Gary Marcus: belief

Transcript context

…Even really big ones? Even pretty big ones. I mean, there's a video, I think, of a kid doing 7 discs lightning fast, like in 2 minutes on YouTube. A kid who enjoys it, he's probably 12 or 15 or whatever. I'm sure he can do 8 disks if he wants to because it's a recursive algorithm. I'm sure he's learned it. And so I think some humans can do a problem like that. Some humans, if they want to, can do arithmetic. We humans do get into memory limitations. But you shouldn't expect that AGI should. There is actually like a we should pause for a moment on definition of AGI, right? It has had varied definitions. The 1 that I always imagine is it should be at least as good as humans in a bunch of things and better in certain ones. So I would not be satisfied with an AGI that can't do arithmetic. I'd be like this, you know, yes, okay, it's equivalent to people in this respect. But I would actually expect more. And especially if we're talking about the risks that we're, concerning. I think we're really talking about a form of AGI that probably can do all the short term memory things that people can't and has the versatility and flexibility of humans. You can argue about that and and, you know, I I would say that like the weakest AGI would be it's as good as Joe Sixpack who's really not very good at reasoning, has is full of confirmation bias, has not gone to graduate school, doesn't have, you know, critical reasoning. You'd say, okay, that's AGI because it's it does what Joe Sixpack does. I think most of the safety arguments are really around AGI that's at least as smart as like you know, most smart people. Smart people can in fact do things like Tower Of Hanoi. And certainly, know, another example I gave you was chess. Right? 6 year olds can learn to follow the rules of chess. O3 will do things like have a queen jump overnight, which is not possible. And so the failures there are quite striking and not something you need even an expert to do. Yeah. So I guess I would say it feels to me like we're making progress on these things, or at least that these barriers are not going to be barriers for long. I think, for example, that maybe the…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.