When most people use terms like next token prediction they’re often trying to use it with an implication that it’s a simple thing and nothing big or important could grow out of it.
I’m saying that as much as we dress it up and pretend it’s a silver bullet that can cure all ills, it isn’t. They can be very useful and powerful in specific instances, but this will not achieve AGI.
Over the last several years we’ve insisted that AI cannot possibly share the most important aspects of the human mind, but one by one everything we pointed to in order to differentiate ourselves was shown by research to have a strikingly similar allegory in modern AI.
Citation needed. AI is trained to pretend to be human and it’s real good at that. It’s why we say it’s thinking when it fundamentally is not. It’s anthropomorphization writ large. It’s just very repetitive math. Maybe brains are too, but it hasn’t reached our level. And it’s wrong all the time, which is a bit of a problem.
You genuinely believe that the researchers under tight NDA in the frontier labs agree with you on AGI not being anywhere near reach? Or do you think you have a deeper understanding of the topic?
My degree and I do think that while I’m not a doctor (a mere masters), I know enough to look at what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, what they’re promising, what they aren’t actually delivering, what damage AI* is doing, and what it is under the hood to know that what’s been promised cannot happen with things as they are and may work to kill us all along the way (ecologically speaking).
plenty of people to lord over who are grateful for the wonderful people who stepped in and helped save them
Pure Hollywood. If you think anyone could engineer something with that level of precision AND manage to somehow dominate the world after such wildly fictitious devastation, I have AGI to sell you.
It isn’t complicated. It’s the oldest thing in the world. Grifters found a shiny and they want to get as much money as they can get and run before the bill shows up.
How many degrees do you want me to have? That’s one hell of a standard.
We train models to do specific things. We trained AI to regurgitate human like speech patterns. We made it big enough that it does so fairly well. The tech bros said “good enough” and took that technology and tried to hide behind universal function approximation theorem to say it can do anything.
But we didn’t teach it to learn. To remember. To cross reference or doubt. Because it can’t do any of those things. It’s a math problem that solves “how can I seem human”. We threw on guard rails against some hallucinations (nods to RAG models), but it’s still not conscious. If you think it is, I encourage you to interact with people face to face and compare.
You’ve mentioned a paper, now cite it. I fail to see how global workspace theory applies. Granted I’m not an expert, but a model of how the brain works doesn’t mean a bunch of linear algebra spontaneously achieved similar even if we accept it as valid.
I’m aware of J space. It’s not compelling. Hell, it’s published by “our scary AI escaped containment” advertising scheme Anthropic. What they found is… what models do. It’s useful for examining pieces of the architecture, but it’s not proving anything more than what we already knew was happening.
Under the hood is a bunch of linear algebra. What we don’t know is what any given neuron or array thereof is firing on without a shit ton of research. I’ll leave it to the researchers, preferably ones without an obvious bias like being paid by Anthropic, to call it when they achieve anything truly useful or interesting. Because right now they’re just destroying natural resources (water because capitalists are to sociopathic and short sighted to pay more to not destroy the planet), damaging people as individuals (intensifying burnout, exacerbating mental health issues, deskilling), damaging society (propagation of disinformation/hallucinations and whatever else the tech bros are up to), built on theft for a product that’s ok at best, far from necessary and a bubble that’s going to fuck us all.
Even if it was as good as you say, I can’t say that it’s worth it.
But we can agree that the oligarchs are evil cunts. We’ve always got that in common.
Respond how you will, I might read it, but I’m out for my own well being. Peace.