In plain words: A recent proof claims that learning human-like intelligence from data is too computationally hard to ever achieve. But it quietly assumes how the training examples are spread out, and fixing that gap runs into trouble: "human-like" is hard to define and each system's built-in preferences matter.
Abstract · Barriers to Complexity-Theoretic Proofs that "AGI" Using Machine Learning is Impossible
A recent paper (van Rooij et al. 2024) claims to have proved that achieving human-like intelligence using learning from data is intractable in a complexity-theoretic sense. We point out that the proof relies on an unjustified assumption about the distribution of (input, output) tuples in the data. We briefly discuss that assumption in the context of two fundamental barriers to repairing the proof: the need to precisely define ``human-like," and the need to account for the fact that a particular machine learning system will have particular inductive biases that are key to the analysis. Another attempt to repair the proof, by focusing on subsets of the data, faces barriers in terms of defining the subsets.
Michael Guerzhoy
arXiv:2411.06498 · cs.AI, cs.CC · submitted Nov 10, 2024 · updated Apr 4, 2026
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