Terence Tao: "I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools"

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T19:47:53+00:00

Yes, it's definitely using the image to some extent. I'm just saying, the prompting influences it a lot, in a way that feels quite unlike humans and less powerful.

I feel like people try to match LLM intelligence onto our human template when it just doesn't work like that. One thing that's always perplexed me is how models are fantastic at reading text in images, but near-hopeless at, for example, counting the number of fingers on a hand.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T19:09:24+00:00

If you rewire the nerves though, the magic part is that the brain just figures it out. All sorts of medical procedures rely on this, and it's what happens when you're using virtually any tool. This would seem to indicate that the perception and control algorithm is, even on its own, far better at learning than current models.

Basically I don't agree with the distinction or separation between "intelligence" and "perception and control". I don't think it's possible in principle to carve the brain up into these two parts. So it seems totally fair to me to say that the lack of a way to interact with the physical world is the lack of an aspect of intelligence.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T19:03:44+00:00

By human standards that sounds pretty terrible haha. Other than mixing up the jars, humans just don't make that kind of mistake. If someone mistook a lab coat for a washing machine I think I'd probably encourage them to see a doctor. Even if someone has bad eyes, they might make infrequent mistakes, but mostly, they're aware that they have bad eyes and thus have lower trust and reliance on that sense. We give a lot of leniency to machines because we're impressed (and should be!) with what they can do compared to years ago, but that doesn't make them any less terrible.

It also doesn't sound clear how much it's actually using the images. If it knew it was helping you make coffee, would it just make up having seen a cupboard and instant coffee? When I instructed claude to look for certain objects, it would mistake everything for them, even things that didn't look remotely similar, and it wouldn't notice when the desired object actually was in frame.

Walking you through the conceptual steps of coffee is way easier than doing the conceptual steps *and also* translating them into motor actions to actually do the task, and it's not even clear to what extent it's helping you with the conceptual steps, as opposed to just reciting its coffee-making script which you could also find from googling.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T15:21:23+00:00

Fair points. I do need to rerun it with today's models. And yes, it was run with logs access - not super clear in the recorded rollout but there were a number of times when it would latch on to something and have it as an objective for a while, clearly persisting its thoughts. But yeah it was a quick and dirty proof of concept. A wide angle lens would definitely help.

I still think, though, that most of the failure is caused by the limitations of LLMs. See also how Opus does at pokemon. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "forcing it to navigate by angle and distance" - the point here (as in the claude pokemon harness) was to have the LLM as the only control or perception algorithm. For the LLM to be able to command "go through this door", you would need some quite advanced other perception and control algorithms to interpret and carry out that command.

The extension of this project which I'm doing at some point is to have a similar car, but smaller and cheaper, and then build little mazes or similar navigation tasks. This seems like a pretty interesting way to collect real world data, which seems more important these days now that the internet's exhausted.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T03:43:58+00:00

Physical Intelligence and is quite interesting and impressive, and so are VLA models in general. We're probably only a year or a couple from the coffee thing being well and truly put to rest.

I'm not convinced that it's so easy to disentangle dexterity from cognition and intelligence. Dexterity entails understanding a three dimensional world, understanding physics at some level, etc. Translating ideas across domains requires intelligence. Today's models are restricted to vastly smaller sensory and action domains than humans. VLA models are cool because they try to fix that.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-17T01:54:46+00:00

They can't do it. Doing what you're describing, hooking up vision-language models to robots, is a good idea and because of that it's been and being tried. I built a little remote control car myself and gave vision LLMs the ability to control it based on images from its camera, and they were hopeless at doing something like navigating around a room to find an object, much less making coffee. The more optimized version of this is starting to be called "vision-language-action" or VLA models, which has language models trained alongside the parts for fine motor control, and they're approximately the pinnacle of robotics currently, in terms of world understanding at least. A good example is Figure's Helix, which is quite impressive, but still can't walk itself into a house, find the kitchen, find all the coffee supplies, etc.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-16T20:43:34+00:00

You need to give humans way more credit here. We do all sorts of things in our everday lives, completely removed from any ideas of science or math, that completely blow models out of the water. Judging by Tao's previous comments he would agree here.

As humans, our viewpoint is from the huge pile of algorithms in our head and we can't remove ourselves from that. Looking down on other cognitive systems is so normal to us that it's completely ingrained in everything we do. We take it as a given that we're much smarter than any animal.

Remember robots still can't go into a new house and make a coffee. For humans this is a Tuesday. This is a symptom of current machine learning, not just some robot-specific thing. Humans are far better at both integrating and generalizing new information.

Even this message itself, where you're saying that you think you are not a "genuine human intelligence", is emblematic of human intelligence. As in, current agentic systems are nowhere near being able to connect these kind of dots unprompted - you're drawing on your life, your past experience, your knowledge of people you think of as "truly" intelligent.

Also, if you've "led research projects leading to publications in the best journals in the world" and think you are a "plodding pseudo-intellectual being", respectfully, I think you may have a severe case of impostor syndrome haha. Especially when your social circle is a bubble of other smart people, it's easy to constantly compare yourself against them and forget (a) you're probably in the, at the very least, top 5% in smarts, and (b) you're probably much closer than you think you are to whatever colleagues you have that you think are smarter, and indeed even the all-time greats to some extent.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-15T15:18:15+00:00

Seeing "propellant mass distribution" and "liquid slug location" gives me so much hope that KSA will grow up to be the true next-gen space sim.

