There’s a spirited discussion on the research paper A Definition of AGI on Hacker News. This comment by fnordpiglet caught my attention.
Try this exercise. Do not think and let your mind clear. Ideas will surface. By what process did they surface? Or clear your mind entirely then try to perform some complex task. You will be able to. How did you do this without thought? We’ve all had sudden insights without deliberation or thought. Where did these come from? By what process did you arrive at them? Most of the things we do or think are not deliberative and definitely not structured with language. This process is unobservable and not measurable, and the only way we have to do so is through imperfect verbalizations that hint out some vague outline of a subconscious mind. But without being able to train a model on that subconscious process, one that can’t be expressed in language with any meaningful sufficiency, how will language models demonstrate it? Their very nature of autoregressive inference prohibits such a process from emerging at any scale. We might very well be able to fake it to an extent that it fools us, but awareness isn’t there – and I’d assert that awareness is all you need.
naveegator.in 