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LLMs have intelligence, what they don't have is advanced spatial skills and visual comprehension. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is designed to code first and foremost, secondarily as a writer/conversationalist. Game-playing and consoling in Minecraft cathedrals (which Sonnet does quite well) is a tertiary capability that they didn't even aim for but are testing anyway. They didn't try to make it good at this, unsurprisingly it's not that great at it.
I had Sonnet play through a civ 4 game where I implemented its strategy and tactics, it was perfectly capable of reacting to text inputs but didn't really understand the pictures, where units were in relation to eachother. If you give it the inputs in the medium it understands best, text, it's pretty capable. When these AIs struggle with strawberry, that's because their tokenizer can't properly count letters. They never see a single letter.
Have a look at what they do with code in minecraft: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FCnQvdypW_I
It's a long video but you can take a general look at what they build. Can you build a house by coding it in? OK, they're not that great at stairs. But they are directly coding things in. I bet 98% of the planet couldn't do this specific niche skill that humans have no aptitude for, coding in architecture in minecraft. That's not a tool in our arsenal. It doesn't discredit our intelligence because we're bad at things we're not supposed to do in mediums unintuitive to us.
Now consider Alphago. You can't beat it, nobody can. A few people can beat Google's 7 year old AI Starcraft pro, not very many though (and this is the version downgraded to non vastly superhuman speed).
That Sonnet can kind of play Pokemon is proof in my mind that AGI is imminent. It proves that Sonnet's intelligence generalizes out into domains it wasn't remotely designed for, even crippled by the visual input barrier. Combined with the specialized bots, we have both 'extremely broad' and 'extremely capable'. All that remains is marrying the strengths of both approaches together, scaling up, working on visuals and tweaking.
Consider just today another AI agent arrived, it seems pretty capable: https://x.com/LamarDealMaker/status/1898454061277458498
Would you be willing to state here what your predictions are for when you think we're likely to have AGI? It might also be good to have a definition of AGI, or whatever metric that could be used to judge success. For instance, "I predict we'll have AGI by 2028, and it will lead to >5% annual GDP growth or >10% unemployment thereafter"... something like that?
AI-boosters seem to think any piece of evidence points to AGI being imminent. I just can't imagine how someone would look at Claude's performance playing Pokemon and see it as a good sign.
I think by 2027. Executives in Anthropic, OpenAI seem to give that as their date.
Defining AGI is tricky. I think the key element is take-off. AI right now is best at coding. You use code to make AI. Recursive self-improvement is the name of the game, AGI will be when you have bots performing the tasks that AI researchers do now in collating data and training models (not in the partial sense like how synthetic data is used today but in a holistic sense where the main intellectual work would be done by AIs). And AGI will be ephemeral because superintelligence will happen immediately afterwards and things will get very crazy very quickly, the world power structure will change fundamentally. Nobody will be asking 'what does this mean for unemployment' because that will be the least of our concerns. We will know AGI when we see it.
Little things like mapping the relations between objects in space don't disprove intelligence. If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning. The intelligence is there, that's what they're working on. Advanced vision isn't there, people don't particularly need AIs to play Pokemon, they're needed for writing code.
And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.
doubt pretty much, given what with chess it gets out lost of track very quickly
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Text adventure games exist. Has anyone tried pitting Claude against one?
I tried with Colossal Cave, but it's in the training set.
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I'm struggling to come up with a way to contribute something valuable to the conversation, I just want to put my name down as predicting nothing remotely close to this will end up happening in two years.
We already have AI models improving kernels (for AI deployments) today. It's not a big leap of logic that they'll do more and more, achieving takeoff.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/
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Do you have any interesting recommendations? It always seemed like apart from Google, the most interesting ones are not publicly traded. MSFT for a while seemed like a way to get exposure to OpenAI, but now there are rumours that they may want to divest.
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I saw a clip of Neuro being amazingly good at "Where's Waldo." Like "he's by the boat with yellow sails at the top right" level of identifying and understanding images. I wonder if that sort of skill is done with separate models that talk to the main one, or if it's integrated.
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