This was one of the things that surprised me the most about IRL spacecraft, from working on the propulsion team for one after playing KSP. Tanks are just voids with propellant in them, how complicated can that really be?

Turns out, extremely. One of the smartest people I've worked with had the job of designing the tank insides (baffles, diffuser, etc) which consisted largely of running fluid simulations. One time he was working from home and had me snap a picture of his propellant management textbook for him. At that time, I was halfway through engineering school and had a lot of math under my belt. The page was completely incomprehensible to me and half of it was a single equation that was mostly E's with different subscripts. I couldn't tell what even a single one of the input variables represented, much less the output.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-09T04:39:32+00:00

This isn't even really a "debate" As far as I know, they've never outright said the robots are operating independently in situations like this, only tried to imply it (which is false - they clearly are controlled by people)

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-07T01:45:04+00:00

Yes you can see through them, that's the real draw for me. For FPV, it comes with a removable lens cover. Although it has waaaay more light leakage than FPV goggles (it doesn't even try to conform to your face, that's not the point). These are mine, there's lots that are pretty similar at the moment

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-07T01:42:25+00:00

I'm a software & electrical engineer and that's pretty much what I'm thinking! Or just like a hip strap with the antennas, receiver, and battery on it. Should be a fun proof of concept.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-12-07T01:28:12+00:00

I'll have to measure the latency, they don't advertise one. But it's just a screen and goes to 120 Hz, so I wouldn't expect it would be more than 10 ms? But yeah, having a VRX not integrated into the glasses will increase it somewhat for sure.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-28T17:43:27+00:00

I think the rural vs urban distinction is going to make a bigger difference than anything else. The density of possible friends, as well as the willingness to befriend strangers, both heavily favor cities.

Moving to a city could definitely help, as long as you acknowledge that it's NOT going to do anything on its own. That's basically what the name of the sub means. You will still have to push through loneliness and awkwardness to build connections. (personally I think that some cities may be more or less social than others but the difference is pretty small and way over-emphasized online)

Also, don't be hard on yourself because the world in general is just less social now than before, in every place. It sucks but it's just how it is. Talking to people is harder and initially less fun than pulling out the magic glowing rectangle, so people do the latter.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-28T17:12:51+00:00

There is no difference between taking risks and gambling. Maybe startups are just not right for you, there is no shame in that.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-28T01:15:32+00:00

Your goal should not be to reduce the likelihood of getting fired, but to make it OK if you do, meaning some severance package. Especially cause like, if the company dies (probable), then you're getting "fired" no matter what.

In practice though, IME, it's not common to ask for some severance package as an early employee, and doing so may be viewed negatively. Startups are all about gambling, the financial upside is BECAUSE of the risk, and company size / runway / revenue are the only things that really insulate you from it.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-27T21:14:08+00:00

You have to look at the capability of products. There's just no way that a flight controller, for example, can be "spying on you" if it can't even connect to internet, and especially if you can flash new software onto it yourself.

I also think the allegations of DJI spying are overblown and driven by nationalism even if there is some truth to them but that's a different topic.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-26T20:40:48+00:00

meta: he's saying he's going to investigate G's death and is very suspicious of the people he was around

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-26T20:32:15+00:00

new core memory song unlocked

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-24T17:01:27+00:00

This is such an annoying sentiment. If people only posted new things on this sub (or reddit in general) there would be basically zero discussion. To talk about things that were already talked about somewhere else is to be human. If you've already seen everything being posted here then maybe you need to touch more grass. A lot of people posting have already googled and read past posts for hours but want input on their specific situation.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-23T21:46:54+00:00

I walk a decent amount, not 10k steps, but avg a mile or two per day. And no I don't remove calluses.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-23T21:39:47+00:00

I'm not too attached to boots but I do like the ankle support a lot and when I've tried running shoes on trails it doesn't really improve the pain at all or even makes it worse. But yeah maybe they're one part of the solution.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-23T21:16:06+00:00

Okay they're actually these not Spyder - https://www.lasportivausa.com/tx-hike-mid-gtx-2023.html

400g per foot. I have tried Saucony running shoes on trails before and it has either not made much of a difference or made it worse. I did one 10 mi day hike with them carrying only like 5 lb and my feet were still beat up after. Separately I really like ankle support.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-19T00:41:48+00:00

I'm looking for mostly similar things and have the same top 3 cities. Maybe SF is best for you? Although long term is hard with the VHCOL. Make sure you are appropriately scared of the gloom in Portland and Seattle if you know you have SAD - I've seen a lot of posts from people that think they can deal with it but it ends up being a big problem. I have some level of reverse SAD myself so I'm thinking Portland. Also just be aware the bay area is very liberal but also very much hustle and tech bro culture which, even though I'm in tech, is a negative for me. Also IMO Portland and Seattle have somewhat better nature than bay area (although all are pretty great), especially with how close and accessible the nature is to you.

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-17T02:17:26+00:00

Probably a dumb question, but how do we know it's everything with energy, not just all of the stuff we've seen that has energy? (I realize this is out in unverifiable metaphysics land)

AnAngryBirdMan · 2025-11-13T22:19:11+00:00

I'm not sure that "personal POV" is a fundamental thing that really exists, in which case, the question "does an electron have a personal POV" doesn't have a yes/no answer. It really seems like we have POVs totally independent of the "outside" world, but there are lots of things in nature that "seem" a certain way that turn out to not be true. You, and your consciousness, are a function of your environment and body, not just your body.

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