I certainly am not surprised that OpenAI, Google and so on are overstating the capabilities of the products they are developing and currently selling. Obviously it’s important for the public at large to be aware that you can’t trust a company to accurately describe products it’s trying to sell you, regardless of what the product is.

I am more interested in what academics have to say though. I expect them to be more objective and have more altruistic motivations than your typical marketeer. The reason I asked how you would define intelligence was really just because I find it an interesting area of thought which fascinates me and has done long before this new wave of LLMs hit the scene. It’s also one which does not have clear answers, and different people will have different insights and perspectives. There are different concepts which are often blurred together: intelligence, being clever, being well educated, and consciousness. I personally consider all of these to be separate concepts, and while they may have some overlap, they nevertheless are all very different things. I have met many people who have very little formal education but are nonetheless very intelligent. And in terms of AI and LLMs, I believe that an LLM does encapsulate some degree of genuine intelligence - they appear to somehow encode a model of the universe in their billions of parameters and they are able to meaningfully respond to natural language questions on almost any subject - however an LLM is unquestionably not a conscious being.

You’re right that we need a clear definition of intelligence if we are to make any predictions about achieving AGI. The researchers behind this article appear to mean “human-level cognition” which doesn’t seem to be a particularly objective or useful yardstick. To begin with, which human are we talking about? If they’re talking about an idealised maximally intelligent human, then I don’t think we should be surprised that we aren’t about to achieve that. The goal is not to recreate human cognition as if that’s some kind of holy grail. The goal is to make intelligent systems which can give results which are at least as good as what would be produced by a skilled and well-trained human working on the same problem.

Can I ask you how you would define intelligence? And in particular, how would you - if you would at all - differentiate intelligence from being clever, or from being well educated?

Imagine life in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. All electronic devices have been rendered useless due to the EMPs from all the nuclear blasts. You, with your unfathomable ability to tell the time from an old wind-up clock, are viewed as a literal god among men (and women)

Heroic works really well. I’ve just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I’ve only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they’re working perfectly, running via proton.

The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.

I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc

Mastodon where it’s focused on a person’s single post

This is a good observation, it means that kind of social media (twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) is much more egotistical and self-aggrandizing,which in turn explains why people like Musk and Trump are so enamoured with the format.

Those poor Iranians

I suggest you try to analyse the data. Iranians have a very high energy usage per capita - at least as high as any EU country and probably higher. The country is a major oil and gas producer, and the population is accustomed to cheap petrol prices due to heavy subsidisation by the government. You won’t find many Iranians opting to use public transport for the good of the environment. Like Americans, they would rather sit in their own air-conditioned vehicles in interminable traffic jams.

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I’ve not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it’s made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.

Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.

Wow that video really gives an idea of the scale of the task. They seem to be recreating it all from scratch - Every single location from oblivion with all the textures. From what i recall, oblivion’s map was way bigger than skyrim’s.