On: ChatGPT Plugins

[astrange]

> An AGI by definition is capable of self improvement.

Just because you can imagine something and define that something has magic powers doesn't mean that the magic powers can actually exist in real life.

Are you capable of "self improvement"? (In this AGI sense, not meant as an insult.)

[adamisom → astrange]

.. what? Us humans are capable of self-improvement, but we’re also a kludge of biases through which reason has miraculously found a tiny foothold.

We’re talking about a potential intelligence with none of our hardware limitations or baggage.

Self-improve? My brother in Christ, have you heard of this little thing called stochastic gradient descent?

[astrange → adamisom]

> Us humans are capable of self-improvement

No, you're capable of learning things. You can't do brain surgery on yourself and add in some more neurons or fix Alzheimer's.

What you can do is have children, which aren't you. Similarly if an AI made another bigger AI, that might be a "child" and not "them".

> We’re talking about a potential intelligence with none of our hardware limitations or baggage.

In this case the reason it doesn't have any limitations is because it's imaginary. All real things have limitations.

> Self-improve? My brother in Christ, have you heard of this little thing called stochastic gradient descent?

Do you think that automatically makes models better?

[adamisom → astrange]

>> Us humans are capable of self-improvement

> No, you're capable of learning things. You can't do brain surgery on yourself

What principle do you have for defining self-improvement the way that you do? Do you regard all software updates as "not real improvement"?

>All real things have limitations.

Uh, yep, that doesn't mean it will be as limited as us. To spell it out: yes, real things have limitations, but limitations vary between real things. There's no "imaginary flawless" versus "everything real has exactly the same amount of flawed-ness".

[astrange → adamisom]

> What principle do you have for defining self-improvement the way that you do? Do you regard all software updates as "not real improvement"?

Software updates can't cause your computer to "exponentially self-improve" which is the AGI scenario. And giving the AI new software tools doesn't seem like an advantage because that's something humans could also use rather than an improvement to the AI "itself".

That leaves whatever the AGI equivalent of brain surgery or new bodies is, but then, how does it know the replacement is "improvement" or would even still be "them"?

Basically: https://twitter.com/softminus/status/1639464430093344769

> To spell it out: yes, real things have limitations, but limitations vary between real things.

I think we can assume AGI can have the same properties as currently existing real things (like humans, LLMs, or software programs), but I object to assuming it can have any arbitrary combination of those things' properties, and there aren't any real things with the property of "exponential self-improvement".

[boppo1 → adamisom]

Why do people use the phrase 'My brother in Christ' so often all of a sudden? Typically nonbelievers and the non observant.