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Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better
(indianexpress.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Cool, Bill Gates has opinions. I think he's being hasty and speaking out of turn and only partially correct. From my understanding, the "big innovation" of GPT-4 was adding more parameters and scaling up compute. The core algorithms are generally agreed to be mostly the same from earlier versions (not that we know for sure since OpenAI has only released a technical report). Based on that, the real limit on this technology is compute and number of parameters (as boring as that is), and so he's right that the algorithm design may have plateaued. However, we really don't know what will happen if truly monster rigs with tens-of-trillions of parameters are used when trained on the entirety of human written knowledge (morality of that notwithstanding), and that's where he's wrong.
Yeah and I think he may be scaling to like true AGI. Very possible LLMs just don't become AGI, you need some extra juice we haven't come up with yet, in addition to computational power no one can afford yet.
My hypothesis is that that "extra juice" is going to be some kind of body. More senses than text-input, and more ways to manipulate itself and the environment than text-output. Basically, right now llm's can kind of understand things in terms of text descriptions, but will never be able to understand it the way a human can until it has all of the senses (and arguably physical capabilities) that a human does. Thought experiment: Presumably you "understand" your dog - can you describe your dog without sensory details, directly or indirectly? Behavior had to be observed somehow. Time is a sense too. EDIT: before someone says it, as for feelings I'm not really sure, I'm not a biology guy. But my guess is we sense our own hormones as well
First, they do have senses. For example, many LLMs can "see" images. Second, they're actually pretty good at describing things. What they're really bad at is analysis and logic, which is not related to senses at all.
I'm not so convinced that logic is completely unrelated to the senses. How did you learn to count, add, and subtract mentally? You used your fingers. I don't know about you, but even though I don't count my fingers anymore I still tend to "visualize" math operations. Would I be capable of that if I were born blind? Maybe I'd figure out how to do the same thing in a different dimension of awareness, but I have no doubt that being able to conceptualize visually helps my own logic. As for more complicated math, I can't do that mentally either, I need a calculator and/or scratch paper. Maybe analogues to those can be implemented into the model? Maybe someone should just train a model on khan academy videos, and it'll pick this stuff up emergently? I'm not saying that the ability to visualize is the only roadblock though, I'm sure that improvements could be made to the models themselves, but I bet that it'll be key to human-like reasoning
That's a good point.