AGI will not happen in your lifetime. Or will it?
We recorded 28 claims from this post. 11 were checked against evidence. 17 can’t be checked. 16 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (28)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“Neither one of us believes for a minute that large language models are remotely close to artificial general intelligence, and what’s more, we mostly agree about what’s missing: semantics, reasoning, common sense, theory of mind and so on.”
What we tested: Large language models are not remotely close to AGI; they lack semantics, reasoning, common sense and theory of mind.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I think we are wasting funding and bright young minds on an approach that probably isn’t on the right path.”
What we tested: Marcus thinks the field is wasting funding and bright young minds on an approach that probably is not on the right path.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Even if we need to invent a new chip type as a prerequisite, that could be a thirty year process rather a one hundred year process.”
What we tested: Even if a new chip type is required for AGI, that could take about thirty years rather than a hundred.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“What I think we are missing are (a) ideas and (b) large scale databases of machine-interpretable knowledge.”
What we tested: What AGI development is missing is new ideas and large-scale databases of machine-interpretable knowledge.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I take that as a hopeful sign that the scaling-über-alas narrative is losing force, and that more and more people are open to new things.”
What we tested: Marcus takes Meta's Cicero as a hopeful sign that the scaling-über-alles narrative is losing force and that more and more people are open to new things.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“The neurosymbolic AI community is growing fast; conferences that used to be dozens are now thousands.”
What we tested: The neurosymbolic AI community is growing quickly, with conferences going from dozens to thousands of attendees.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“ChatGPT is (at least in many ways) a far inferior intelligence, that, despite having some undeniable talents, cannot at all be trusted.”
What we tested: ChatGPT is in many ways a far inferior intelligence and cannot be trusted.
What happened: The developer itself said, at launch, that ChatGPT gives plausible but wrong answers. This supports the claim that its output could not be trusted without checking. (OpenAI, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Troll farms may well starting using it to create misinformation at unprecedented scale”
What we tested: Troll farms may start using ChatGPT to create misinformation at unprecedented scale.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“we can also expect more and circles of fake web sites in order to sell advertisements”
What we tested: ChatGPT will lead to more circles of fake websites created to sell advertising.
What happened: Three months after the post, an independent monitor documented AI-written content-farm sites run for ad revenue. This is the kind of site Marcus predicted. (NewsGuard, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“In a recent Wired article, I predicted that 2023 see the first death attributable to large language models, and I stand by that prediction.”
What we tested: 2023 will see the first death attributable to large language models.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Already we have seen minor abuses; plagiarism, for example, will never be the same.”
What we tested: Minor abuses of ChatGPT have already been seen, and plagiarism, for example, will never be the same.
What happened: The professor reported a student's admission to using ChatGPT for the assignment in December 2022. This establishes a pre-post misuse example without treating the detector score as proof. (New York Post, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Bias is likely to be huge issue, too.”
What we tested: Bias is likely to be a huge issue with large language models like ChatGPT.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“ChatGPT is a dress rehearsal, and I wouldn’t say we as a society have gone through it with flying colors.”
What we tested: ChatGPT is a dress rehearsal for more potent AI, and Marcus would not say society has gone through it with flying colors.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I think that better AI, in which we could directly instill values, might actually make us safer than the world in which we inhabit now, in which so much of what happens is down to the vagaries of what happens to be in this or that training set”
What we tested: Marcus thinks better AI, in which we could directly instill values, might actually make us safer than the current world, in which so much depends on the vagaries of what happens to be in this or that training set.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“it terrifies me that so much of current AI is dependent on random details of training corpora that are not available to scientists for inquiry. This seems like a really bad idea.)”
What we tested: Current AI should not depend on random details of training corpora that scientists cannot inspect; this is a bad idea.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I don’t think that kind of flexibility in any way rests on or demands on sentience.”
What we tested: The flexible, general intelligence that defines AGI does not require sentience.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“These characters (especially perhaps the latter two) might or might not be argued to be sentient, but it seems to be that they are flexible, resourceful, reliably (in a way that LLMs certainly aren’t), and adaptive.”
What we tested: LLMs are certainly not reliable in the way general intelligences like the Star Trek computer would be.
What happened: The developer of the leading LLM admitted that it produces incorrect or nonsensical answers. (OpenAI, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I am also with you in doubting that there will be a single magic singularity moment.”
What we tested: There is unlikely to be a single magic singularity moment for AGI.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“Machines will just get more and more reliable and more general.”
What we tested: AI systems will gradually become more reliable and more general.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“AGI is unlikely to be exactly humanlike, but I don’t see being a replica is a necessity; adaptivity is key, and that is probably achievable by multiple means”
What we tested: AGI is unlikely to be exactly humanlike; adaptivity is key and probably achievable by multiple means.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“With all that considerable agreement noted, I am still not seeing a principled argument that constructing flexible, adaptive systems with commonsense reasoning, deeper semantics, and so on will take us past the end of the current century.”
What we tested: Marcus is still not seeing a principled argument that constructing flexible, adaptive systems with commonsense reasoning, deeper semantics and so on will take us past the end of the current century.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Of course nothing is guaranteed; we might not get there because we blow ourselves up, or because we waste so much time on large language models that other important challenges—like semantics, causality, commonsense reasoning, abduction and so forth—never get the attention they deserve.”
What we tested: Nothing is guaranteed: we might not get to AGI because we blow ourselves up, or because we waste so much time on large language models that other important challenges such as semantics, causality, commonsense reasoning and abduction never get the attention they deserve.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Or because we can’t come up with something better than the current systems that are so greedy in both data and energy consumption that they could asymptote before anything really general emerges.”
What we tested: We might not get to AGI if we can't come up with something better than current systems, which are so greedy in data and energy consumption that they could asymptote before anything really general emerges.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“A decent fraction of the AI community has already recognized that the primary forte of large language models is in generating bullshit; many also see that the current path to autonomous vehicles is not making the progress that some expected.”
What we tested: A decent fraction of the AI community has already recognized that the primary forte of large language models is generating bullshit, and many also see that the current path to autonomous vehicles is not making the progress that some expected.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“But certainly the hunger is there, the funding is there, and my guess is that patience for LLMs (which I see as a detour) is not infinite.”
What we tested: LLMs are a detour, and the field's patience for them will likely run out.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“So I don’t think we will waste more than 5 years before a substantial fraction of AI effort is looking outside the limited streetlight that currently are sucking up so much mental energy.”
What we tested: Within 5 years, a substantial fraction of AI effort will look beyond the current LLM-focused approaches.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“I think that in achieving AGI we will have no choice but to find ways of integrating whatever we can get out of deep learning with explicit knowledge and explicit cognitive models.”
What we tested: Achieving AGI will require integrating deep learning with explicit knowledge and explicit cognitive models.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“And I also agree that we need many other voices, not just technologists, speaking up in this journey.”
What we tested: AI development should include many voices beyond technologists.
Held from this post (16)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: AI physical reasoning will improve before psychological reasoning, and AGI will not arrive on a single identifiable day.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: Humanity will eventually reach AGI, quite possibly before the end of the 21st century.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: Integrating AI components into a whole is a huge unsolved problem.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: Marcus has long been concerned that a fixation on Big Data has sucked the oxygen from many other ideas that might be better.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: Most AI money right now is going mostly to large language models, which to Marcus (as to Booch) just seem like an approximation to intelligence rather than the real thing, and so a frustrating distraction.
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: ChatGPT has apparently been used to create malware and was used by CNET to produce error-filled news stories.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: We do not yet have AI as flexible and reliable as AGI.