me, but I have done such an implementation, and those particular LLMs are very limited. Two things come to mind.

1. It is still correct that the limited "truth-seeking" that I expressed holds. With respect to the limited world model possessed by the limited training and limited dataset, such a model "seeks to understand" the approximate concept that I am imperfectly expressing that it has data for, and then generate responses based in that.

2. SotA models have access to external data, be it web search or RAG+vector database, etc.. They also have access to the Chain of Thought method. They are trained on datasets that enable them to exploit these tools, and will exploit these tools. The zero-to-hero sequence does not lead you to build such an LLM, and the one that you build has a very limited computational graph. So with respect to more... traditional notions of "truth seeking", these LLMs fundamentally lack the equipment to do that that SotA models have.