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I become more and more skeptical that the current LLM approach to AI is going to get us close to AGI, let alone ASI, whatever that means. The models are just clearly not that smart, and if you don’t realize this it’s because (1) you are not that smart or (2) you’re using it in the domain that the architecture happens to be good at, which is language (which includes chatting but also programming and some formal math.)
People are super language-oriented and so are overly impressed/distracted when something can do human language so well. We’re just dazzled by language use, and that massively biases our perception.
The technical field most dazzled by LLMs is programming, which is also basically just a translation job. Society has been under the misapprehension that being a computer translator is a super hard and intellectual job, partly because it has paid so well in the past couple of decades. This is just because there aren’t any people who are natively bilingual in English and computer, in the same way there are lots of people who natively bilingual in English and Spanish. Like an English teacher in China, people were able to arbitrage this lack of supply, and people mistook the existence of this arbitrage as evidence that the field is super difficult.
If you are in a technical field outside of this it is very obvious, and has been for a long time, that the current architecture is bad and progress stalled. A bunch of programmers will lose their status, like so many loser English teachers in China, but beyond that the current path isn’t going to change much.
Programming is an extremely g-loaded activity. Technical interviews at silicon valley tech companies are not far from straight up IQ tests. When I taught programming, I encountered a lot of students who were very diligent and motivated but hit a brick wall because they just didn't have the cognitive equipment to think at the level of abstraction required to reason about non-trivial programs. I think that, prior to the age of LLMs, you would be hard pressed to find a working programmer with a 100 IQ. I doubt the same can be said of transistors.
For some subset of g, where g is pure logic. For other subsets of g, especially those related to mechanical reasoning and 2nd order effects, I have a large pile of former FAANG resumes that have failed the conversion to nuts, bolts, and actual atoms engineering that argues otherwise. Not to say they arent intelligent, but a "pure generalist" is not a hard requirement.
I think this is one of those "theory vs practice" things. In theory, programming is an extremely intellectually straining endevour, and the academic pipline in the West is set up with some pretty fine filters. In practice though with the way big companies PM the development, deployment, and maintenence of most software today you dont actually need an above-average IQ to excel (this is a feature, not a bug). I agree with badger that the market rate for programming salaries has probably overstated the relative intellectual demand compared to other professions of similar educational requirements.
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I don't think this necessarily conflicts with badger's claim; it may be that Computerese is a sufficiently obtuse language that the default language centers of the human brain can't cope with it the way they can with Spanish or Chinese, requiring considerable cognitive processing power to learn it anyway, but that this is ultimately just a quirk of what language architectures our brains are optimized for. Swimming isn't inherently a harder problem than walking, natural-selection-wise - but it's very difficult if you're an elephant.
Elephants are arguably better swimmers than humans -- I think they are positively buoyant even?
You might be thinking of hippos, which sink.
Actually, I was thinking of underwater swimming, the kind that fish evolved to do in the same way that humans evolve to speak natural language, and which elephants would struggle to match. But fair cop on the fact-check regardless, my fault for putting pithiness over precision.
I think they could probably be unusually good at that (as mammals!) too, if they weren't so damn floaty -- they have a built-in snorkel!
Ballasted elephant experimentation, anyone?
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