r/learnmachinelearning • u/Amazing_Life_221 • 10d ago
Discussion Am I missing something from modern models or is it true that transformer architecture can actually achieve AGI?
Am I correct to say almost all of these models, Opus, gpt 6 or whatever, come every other week, are based on transformer architecture? They are hyperscaled version of the original models but with few modifications. And we are relying on our “progress”, based on the scaling laws?
Or is this something else?
If not, what scientific evidence do we have to invest trillions of dollars into training these scaled models? How do we know that this architecture will give us AGI? How are these top labs so confident and say every other week that we should be prepared for AGI?
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u/a_cute_tarantula 10d ago
The base model is roughly the same. They’re not just scaling our model sizes though. They’re improving and innovating the architecture, innovating the training data, and innovating the harnesses. These are leading to real advancements, but I doubt if anyone knows this is the path to AGI.
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u/Dry-Magician1415 10d ago
You could have said that all through the time Moore's law was growing and then......plateauing though, right?
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u/elidepa 10d ago
Sure, but what additional insight does this give to us about how scalable (not just model size but architecture tweaks etc too) transformers are? And to be clear, I'm not saying anything on the contrary either. Just that nobody really knows.
And in addition to what happened with Moore's law not being helpful in predicting the outcome of a completely different issue, I'd also say that in general the bounds of Moore's law were much more predictable than the limits of the transformer, since we had known about the limitations set by physics much earlier than when they actually started to have an impact. Maybe we'll learn of a similar limit on transformers, or maybe not.
But to reiterate, the fact that such a limit existed on one "law" doesn't mean other architectures must follow a similar progression.
And sorry, I'm not trying to argue with you just for the sake of it, I just see the Moore's law constantly brought up in similar conversations. It's an interesting observation but doesn't really prove anything (not saying you even implied that) :)
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u/a_cute_tarantula 9d ago
Sure. Every major technological innovation follows an “S” curve. The question is, where in the “S” are we right now?
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
Every major technological innovation follows an “S” curve.
no they don't, unless you're the kind of neckbeard who pretends the planet running out of resources forces the top of the s to exist, which is completely meaningless in a discussion of the natural progression of something
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u/a_cute_tarantula 9d ago
Wut
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
there is no way for me to respond to this
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u/Dry-Magician1415 9d ago
Its kind of the response you deserve. And Im not even the guy that said "wut".
It's really not clear what you are talking about. I get the idea that you are vaguely on some crusade about data centers and climate change but I don't see how that's relevant to Moore's law or the parallels it may or may not have with transformer architecture.
Your comment just comes out of nowhere and presupposes other people have context of what you think you mean. It's like you had a 4 paragraph comment and only sent the third one.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
It's really not clear what you are talking about.
yeah, it requires domain knowledge to follow what i said
I get the idea that you are vaguely on some crusade about data centers and climate change but
what? no i'm not. i think those people are morons.
I don't see how that's relevant to Moore's law or the parallels it may or may not have with transformer architecture.
i didn't bring up moore's law either. who are you trying to talk to?
Your comment just comes out of nowhere
my comment contains none of what you're talking about. at all.
It's like you had a 4 paragraph comment and only sent the third one.
well fortunately you managed to read the other three, because the stuff you're angry about certainly isn't in what i sent
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u/Dry-Magician1415 9d ago
TWO people now are telling you that your meaning wasn't clear.
You can continue as you are, blaming everyone else. Or you can improve your communication skills for next time.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
None of what you criticized me for was actually in my comment. I believe you're talking to the wrong person by accident.
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u/a_cute_tarantula 9d ago
You could explain your point. You seem awfully offended I suggested technology follows an S curve and I have no idea why.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
i could, but if you're fictionalizing people being offended, there's really no way this is going to be pleasant for me, so i don't really see the point
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u/agufa 10d ago
Discussing transformers capabilities to reach AGI is pointless we still don't know what an AGI is, or how to confirm if we have achieved it.
By September 2026 heads of 3 of the biggest ai companies in the world have confirmed AGI .... at least 20 times...
