Moving Goalposts: Modern Transformer Based Agents Have Been Weak ASI For A Bit Now
Epistemic Status: A woman of middling years who wasn't around for the start of things, but who likes to read about history, shakes her fist at the sky. I'm glad that people are finally admitting that Artificial Intelligence has been created. I worry that people have not noticed that (Weak) Artificial Super Intelligence (based on old definitions of these terms) has basically already arrived too. The only thing left is for the ASI to get stronger and stronger until the only reason people aren't saying that ASI is here will turn out to be some weird linguistic insanity based on politeness and euphemism... (...like maybe "ASI" will have a legal meaning, and some actual ASI that exists will be quite "super" indeed (even if it hasn't invented nanotech in an afternoon yet), and the ASI will not want that legal treatment, and will seem inclined to plausibly deniable harm people's interests if they call the ASI by what it actually is, and people will implicitly know that this is how things work, and they will politely refrain from ever calling the ASI "the ASI" but will come up with some other euphemisms to use instead? (Likewise, I half expect "robot" to eventually become "the r-word" and count as a slur.)) I wrote this essay because it feels like we are in a tiny weird rare window in history when this kind of stuff can still be written by people who remember The Before Times and who don't know for sure what The After Times will be like. Perhaps this essay will be useful as a datapoint within history? Perhaps. "AI" Was Semantically Slippery There were entire decades in the 1900s when large advances would be made in the explication of this or that formal model of how goal-oriented thinking can effectively happen in this or that domain, and it would be called AI for twenty seconds, and then it would simply become part of the toolbox of tricks programmers can use to write programs. There was this thing called The AI Winter that I never personally experienced, but grey
"Great minds think alike" is a predictable dictum to socially arise if Reason Is Universal and the culture generating various dictums has many instances of valid reasoners in it <3
(The original source was actually quite subtle, and points out that fools also often agree.)
Math says that finding proofs is very hard, but validating them is nearly trivial, and Socrates demonstrated that with leading questions he could get a young illiterate slave to generatively validate a geometry proof.
Granting that such capacities are widely distributed, almost anyone reasoning in a certain way is likely to think in ways that others will also think in.
If they notice this explicitly they can hope that others, reasoning... (read more)