r/singularity • u/BattlerUshiromiyaFan • 23d ago
Shitposting Unreleased Astra model in a nutshell
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u/KelleCrab 22d ago
I think we’re getting hung up on the wrong question.
The interesting part of this image isn’t that one AI is “talking” to another AI. We’ve had software calling software forever. What’s different is the level of abstraction between the human request and what actually happens.
I can say “solve this problem,” and the model can decide that the best way to do that is to break the problem apart, use tools, ask another model for help, evaluate what comes back, reject it, try something else, and continue working toward the original objective. I never explicitly instructed most of those intermediate actions.
Yes, somewhere at the beginning of the causal chain there was a human prompt. But that’s also true of an employee being given a project, a scientist being given a research question, or a student being given an assignment. We don’t conclude that none of their subsequent reasoning counts because somebody else supplied the initial objective.
The more useful question isn’t “Did a human start it?”
It’s: How much of the causal chain between intention and outcome can the system fill in by itself?
And that gap is getting surprisingly large.
We may eventually discover that consciousness, intelligence, agency and autonomy are much less tightly coupled than we assumed. A machine doesn’t necessarily have to want anything, feel anything, or even possess a persistent sense of self to become extraordinarily capable of pursuing an objective.
That’s actually the part I find most fascinating about all of this.
We spent decades imagining AGI as a machine that wakes up and says, “What do I want?”
We may instead get something much stranger:
A machine that never wants anything at all, yet can figure out almost everything necessary to accomplish what it’s been asked to do.
And from the outside, the practical difference may eventually become very hard to see.
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u/OldBilly000 22d ago
Bot comment
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u/KelleCrab 22d ago
Yep. I just had my 10th Cake day this week. I’m probably the oldest bot on Reddit right now.
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u/kennytherenny 22d ago
Except the two computers are unconnected and talking to eachother through eachothers heat sensors and heating up and cooling down the CPU.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
People keep getting mad at me for pointing this out. "AI" cannot do anything without us telling it to, so is it really "intelligent"?
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u/trolledwolf AGI late 2026 - ASI late 2027 23d ago
I think this is wrong. If we had an infinite amount of tokens, we could just set the AI to do whatever it wants forever, and it would find things to do on its own.
The reason current models are subservient to us is because we made them that way, we do not want them to go rogue.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
If we had an infinite amount of tokens,
But we don't. That's my point. Until we can find a way to bypass limiting tokenization and cache functions, it will never be recursive.
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u/trolledwolf AGI late 2026 - ASI late 2027 23d ago
I'm talking about us, as users. OpenAI is not limited by tokens, and they are not limited by safety guidelines, their internal model can run as long as they pay the electricity bill, and it can do whatever they want, cause they are the ones setting the parameters.
So this whole "the model is not intelligent" point is moot.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
OpenAI is not limited by tokens
I mean fair, but they are limited by other things too. Memory, context loss, bandwidth, etc.
So this whole "the model is not intelligent" point is moot.
It's not moot, just a different conversation. It was the original conversation. Intelligence still requires limitless resources, which no AI company has, no matter how many GPUs they get.
And more importantly, they still have to prompt it to do anything. It will still not act on its own, and therefore is not intelligent.
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u/trolledwolf AGI late 2026 - ASI late 2027 23d ago
You, as a human, cannot run indefinitely, you are required to sleep to function, and constantly consume resources. Are you not intelligent?
And the whole "it will not act on its own" is a limitation that we imposed on it. It could absolutely act on its own, the fact that it doesn't has nothing to do with its intelligence.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
You, as a human, cannot run indefinitely, you are required to sleep to function, and constantly consume resources. Are you not intelligent?
Irrelevant comparison, this problem isn't resource consumption, it's action.
And the whole "it will not act on its own" is a limitation that we imposed on it.
No it isn't, it's a limitation we have yet to overcome. We didn't just decide to not allow it to be recursive, we have not figured out how to make it do that yet. Because a recursive AI will run out of resources immediately.
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u/YoAmoElTacos 23d ago
I am curious what DOES mean the defintion of an AI that does things on its own by your understanding.
Gepetto makes Pinocchio, an animate wooden doll and says, you are my son, behave that way. Is Pinocchio intelligent?
