cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20858435
Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.
The paper’s scope is to prove that AI cannot feasibly be trained, using training data and learning algorithms, into something that approximates human cognition.
The limits of that finding are important here: it’s not that creating an AGI is impossible, it’s just that however it will be made, it will need to be made some other way, not by training alone.
Our squishy brains (or perhaps more accurately, our nervous systems contained within a biochemical organism influenced by a microbiome) arose out of evolutionary selection algorithms, so general intelligence is clearly possible.
So it may still be the case that AGI via computation alone is possible, and that creating such an AGI will not require solution of an NP-hard problem. But this paper closes one potential pathway that many believe is a viable pathway (if the paper’s proof is actually correct, I definitely am not the person to make that evaluation). That doesn’t mean they’ve proven there’s no pathway at all.
Our squishy brains (or perhaps more accurately, our nervous systems contained within a biochemical organism influenced by a microbiome) arose out of evolutionary selection algorithms, so general intelligence is clearly possible.
That’s assuming that we are a general intelligence. I’m actually unsure if that’s even true.
That doesn’t mean they’ve proven there’s no pathway at all.
True, they’ve only calculated it’d take perhaps millions of years. Which might be accurate, I’m not sure to what kind of computer global evolution over trillions of organisms over millions of years adds up to. And yes, perhaps some breakthrough happens, but it’s still very unlikely and definitely not “right around the corner” as the AI-bros claim (and that near-future thing is what the paper set out to disprove).
That’s assuming that we are a general intelligence.
But it’s easy to just define general intelligence as something approximating what humans already do. The paper itself only analyzed whether it was feasible to have a computational system that produces outputs approximately similar to humans, whatever that is.
True, they’ve only calculated it’d take perhaps millions of years.
No, you’re missing my point, at least how I read the paper. They’re saying that the method of using training data to computationally develop a neural network is a conceptual dead end. Throwing more resources at the NP-hard problem isn’t going to solve it.
What they didn’t prove, at least by my reading of this paper, is that achieving general intelligence itself is an NP-hard problem. It’s just that this particular method of inferential training, what they call “AI-by-Learning,” is an NP-hard computational problem.
What they didn’t prove, at least by my reading of this paper, is that achieving general intelligence itself is an NP-hard problem. It’s just that this particular method of inferential training, what they call “AI-by-Learning,” is an NP-hard computational problem.
This is exactly what they’ve proven. They found that if you can solve AI-by-Learning in polynomial time, you can also solve random-vs-chance (or whatever it was called) in a tractable time, which is a known NP-Hard problem. Ergo, the current learning techniques which are tractable will never result in AGI, and any technique that could must necessarily be considerably slower (otherwise you can use the exact same proof presented in the paper again).
They merely mentioned these methods to show that it doesn’t matter which method you pick. The explicit point is to show that it doesn’t matter if you use LLMs or RNNs or whatever; it will never be able to turn into a true AGI. It could be a good AI of course, but that G is pretty important here.
But it’s easy to just define general intelligence as something approximating what humans already do.
No, General Intelligence has a set definition that the paper’s authors stick with. It’s not as simple as “it’s a human-like intelligence” or something that merely approximates it.
