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Zeno's AGI.
For a long time, people considered the Turing Test the gold standard for AI. Later, better benchmarks were developed, but for most laypeople with a passing familiarity with AI, the Turing Test meant something. And so it was a surprise that when LLMs flew past the Turing Test in 2022 or 2023, there weren't trumpets and parades. It just sort of happened, and people moved on.
I wonder if the same will happen with AGI. To quote hype-man Sam Altman:
Okay, actually he said that about Chat GPT 4.5, but you get the point. The last 6 months have seen monumental improvements in LLMs, with DeepSeek making them much more efficient and xAI proving that the scaling hypothesis still has room to run.
Given time, AI has been reliably able to beat any benchmarks that we throw at it (remember the Winograd schema?). I think if, 10 years ago, if someone said that AI could solve PHD level math problems, we'd say AGI had already arrived. But it hasn't. So what ungameable benchmarks remain?
AGI should lead to massive increases in GDP. We haven't seen productivity even budge upwards despite dumping trillions into AI. Will this change? When?
AI discoveries with minimal human intervention. If a genius-level human had the breadth of knowledge that LLMs do, they would no doubt make all sorts of novel connections. To date, no AI has done so.
What stands in the way?
It seems like context windows might be the answer. For example, what if we wanted to make novel discoveries by prompting an AI. We might prompt a chain-of-reasoning AI to try to draw connections between disparate fields and then stop when it finds something novel. But with current technology, it would fill up the context window almost immediately and then start to go off the rails.
We stand at a moment in history where AI advances at a remarkable pace and yet is only marginally useful, basically just a better Google/Stack Overflow. It is as smart as a genius-level human, far more knowledgable, and yet also remarkably stupid in unpredictable ways.
Are we just one more advance away from AGI? It's starting to feel like it. But I also wouldn't be surprised if life in 2030 is much the same as it is in 2025.
I’ve never understood how the Turing test measured anything useful. The test doesn’t even require that the AI agent understand anything about its world or even the questions being asked of it. It just has to do well enough to convince a human that it can do so. That’s the entire point of the Chinese room rejoinder— an agent might well be clever enough to fool a person into thinking it understands just by giving reasonable no answers to questions posed.
The real test, to me, is more of a practical thing — can I drop the AI in a novel situation and expect it to figure out how to solve the problems. Can I take a bot trained entirely on being an English chatbot and expect it to learn Japanese just by interacting with Japanese users? Can I take a chatbot like that and expect it to learn to solve physics equations? That seems a much better test because intelligent agents are capable of learning new things.
I am flabbergasted by people, including the person who came up with the Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle, not seeing what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion:
The room speaks Chinese.
(Is that a problem? No, not at all. I just didn't think you'd be Chinese)
No individual component of the room speaks Chinese, including the human, but that is no impediment. No single neuron in your brain speaks English, but we have zero qualms about saying the entire network, i.e your brain, does.
Searle literally addressed this objection in his very first paper on the Chinese Room.
Seems nonsensical to me. I fail to see how this person could have that inside their brain and fail to speak Chinese. How is that even physically possible?
So, take throwing a ball. The brain’s doing a ton of heavy lifting, solving inverse kinematics, adjusting muscle tension, factoring in distance and wind and all in real time, below the level of conscious awareness. You don’t explicitly think, “Okay, flex the biceps at 23.4 degrees, then release at t=0.72 seconds.” You just do it. The calculations happen in the background, and you’d be hard-pressed to explain the exact math or physics step-by-step. Yet, if someone said, “You can’t throw a ball because you don’t consciously understand the equations,” you’d rightly call that nonsense. You can throw the ball - your ability proves it, even if the “how” is opaque to your conscious mind.
If Searle were to attempt to rebutt this by saying, nah, you're just doing computations in your head without actually "knowing" how to throw a ball, then I'd call him a dense motherfucker and ask if he knows how the human brain works.
Well, he would be able to converse in chinese, and to converse in english, but not able to translate between them. That seems very possible; theres propably some brain disorder where you do that.
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The answer is that he doesn't understand Chinese, he plus the room understand Chinese.
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If someone internalizes the system in his head, ignoring practicality (which makes it hard to properly imagine the situation), then he's acting as a dumb CPU executing a Chinese program. The answer is still "the man doesn't know Chinese, the system does". The answer feels strange because "the man" is in the man's head and "the system" is also in the man's head, but that doesn't make them the same thing or mean that they both have the same knowledge.
Of course, in Searle's time, "come on, he's running a virtual machine" isn't something you could really say because people weren't familiar with the concept.
Virtual machines were a thing since 1965, and Searle wrote his nonsense about intentionality in 1983, and the Chinese Room in 1980.
If someone has the gall to claim to disprove the possibility of artificial intelligence, as he set out to do, it would help to have some understanding of computer science. But alas.
I agree with you but Searle and his defenders wouldn't. As far as I'm concerned, it matters not a jot if the system is embedded inside a brain, up an arse, or in the room their arse is resting in.
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