Comment by nosianu
> I used to make the comment, pre-LLM, that we needed to get to mouse/squirrel level intelligence rather than trying to get to human level abstract AI. But we got abstract AI first. That surprised me.
"AI" is not based on physical real world data and models like our brain. Instead, we chose to analyze human formal (written) communication. ("formal": actual face to face communication has tons of dimensions adding to the text representation of what is said, from tone, speed to whole body and facial expressions)
Bio-brains have a model based on physical sensor data first and go from there, that's completely missing from "AI".
In hindsight, it's not surprising, we skipped that hard part (for now?). Working with symbols is what we've been doing with IT for a long time.
I'm not sure going all out on trying to base something on human intelligence, i.e. human neuro networks, is a winning move. I see it as if we had been trying to create airplanes that flap their wings. For one, human intelligence already exists, and when you lean back and manage to look at how we do on small and large problems from an outside perspective it has plenty of blind spots and disadvantages.
I'm afraid if we were to manage a hundred percent human level intelligence AI we will be disappointed. Sure, it will be able to do a lot, but in the end, nothing we don't already have.
Right now that would also just be the abstract parts, I think the "moving the body" physical parts in relation to abstract commands would be the far more interesting part, but since current AI is not about using physical sensor data at all, never mind combining it with the abstract stuff...
You seem to be suggesting that current frontier models are only trained on text and not "sensor data". Multi-modal models are trained on the entire internet + vast amounts of synthetic data. Images and videos are key inputs. Camera sensors are capable of capturing much more "sensor data" than the human eye. Neural networks are the worst way to model intelligence, except all other models.
You may find this talk enlightening: https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/ilya-sutskever-openai-2023...