There are two significant phases of intelligence, the first is the knowledge acquisition phase and the second is the knowledge utilisation phase. The knowledge acquisition stage is available by default in many animals but what makes humans unique is that our ability to utilize knowledge is far higher than most mammals.
But even humans individually and as a whole utilize only a very tiny fraction of the available knowledge. For an individual your acquired knowledge base, that is knowledge you have acquired both consciously through study or unconsciously through just existing, is far more than what you are able to utilize.
This is also similar for humanity as a whole, the knowledge we possess both in written form or in other forms far outweighs our ability to utilize it.
The core part of what we could call general intelligence is really more about knowledge utilization and less about acquisition. Because what is useful is only what we can utilize, the rest is just memory.
For example there is a paper just published right now this moment in some journal that contains a piece of knowledge that when integrated with some other pieces could lead to something really remarkable, but you don't know about it. It's just one more paper on the pile, and there are things being put out there that even if you knew about it, would be completely useless to you because there are other parts out there that you don't have access to or don't even know that you need.
Our ability to create knowledge is far more than our ability to ingest or even utilize it. We could be sitting on the solution to many problems that face humanity, including those that we have deemed impossible, but we do not know where these knowledge pieces are because our search for knowledge is no different from instinctually groping in the dark.
This is why the current LLM AGI scam is not helpful because we are not addressing the core part of intelligence which is more about utilization and less about acquisition.
So while LLMs are helping us extract the knowledge we already have and presenting it in a way that is more efficient for human consumption because of our low information input bandwidth, thing like chatGPT help us access large bodies of information in a conversational manner, which is a great way to learn about many things. Our ability to utilize the information we have is still very minimal, in fact when you think about general intelligence think more about utilizing information to solve real-world problems not just amassing or generating information.
So what is the way forward, we have to think about ways to utilize more of the information we have to solve problems, if we are to automate human intelligence then we must find ways to automate what is for lack of a better word, creativity and by creativity, I do not only refer to the creation of artistic pieces, I am thinking more of what you would call engineering creativity, like the kind of creativity that solves problems in the world like better aeroplanes and bridges, or even mathematical creativity like the one that brought us stuff like error correction, etc.
As useful as LLMs are they are only part of the solution to the problem of intelligence, solution synthesis is a far more difficult problem. In my opinion, I think the most optimal way to present solutions to all kinds of problems would be in the form of computer programs, for now I think they are more generic in expressibility than mathematical equations or engineering designs.
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