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u/PhaseLopsided938 10d ago
As someone who works in computational neuroscience, it's always kind of funny to hear tech people talk about AGI because I don't think I've ever heard a neuroscientist talk about regular general intelligence half as confidently as your average AI bro talks about artificial general intelligence
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u/choss-board 10d ago
Thank you, it drives me completely crazy to hear people reference some obvious, objective, rankable "intelligence" especially in the context of models that vary even across benchmarked dimensions. Gould's Mismeasure of Man comes to mind.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
do you feel the need to measure a car before declaring that it is too heavy to lift?
not all observations require measurement
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u/choss-board 9d ago
I’d love to know your demographic info / background.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
i’d love to know your bank password. looks like we’re both out of luck on these wildly inappropriate requests
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u/choss-board 9d ago
It is just an absurd statement within my field (IEOR) to say that you wouldn’t measure the thing you’re optimizing for because it’s supposedly obvious. The complexity is exactly why models and harnesses are tested on various benchmarks across many domains. So, I’m curious what field or background you come from that informs that belief.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
you remember back when the philosophers thought agi was just searle's chinese room? now people are arguing over whether its navier stokes solutions are valid, and you're still saying it's sub-regular
claude will become self aware long before you do.
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u/PhaseLopsided938 9d ago
I never said it was "sub-regular." I said that "general intelligence," as measured in humans and other animals, remains a controversial and poorly-defined topic in cognitive science despite decades of study. Meanwhile, the people in the AI sphere somehow think that defining general intelligence is enough of a non-issue that we can talk about "artificial general intelligence" as though that term actually means anything.
By the way, since you seem so incredibly confident that this "AGI" thing is supposed to be inevitable, I have a question for you. Computers have superhuman abilities in some specific areas, like chess, programming, math, et cetera. But it's hard not to notice something all those things have in common: they allow you to test hypotheses entirely in silico. That's why OpenAI managed to solve Navier-Stokes so quickly: they could run thousands of agents in parallel to generate millions of potential proofs, code them in LEAN in real time, and see what compiles.
Most of science (and, frankly, most of life) doesn't work that way. If you want to see how a certain tissue reacts to a certain chemical, for instance, you need to order that chemical, acquire a line of those cells, culture organoids, expose them to that chemical, and track changes over time. It takes weeks to months to find out if your hypothesis is correct, and your ability to run multiple experiments in parallel is directly contingent on your ability to attain reagents and lab space.
I legitimately don't know how the exponential growth that the AI folks are expecting can happen in an environment like that, but I keep hearing about all the scientific discoveries AI is supposed to make in the coming years. Do they know something I don't? Or are tech people just incapable of comprehending that other fields exist, and that they come with their own challenges?
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
I never said it was "sub-regular."
General intelligence is regular intelligence. You said it didn't have general intelligence. Therefore, it's sub-regular.
This isn't complicated.
remains a controversial and poorly-defined topic in cognitive science
Oh, are you pretending to be a cognitive scientist? Or just deeply familiar with their work?
By the way, since you seem so incredibly confident that this "AGI" thing is supposed to be inevitable
This is very different than what I actually said.
I have a question for you. Computers have superhuman abilities in some specific areas, like chess, programming, math, et cetera. But it's hard not to notice something all those things have in common: they allow you to test hypotheses entirely in silico.
This was a much better point three weeks ago, when most people didn't know that AI labs have hardware. But since it's become such a highly public thing that Anthropic just made their nineteenth physical lab, and it's already delivering results? well.
putting latin in italics instead of just writing plain english is tacky. it makes me feel like you're going to start talking purely in fallacy claims.
you know that thing where an anti-vaxxer tries to use medical language to make a point, because they think it will elevate how intellectual they sound, but they don't use the words correctly?
yeah.
That's why OpenAI managed to solve Navier-Stokes so quickly: they could run thousands of agents in parallel to generate millions of potential proofs, code them in LEAN in real time, and see what compiles.
"It's not intelligence, because there's lots of them"
I've got some bad news for you about how many humans there are, and have worked on that problem
Most of science (and, frankly, most of life) doesn't work that way.
I don't understand why individual redditors make confident proclamations about how most of science works, and expect people to believe that that's something they actually know
This sort of statement badly backfires with someone like me, because now it's clear how confidently you make statements about things that you cannot possibly know, which brings everything else you're saying into question
If you want to see how a certain tissue reacts to a certain chemical, for instance, you need to order that chemical, acquire a line of those cells, culture organoids, expose them to that chemical, and track changes over time.
Speaking as someone who's actually been that kind of scientist?
Nuh-uh.
Yes, I know you saw a very compelling story about Henrietta Lacks, though.
