Some Excerpt: Language models not artificial general intelligence
This is an important article and a true observation of current LLMS:
"The “multiple” part of multiple tasks is in the eye of the beholder. The language model just solves the single narrow task on which it was trained. If an example of the problem or a similar one exists in the billions or trillions of tokens on which the model was trained, then that is all that is needed to solve what some people think of as multiple problems. Occam’s razor recommends adopting the simpler theory—that the conditional probabilities of the language model are enough to produce the observed result. Neither artificial general intelligence, nor any other cognitive process is needed.
Despite the lack of critical thinking, and returning to the question posed earlier, in what universe could a language model be considered generally intelligent? I believe that there is an underlying theory of intelligence that encourages these claims of generality, but this theory is fundamentally flawed.
The key assumptions in this theory include:
Language is enough. Intelligence is language ability. Everything that can be known can be written down in an encyclopedia or, more specifically, on the World Wide Web. All “thought” is expressed in language and there are no other representations needed. Thinking occurs in English for English speaker, Chinese for Chinese speakers, and so on. The only representation that can exist is the conditional probability of a word, given the context. There is no need for a “Language of thought” that is more abstract than this, or any other kind of mental representation or processes.
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The most implausible assumption is the scale one. It relies on a “miracle” of some sort. According to this theory, a model reaching a certain size will spontaneously generate general intelligence. Spontaneous generation has not been found to be a useful theory in biology. It did not work to produce living vermicelli; and it is not a sound basis for producing artificial general intelligence. Artificial general intelligence will require a great deal more than this theory, and the models associated with it, can provide.
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