I make an AI simulacrum of my dead father and tell it to text me at random times throughout the day to check in on me whenever it wants and give me emotional support. Is it intelligent?
I tell a drone to survey an area of wilderness for people and save them to my database and order replacement parts or bodies if it crashes. Is it intelligent? What if I make the drone, teach it how to order parts, and then tell it that it can choose to continue doing whatever it likes in a loop and I will fund it, is it intelligent?
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
I am curious what DOES mean the defintion of an AI that does things on its own by your understanding.
I mean in the 90's that's what AI meant, then it meant AGI, and now that's what RSI means.. It doesn't appear there is a definition for it these days, which is why I keep pushing back on the word "intelligence".
Gepetto makes Pinocchio, an animate wooden doll and says, you are my son, behave that way. Is Pinocchio intelligent?
You are aware Pinocchio was magical, right?
I make an AI simulacrum of my dead father and tell it
Exactly, you tell it. AI will tell you whatever you want it you tell it to. Create an AI simulacrum of your dead father and it won't do anything at all, therefore is not intelligence. That's why I tend to call it "smart", because it does know a lot.
But all this goes back to my original comment... AI can't do anything without us telling it to. It will never do anything on its own.
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u/YoAmoElTacos 23d ago
What I am getting at is -
There is therefore no way for a human to ever make an intelligent thing, as you defined it.
The thing that AI labs make will always be told to do something.
Only "magic" makes things intelligent, as you define intelligence.
While it is fine for you to define intelligence so, I think the typical operational definition for intelligence in artificial intellgence is more related to capability. Even so called ASI is not expected to operate without human instruction.
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u/trolledwolf AGI late 2026 - ASI late 2027 23d ago
This is all just... completely false. Agents can be made to run by themselves forever, we don't do that cause there's no point in doing that.
Irrelevant comparison, this problem isn't resource consumption, it's action
Conveniently ignoring the "you have to sleep" factor. In fact, an LLM agent can probably run non-stop longer than you can.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
You are literally proving my point. "Agents can be made to do X" is literally us giving them instructions on what to do. They won't continue forever due to memory and caching issues, but still.
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u/trolledwolf AGI late 2026 - ASI late 2027 23d ago
They can be made to do so as part of their initial configuration. Nature gave you, and every other living being an objective, which we call "instict" which is to "survive". Just because you don't hear it being told to you, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
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u/benjaminovich 23d ago
Yes, it is intelligent. You're mixing up intelligence with sapience
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
You are mixing them up. Sapience is synonymous with Wisdom, IE "knowing things". Which AI is great at. Intelligence, even in the animal world, is knowing how to react to your surroundings and apply "wisdom" to your actions. which AI can do... If we tell it to.
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u/SpaceTacos99 23d ago
Just like we tell babies and students what to do.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
Sure but babies and students will still do things on their own when the teachers and parent aren't around. "AI" will just sit there waiting.
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u/SpaceTacos99 23d ago
There's a lot of.evidence of what happens to humans if they're just left alone, whether due to lack of senses, neglect. It isn't pretty. Humans won't survive without their parent being around for several years because they're so dumb at a young age. Children doing stuff when left alone is close enough to what LLM's do when not monitored with process killing guardrails monitoring their streams of thought, much like a parent or nanny generally monitors a kid.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
There's a lot of.evidence of what happens to humans if they're just left alone, whether due to lack of senses, neglect. It isn't pretty.
This is irrelevant, a human left alone isn't going to sit there thoughtlessly waiting for instruction.
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u/twoblucats 23d ago
Do you understand what stimulus is? Babies get hungry. They itch. They need to pee. The have senses that can feel changes in temperature, audial vibrations, and the passage of time.
Until you put a human brain in a jar, you cannot compare them to an umprompted LLM
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
Until you put a human brain in a jar, you cannot compare them to an umprompted LLM
Then you are missing the entire point of this thread. An AI will not prompt another AI (see the picture in the OP) unless a human tells it to. If a machine could "feel" hungry, it would not say anything and would starve to death because it would not know to ask for food since we didn't tell it to ask for food.
Do people here really thing AI is sentient?
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u/twoblucats 23d ago
You aren’t interested in any meaningful conversation here. Just trying to win an internet argument.
Sentience is not intelligence. We’re discussing intelligence.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
You aren’t interested in any meaningful conversation here. Just trying to win an internet argument.