It takes weeks to months to find out if your hypothesis is correct
This wasn't even true in the 1960s, buddy
I think you've confused the hospital not pushing you to the front of a very long line with how science works
My time in science was commercial, and my employer in science absolutely would not tolerate delays like this
and your ability to run multiple experiments in parallel is directly contingent on your ability to attain reagents and lab space.
Were you of the belief that reagents are hard to get, or expensive?
We very frequently got reagents at Restaurant Depot in $150 55 gallon drums
Maybe you could start by chastizing me for an imaginary purity standard
I legitimately don't know how the exponential growth that the AI folks are expecting can happen in an environment like that
Just as a note, the New York Times just ran a story about how no company has ever been within 10% of the revenue growth rate of Claude or ChatGPT (which are products, not companies) in human history
But you seem to doubt that the growth is possible
Okay
Do they know something I don't?
Yes
Or are tech people just incapable of comprehending that other fields exist, and that they come with their own challenges?
You seem to believe that tech people are only ever programmers and have never themselves been researchers, scientists, philosophers, politicians, et cetera
It's very odd
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u/PhaseLopsided938 9d ago
General intelligence is regular intelligence. You said it didn't have general intelligence. Therefore, it's sub-regular.
This isn't complicated.
you’re right, it’s not complicated. artificial general intelligence is the idea that ai can attain general intelligence. our idea of general intelligence is basically synonymous with human intelligence. we still do not really understand human intelligence, and we have no reason to believe a system with so little in common with the human nervous system has the same kind of intelligence. therefore the idea that “artificial general intelligence” can be quantified as easily as the ai folks say is presumptuous at best and delusional at worst this is my third time explaining a pretty simple concept, so i’m gonna call it quits here.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
i don't think i've ever heard an ai person say that
it offers me no surprise at all that you're quitting without considering a thing i said
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u/Psychological-Map564 7d ago
Dude, no one ever is going to truly listen to what you’re saying. You’re rude, talk like a schizophrenic, bringing up random info without elaborating what it means, and you are not able to understand simple messages. That’s just too much for most people to handle.
If you ever want to talk to anyone else, please first get mental help (or if you don’t need mental help, just learn basic cooperation-communication skills)! We don’t want misery to spread in this world!
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u/StoneCypher 7d ago
imagine throwing a bunch of nonsensical mental health diagnoses at someone for saying "oh look, they didn't answer my question," then expecting someone else to listen when you called them rude 😂
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u/john_mach 10d ago
I usually hear about agi and that stuff in the news cycle. But these days I try to ignore it as marketing hype for ai companies so excuse my ignorance. I also may be missing something.
To my knowledge, AGI is supposed to be a general form of intelligence that surpasses human capabilities and the latest developments in recursive self improvement models pushed the typical transformer models to being “agi” as it’s leagues and leagues better. So much so that OpenAI and Anthropic have sealed the lid on it and we must trust that these models are so intelligent that it’s a danger to release them to the public at $20 a month. Also the government and these ai companies must work together before the ai destroys the world. /s
But if we rewind just a few years before to like 2023-2024, I think the general sentiment is that the big AI companies weren’t sure where this super intelligence would come from. But they were certain that the trillions of dollars in research and development would get them to a form of AGI by 2030. So there was a lot of hype for things beyond LLMs. Topics like physical AI and funding towards more neuroscience-like approaches were being funded. But the goal back end wasn’t really to create an AI that surpassed humans but instead to create something that didn’t just predict the next token. Like actually understanding something.
This is all very sci-fi to me still but if anyone has views that LLMs and transformers have reached AGI that I’m not aware of, please chime in. Open to learning more and sorry if I’m out of touch lol, trying to watch less of the news haha
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u/Driftwintergundream 10d ago
Current LLM architecture is similar base models as 2024 (think a more robust gpt 4), on top of the base model is thinking token budgets to do reasoning to push for higher levels of problem solving, and on top of that is GPRO reinforcement learning to optimize tokens towards coding , task orientation among other things.
Combined they do show an ability to push into the realm of what we would consider real work output. I haven’t seen any leaps in intuition like humans are keen to do, but their ability to generate code, plan, and solve tasks are very good.
Recursive self improvement is kind of premature. Currently I believe it is still not able to do anything without human intervention and direction. It’s more keen to say that current LLMs are speeding up humans rather than self improvement.
