Monday, January 06, 2025

We don't understand what the language game is.



In board games such as chess, go, and shogi, the AIs have beaten human champions. Indeed, today, nobody is in the doubt as to whether AIs have edge over humans. The battle between AIs and humans are over in these fields.


When it comes to Large Language Models, the situations is not so clear. Although people are generally under the impression that the Turing test is now probably moot, especially because you can formulate the arguments in any ways you prefer, there is no clear measure to judge whether LLMs are doing the job better than humans.


The fundamental problem is our lack of understanding of the nature of the language game. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein described it in a passing manner in his Philosophical Investigations, the description is far from adequate. To this day, we do not have a clear model of what the language game is.


We humans don't know what the language game is exactly, and yet we engage ourselves in it every day. The Large Language Models are being developed and employed without a definite idea of what cognitive function it is addressing.  

Sunday, January 05, 2025

How to measure the intelligence of AGI and/or ASI/


As we go on the road to AGI and/or ASI, there is a genuine problem of how to measure intelligence. IQ is based on the assumption of a Gaussian distribution and deviation from the mean as ratio to standard deviation, so it cannot be applied to AI far removed from humans.


Assessing intelligence purely by the vastness of memory and the speed of calculation would be a part of the equation, but not the essential part. Defining AGI and ASI in terms of the tasks they could perform would be helpful, but then we humans might not be able to conceptualize all the relevant tasks.


There is also the problem of Vingean uncertainty and xAI. If ASI ever materializes, it might not be possible for us humans to understand its functionality. It would be difficult to require explainable performance because that would mean mediocrity within the range of human intelligence.


The only hope would be instrumental convergence. Here, defining AGI and ASI in terms of embodied cognition would prove robust and essential.