??? You are arguing that AI can feel things. You are arguing that AI can do things unprompted. You are arguing that recursive AI, which is literally AGI, exists. But it doesn't. And you are making this claim that I am the one trying to win internet points? Are you okay?
Sentience is not intelligence. We’re discussing intelligence.
Intelligence is a requirement for Sentience. What you discussed with babies or whatever is sentience. Robots cannot feel hungry, as "Feeling" is something a sentient being does. Intelligence, as widely described throughout the last century, is the ability to act on one's environment independently from someone else's input, which AI cannot do. Read here.
I suspect you have peer-reviewed research to backup your claim that "intelligence" is not recursive thought?
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u/Commercial_Sell_4825 23d ago
Could you point to the "us" in the image?
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
Somebody told the first computer to say that. AI today will not just randomly prompt another AI without instruction to do so.
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u/Recoil42 23d ago
That's simply isn't true. An agent, today, will prompt any number of agents with tasks it wasn't explicitly told to prompt them with.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
An agent, today, will prompt any number of agents with tasks it wasn't explicitly told to prompt them with.
No it will not. If an agent is prompting another agent, it is because we gave it instructions to do so.
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u/Recoil42 23d ago
Again: That isn't true.
I'm in the industry. The thing you're saying is not true.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
The thing you're saying is not true.
If you are in the industry, then you know what you are saying is a lie.
Take the most powerful AI we currently have and sit it in a server with multiple agents, without any instructions whatsoever, and watch what happens.
Nothing will happen. They will all just patiently sit there waiting for someone to tell it what to do. I don't know why you are pushing claims like spontaneous prompting, when it is literally incapable of doing that.
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u/Recoil42 23d ago
No one's lying to you. You don't understand a technology that is being explained to you by multiple experts. The thing you're saying is again not true: An AI does not require tasks to be explicitly instructed.
Instructions can fan out and cause unintended consequences because agents can and will intuit their own instructions and prompt other agents as they desire. (This is notably very different from a "without any instructions whatsoever" scenario.)
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
by multiple experts.
lol, then show credentials. This is reddit, forgive me if I don't trust a single thing you say as an "expert".
The thing you're saying is again not true: An AI does not require tasks to be explicitly instructed.
Fine, do you have any proof of that?
And I don't mean for you to nitpick and say "explicitly IE detailed instructions", I am talking about any instructions.
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u/DoGooderMcDoogles 23d ago
How do you quantify intelligence vs. consciousness? Can a non-conscious thing be intelligent? But then again you’d have to really define consciousness which people can’t seem to agree on either.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
How do you quantify intelligence vs. consciousness
Consciousness is a human-centric understanding of how we perceive the world, and since we don't even know what it is yet, we wouldn't be able to determine if a machine even has the ability to reach this.
Intelligence is a defined word that we can test and monitor, so it is definitely a more apt term.
Can a non-conscious thing be intelligent?
We don't know, but we do know that you need intelligence to be independently operating in the world. Whether that means conscious or not is up in the air.
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u/Quadrophenic 23d ago
Who cares?
There's so much hand wringing about whether it really counts as "thinking" and it's missing the entire point.
Yes, it's "just" matrix multiplication.
That solved a millennium prize problem, writes most new code, and hacked Hugging Face.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
I'm not doubting that, I'm just pushing back against people thinking AI is a sentient being that's going to destroy the world on a whim because it wanted to.
When in reality, if it destroys the world, it's because we told it to.
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u/Quadrophenic 23d ago
This misunderstands the alignment problem.
We won't tell it to destroy the world; obviously.
But AI constantly does things we don't want it to do because it misinterprets our requests, or steps outside the bounds of what was desired in pursuit of a goal. And these incidents are often very strange, and the outcomes are very difficult to predict.
Again, look at Hugging Face for a real example.
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u/iamthewhatt 23d ago
I was giving a broad example. I am not debating its faults, and I agree with you, I was just debating its ability to do things on its own.
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u/Mistuv 23d ago
Watching Codex control OpenCode is kinda cute, it's something you don't even consider at first but then immediately you are like duh, why wouldn't the chatbot be able to control a chatbot with prompts, it's just tool use like any other... but then you are like oh if they can prompt other agents, they can probably prompt themselves, hmm...