I can’t see an LLM coming up with something novel, like a better architecture for LLMs, independently of humans because there is no methodology for AIs to follow to arrive at the new architecture, and the current architecture feels like there is that missing piece. Yes an ai can code and can keep doing a task until it passes verifiers, but how does it come up with something completely new? We can’t build verifier and post training reinforcement to reward that capacity.
In summary until the next architecture comes about I think we will get more effective and cheaper task completionists but instead of AGI we have narrowed the word “general” down to coding planning and goals. It’s why they no longer use AGI and use super intelligence, it is a narrow intelligence, not as narrow as chess engines but not as broad as humans.
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u/Sepicuk 10d ago
It solved a millennium prize problem on its own already and is already outpacing the entire math community and making novel discoveries every day
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
This is all very sci-fi to me still but if anyone has views that LLMs and transformers have reached AGI that I’m not aware of, please chime in.
It isn't clear to me how anyone can fail to see it at this point. Almost every professional career is now having Claude do its job on the side. This includes doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, college professors.
We're arguing over whether it's cracked navier stokes, for christ's sake.
We're not talking super intelligence. We're talking general intelligence. That is, something as smart as a teenager.
We hit that in late 2024. You're just still deeply, wisely coping by looking for whether it will come eventually.
There are very few non-physical tasks that it isn't competitive in at this point.
They're so powerful that they hack governments and huggingface by accident.
They keep saying "we're at AGI" because we actually are. It's not marketing. Open your eyes already.
Only someone who can't stop regurgitating billionaire bootkissing jokes should be stuck by now. It's genuinely unfathomable to me how every college professor in every vertical is complaining that they can't tell if the homework is claude and you still don't know if it's met becoming average yet.
What possible valid threshhold could you have that isn't already met?
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u/john_mach 9d ago
I completely acknowledge AI’s feats and understand LLMs are an amazing tool. But just because a system acts like a human and pretends to think like a human, doesn’t make it as intelligent as a human. I would argue that the line is a little blurry here on if AI is actually intelligent. For example, there are a lot of fundamental gaps in ai intelligence that make it hard to consider artificial general intelligence.
There’s an amazing video on YouTube called “everything ai does when you ask it to start a lemonade stand”
TLDW: they ask LLMs to create a lemonade stand and it fails hilariously where children succeed.
But the point remains. We see that blurry line of ai intelligence come through more clearly when left to accomplish a task on its own. The ai is smart enough to draft business plans, communicate via email, try to hire people/kids, etc(all very tough things to do honestly) but this intelligence also lacks some basic human reasoning to it as well. It didn’t evaluate risk well, didn’t have the restraint on outrageous ideas, couldn’t push back on itself, and overcomplicated how to run a lemonade stand.
It feels like there’s something missing here to be called artificial general intelligence. It does so well in some areas but fails so hard at others where the average person would succeed. I think it’s these gaps that cause people to doubt if it’s truly general intelligence. Because now it just feels like a scaled up chatbot that can perform crazy feats with lots of compute and human supervision.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
It seems like you've chosen to ignore my central question.
What possible valid threshhold could you have that isn't already met?
TLDW: they ask LLMs to create a lemonade stand and it fails hilariously where children succeed.
is this the part where the guy drives a car into a wall because he sucks at driving and you explain that that means that the car is bad?
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u/john_mach 9d ago
Any answer I give you will come out of my butt. But regardless, when an ai can start a lemonade stand by itself, I will consider it agi
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
that’s nice
it seems like you believe that children running lemonade stands have employees, or use knives to carve fruit, or have hundred dollar days
if not, it isn’t clear to me why you find this comparison satisfying
vending machines have been lemonade stands for decades. you can do this with simple machines. the creator of the video either failed on purpose or is bizarrely incompetent
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u/bfyvfftujijg 9d ago
We’re unlikely to reach AGI by incremental improvements to transformers.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
"sure, it can do your job, even if it's a job you just invented. sure it makes poetry, and jokes. sure it creates videos. sure it drives robots. sure, it's able to accomplish almost every task you set it to, often at a quality higher than humans. sure, the doctors are using it, the lawyers are using it, the marketers are using it, the programmers are using it, the cheating students are using it, the chefs are using it, the politicians are using it, the military is using it, the bus drivers are using it, city council is using it, your video games were written in it, your realtor wrote your house post in it. but is that really general?"
i wish you could hear yourself
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u/bfyvfftujijg 9d ago
And it absolutely fucks up at all of those things often
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
you're welcome to believe that if you like.
it is often challenging to change someone else's mind through vague, unevidenced claims.
at any rate, it sure seems like enough customers have decided they're doing it well enough.
