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What are the core limitations of transformers and backpropagation for building AGI?

transformersbackpropagationcatastrophic forgettingcontinual learning

Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

The train-then-freeze design of today’s models is the wrong shape for a mind that keeps learning.

Because of the underlying backpropagation algorithm, learning and inference are separate phases. You train a model, you freeze it, and then you use it. If you try to fill the network up with knowledge and keep going, at some point you get catastrophic forgetting: adding a little new knowledge causes it to forget a lot of old knowledge. These systems know a lot, but they don’t reorganize themselves in real time the way parts of the human brain do.

Source: Rethinking the AGI Race, with Benjamin Goertzel (eCornell Keynote)


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