Breaking news: AGI is not imminent!
Influencers have gone wild lately claiming that AGI is imminent. One even alleged last night that “Sam [has] just called an emergency meeting.. . we’re way ahead of schedule. weeks not years.”
Sam Altman himself hinted we were close, just two weeks ago, writing “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it”, which to be honest gave me Elizabeth Holmes vibes.
Today he walked it back.
Gary Marcus stands by his prediction that we will not see AGI in 2025, and regrets that Elon Musk didn’t take his million dollar bet.
Every transformer based model has been caught out parroting its dataset. The justification for this behavior is "this is also how people learn", but you can teach a child how to roll a ball without giving them three hundred trillion examples of it. That's what a general problem solving intelligence does. It problem solves.
These transformers don't. They parrot, bootstrapping themselves off an immense amount of information taken from 8 billion actual problem solvers, sufficient enough to look slightly smarter than people who don't know what they are.
If you consider (from a very high level perspective) the mechanisms through which OpenAI and similar have an opportunity to improve their LLMs, they really have three areas of improvement they can pursue:
1. Improving conceptual recognition through context, a largely mathematical problem
2. Improvement of contextual length, which is both a capacity problem and a mathematical problem
3. Improvement of contextual summarising, which is a mathematical problem
You're well into death by dimensionality in problem 3. Problem 1 is still largely theoretical and we don't even really have a conceptual understanding of it in people, let alone machines. Problem 2 is partly reliant on problem 3, but also on sheer numerical brute force. That will get them some of the way, but we're talking getting to warp drive by dinosaur bone fuel here.
None of these problems are solvable by the LLM themselves. Worse, even assuming you were able to teach an agent something (you can't, you can only alter the results from its querying by embedding additional context), it has no mechanism of feeding that information back as anything other than "this query solved a problem".
There is no intuition. No conceptual wrangling. No unsupervised learning. No feedback method. Worse, they don't perform on the fly conceptualisation like we do. They have it hard coded, embedded into them because of the language they speak.
Not only are we not going to see AGI this year, but without a substantial revolution in how these systems conceptualise (which shows no signs of coming), it won't arrive.
Ever.
I advise caution against buying into the hype created by OpenAI. They have repeatedly made claims that have later been discredited by independent research.
There are also significant issues with AI benchmarks, particularly given that the training data is neither shared nor independently verifiable, leaving them open to manipulation.
This appears to be yet another case of what resembles p-hacking – manipulating data to produce results that align with one’s interests.
Consider this excerpt from a tweet:
“Remember o3’s 25% performance on the FrontierMath benchmark?
It turns out OpenAI funded FrontierMath and had access to a substantial portion of the dataset.
The mathematicians who created the problems and solutions for the benchmark were not informed that OpenAI was behind the funding or had access to the data.
This raises critical concerns:
• It is unclear whether OpenAI trained o3 on the benchmark, making the reported results questionable.
• Mathematicians, some of whom are sceptical of OpenAI and would not wish to aid general AI advancements due to concerns about existential risks, were misled. Many were unaware that a major AI company funded the effort.
From Epoch AI:
‘Our contract specifically prevented us from disclosing information about the funding source and the fact that OpenAI has data access to much but not all of the dataset.’
https://x.com/mihonarium/status/1880944026603376865?s=46&t=oOBUJrzyp7su26EMi3D4XQ