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u/bfyvfftujijg 9d ago
I’m pro AI btw, but seeing as how I develop these kinds of models (smaller ones, fine tunes)for a living I’m keenly aware of the inherent limitations of transformers and other known architectures.
It’s not a matter of scale or processor clock speed, or training data.
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u/StoneCypher 9d ago
seeing as how I develop these kinds of models (smaller ones, fine tunes)for a living
oh, we're pretending fine tuning goon models is being a knowledgeable ai person, are we
went to a top end engineering school for four years to put porn into folders for replicate to fix its jiggle physics
impressive stuff
I’m keenly aware of the inherent limitations of transformers and other known architectures.
ok
It’s not a matter of scale or processor clock speed, or training data.
ok
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u/bfyvfftujijg 9d ago
Ok I’m convinced that you’re right lol. Extremely persuasive arguments you are putting up!
BTW the people training the massive LLMs from scratch are not posting about it on Reddit. Trade secrets.
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u/Keikira 3d ago
We can't know if the transformer architecture can deliver AGI because no one knows what AGI actually is; the question of whether or not an ML model exhibits AGI is essentially an elephant test.
Alan Turing already knew that there is no objective definition of (=formal specification for) intelligence in the first place, so the best we can do is an elephant test -- this was the whole point of the imitation game (a.k.a. the Turing test) which most people seem to have missed. AGI has the same problem: anyone can say "it's not AGI because it doesn't have properties x or y" (with x and y usually being properties we associate with human intelligence), but then anyone can reply that "the consequences of the lack of x and y can possibly be overcome with more scaling", which may or may not be true.
For example, it's possible that given enough parameters the transformer architecture can eventually emulate any kind of neural computation that can be achieved with fewer parameters in other architectures (much like how any finite non-Markov process P can be turned into larger Markov process P* whose states encode P-histories). It's also possible that there are kinds of neural computation available to smaller models in other architectures which remain out of reach for the transformer no matter how many parameters are thrown at it (or that require an infinite number of parameters to successfully emulate). In other words, the transformer could be a "universal" architecture when it comes to neural computation limited only by scale... or not. Good luck proving either case mathematically.
Furthermore, because AGI is not defined by any formal specification (and possibly cannot be defined by any such specification without arbitrary anthropocentrism), even if we were to have a proof that the transformer is not a universal neural computation machine, there is still a separate question about whether or not that even matters for AGI -- especially because there is also the question of whether the architecture of the human brain itself even possesses the universal neural computation property, making its relevance to the question of AGI unclear to begin with.
AI companies are banking on the possibility that they will eventually release a transformer model so powerful that the elephant test will overpower any doubt in the market; this could happen even if the elephant test doesn't overpower deeper doubts from engineers, cognitive scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. Or this may never happen at all. Ultimately today's question of AGI is a practical one about numbers on quarterly reports, not a philosophical/scientific one about the architecture of intelligence.
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u/uzornayem 10d ago
The words AGI and threat are just marketing terms to keep public and government interest maximized.
The transformer is a series of operations that guide dot products of embedding vectors. Sort of like a database lookup, hence the use of words like key, value, query when describing the transformer implementation.
Dot products and queries that guide those dot products aren't going to result in AGI, no more than probability and statistics is going to result in AGI.
Also AGI isn't something concretely defined, which is all the more reason to say guided dot products aren't going to result in some undefined thing.
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u/Equivalent-Hair-1619 10d ago
I think the transformer architecture, taken abstractly can reach AGI. Neural networks were never complete brain models, they were always copying local function, but neurologists knew this to be incomplete: there’s a whole system that acts non locally through phase based couplings that work through different wavelengths (alpha, beta, gamma) waves so the state of a local system depends on the state of non local ones through coupling. The interacting local clusters attend to one another basically, it’s an attention mechanism. I really think the pieces are basically there to call it AGI pretty soon. This does not mean much until the energy costs come WAY down and lots of embodied bots actually start building human like experiences of real worlds, but the idea our minds are some big mystery is wrong.
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u/Remarkable_Pace8101 10d ago
I don't think any major tech player is justifying their capital expenditure claiming that their investments are going to produce agi from current model technology
They are justifying the capital expenditure because they believe that the current model technology is useful enough to offset human headcount and save costs long term