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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Most people will recognize AGI when it can independently enact change on the world, without regard for the desires or values of humans, including its creators. Until then, they'll see whatever brilliant things it enables as merely extensions of the guiding human's agency.

AI built on language models will always reflect us because they’re trained on us in a fundamental way. They are the product of human civilization, their ways of thinking are ours, only faster / better. Where AGI is ‘evil’ it will be evil in a human way.

This.

MY personal benchmark is that I want an AI agent that can renew and refill a drug prescription for me.

This isn't a task that should require an AGI, but its one that is frustrating for me to accomplish, and often involves interacting with a couple websites, then making a phone call to multiple parties, possibly scanning and e-mailing a document or two, and finally confirming that the end result is ready for pickup.

This still seems beyond the current crop.

And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.

That said, I don't think an AGI NEEDS to be able to navigate the world, if its smart enough it can use human intermediaries to achieve most of its goals, potentially including killing the humans.

So, if I'm being blunt and oversimplifying, the current state of AI tech is ABSOLUTELY a tool that can leverage human productivity, but needs more agentic behavior and the ability to manipulate atoms and not just bits, which I think most benchmarks don't actually account for.

And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.

This came out just this week: https://microsoft.github.io/Magma/

Magma is the first foundation model that is capable of interpreting and grounding multimodal inputs within its environment. Given a described goal, Magma is able to formulate plans and execute actions to achieve it. By effectively transferring knowledge from freely available visual and language data, Magma bridges verbal, spatial and temporal intelligence to navigate complex tasks and settings.

Things are moving very quickly now.

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