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I'm also convinced that LLM's aren't the path to AGI. They were grossly overrated from the very beginning. If you want real AI, you have to dump the snake oil. It's already empirically well adduced (1, 2) that LLM's can't get you there.
There's a 'lot' of things you need before you've actually got an intelligent machine that can think. It begins with constructing mental models. From there, you navigate those models in the imagination or perceptual space laid out to work out answers to questions and work out alternatives. Once you build those spaces (and in this case I mean building creative and entirely novel ones) and navigate them to accelerate anticipatory learning. Cats for example actually "learn" how to hunt by doing this. Once you've learned how to model spaces you can them move to modeling "systems;" and that's when you get to the point where it becomes possible to give AGI a theory of 'other' minds. And a "mind" in purely mechanistic and computational terms is simply another causal system; just like "spaces" and "systems" are particular causal systems.
Notice that's exactly what an LLM 'doesn't' do. If you take a look at Waymo's World Model for instance, this is exactly more along the lines for the correct pathway of approach that you need. When you're continuously inventing new models of imaginary environments, you begin to build the skillsets that slowly become applicable to the real world. When it can do that, that's more along the lines of where scaling becomes effective. Nothing like Sam Altman's idea of where it's relevant. When you've got to that stage, AI can then begin to model it's own causal system to think about it's own thinking such that it's capable of asking itself when it's wrong; or how to stack a particular sequence of events to achieve a desired end result.
Incidentally this is the exact pathway natural selection determined for human beings and I'm thoroughly convinced it's the 'only' way to get AGI. This is what human beings fundamentally are on the naturalist paradigm: models and model builders that also navigate and move about in those models. There's zero evidence that I've seen to indicate that the money flowing into AI at the present moment is traveling down that research pathway and make no mistake, eventually the supply of it is going to run out. But make no mistake. A 'lot' of rich people are stupid, so it's doubtful it'll ever go to the real thing. They'll throw it all at the next bullshit snake oil, get their fiscal bailout and blame it on immigrants on something. Presently I'm not left feeling very optimistic about the current state of the industry. It's incredibly destructive to the environment, it dumbs down the human intelligence, and it hasn't even been proven to even work. Why is the “world” so excited?
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