[garretraziel]

When my friends talked about how AGI is just creating huge enough neural network & feeding it enough data, I have always compared it to: imagine locking a mouse in a library with all the knowledge in the world & expecting it to come out super intelligent.

[surfingdino]

The mouse would go mad, because libraries preserve more than just knowledge, they preserve the evolution of it. That evolution is ongoing as we discover more about ourselves and the world we live in, refine our knowledge, disprove old assumptions and theories and, on occasion, admit that we were wrong to dismiss them. Also, over time, we place different levels of importance to knowledge from the past. For example, an old alchemy manual from the middle ages used to record recipes for a cure for some nasty disease was important because it helped whoever had access to it quickly prepare some ointment that sometimes worked, but today we know that most of those recipes were random, non-scientific attempts at coming up with a solution to a medical problem and we have proven that those medicines do not work. Therefore, the importance of the old alchemist's recipe book as a source of scientific truth has gone to zero, but the historic importance of it has grown a lot, because it helps us understand how our knowledge of chemistry and its applications in health care has evolved. LLMs treat all text as equal unless it will be given hints. But those hints are provided by humans, so there is an inherent bias and the best we can hope for is that those hints are correct at the time of training. We are not pursuing AGI, we are pursuing the goal of automating the process of creation of answers that look like they are the right answers to the given question, but without much attention to factual, logical, or contextual correctness.

[immibis]

No. The mouse would just be a mouse. It wouldn't learn anything, because it's a mouse. It might chew on some of the books. Meanwhile, transformers do learn things, so there is obviously more to it than just the quantity of data.

(Why spend a mouse? Just sit a strawberry in a library, and if the hypothesis holds that the quantity of data is the only thing that matters holds, you'll have a super intelligent strawberry)

[ben_w]

GPT-3 is about the same complexity as a mouse brain; it did better than I expected…

… but it's still a brain the size of a mouse's.

[dgb23]

Mice are fare more impressive though.

[spyhi]

To be fair, it’s the horsepower of a mouse, but all devoted to a single task, so not 100% comparable to the capabilities of a mouse, and language is too distributed to make a good comparison of what milestone is human-like. But it’s indeed surprising how much that little bit of horsepower can do.