Hello, everyone. I am glad to say that the majority of my move is behind, as we are down to a single-digit number of boxes left to unpack. There might be a future blog post about John’s unhealthy fixation with cardboard boxes or the wonderful feeling of removing a good percentage of your household items through yard sales, donations, and dump runs. As a matter of principle, I may want to do this every five to ten years.
Many people ask me what I think about AI, and more specifically, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). I have two replies. The first is that I wrote a story about how that will end. You can read it on this very blog. The second thing is that I do not think LLMs will get us there.
I think a second generation (Third generation? Fourth generation?) of AI systems will soon be coming and will have a better symbolic understanding of the data. The investment frenzy for those systems and the startup companies that create them has not yet begun.
The symbolic understanding of the data is important. The only reason current LLM systems can answer the question, “What do a fire engine and a book have in common?” is because someone typed it into the internet already. We need an AI system that spontaneously, without prompting, creates jokes with that level of cleverness. The spontaneous creation of new ideas, and eventually new science and mathematics, is the part that will tip it over into AGI territory.
Until then, everything we read from current AI systems is just a highly plausible set of words calculated from a subset of gobbledygook that humans have saved onto the Internet. Paragraphs of text read like they were written in a hurry by a tenth grader who has an essay due in nine hours, not even considering the high level of hallucinations that sometimes find their way into the output.
The AGI system that will eventually exist will combine multiple generations of AI systems and add a top-level layer of autonomy, asking, “Is this what I really think, or at least, what I really want to say?”
When two different instances of the AGI software answer Spock’s Mom’s question (go ahead and Google it if you are an unlearned heathen) in a way that makes justice systems of the world contemplate making it illegal to hit the off switch, AGI will have arrived.
See you next week.
