4 ms·

Would be interested to know how you reached that 40 years number. I don't think we are even remotely close to AGI, 40 years to me seems extremely optimistic. Th

Would be interested to know how you reached that 40 years number. I don't think we are even remotely close to AGI, 40 years to me seems extremely optimistic. That's within my lifetime.

adrianN 9y ago
They're a scientist: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  That's a little sadder now that I've had the "fourth quarter next year" thing happen to me personally.
ewjordan 9y ago
Probably the same way everyone does, by pulling it out of thin air as a guess. When nobody even knows what theoretical breakthroughs are necessary, you'll always end up with a scattershot all over the place, even amongst experts. Try asking working mathematicians how long until the Riemann hypothesis is resolved one way or another, or look at what people were saying about Fermat's Last Theorem up until it was solved. What we do know is that current techniques won't get us close to AGI, so something new is needed (or perhaps like backprop, something old will work once we have enough compute power). Personally I'm bullish on AGI because I have strikingly low faith in the ability of evolution to operate very effectively as a tool for algorithm discovery, so I suspect that once we've hit the compute threshold we'll find that many different algorithms can do the trick, and 40 years is probably not out of the question for us to hit that point (or 10, or 100), depending who you talk to about what the compute threshold might be. I'd caution against putting too much weight in what experts say, though, since with a tiny few set of exceptions anyone working on "AI" today is actually just working on narrow AI, which is, as someone put it, just glorified linear regression. Those tools will almost certainly be part of the solution, but only in the sense that the classical theory of Diophantine equations was part of Weil's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem - they are not the core of the theoretical approach.
- evc123 9y ago
  Evolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/ http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther... Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads shouldn't be viewed as trivial.
  - backpropaganda 9y ago
    The massive compute/time advantage evolution has makes me bearish about AGI. We really need to fix our compute capabilities before we can start overruning evolution. The math dictates it'll happen, but exponentially slowly if we don't innovate in compute.
    - espadrine 9y ago
      There's more to the story, too: advances on top of CRISP may give us better tools to self-improve the species, accelerating evolution. Personally, I'm bearish about AGI because I believe we will eventually realize that the brain is a glorified linear regression too, with a custom wiring to help learn language and vision.
      - computerex 9y ago
        What do you mean when you say that the brain is a glorified linear regression?
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >What we do know is that current techniques won't get us close to AGI, so something new is needed (or perhaps like backprop, something old will work once we have enough compute power). With backprop we didn't just need bigger machines, we needed better algorithms, palliatives for the exploding-gradient problem that made values exceed our numerical representations, and then hardware specifically designed for doing the matrix-ops involved. If I saw something capable of speeding up probabilistic program inference the way GPUs sped up backprop, I'd start saying we should expect to see powerful AI applications quite soon.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Houshalter 9y ago
40 years is very pessimistic. The median estimate given by AI experts is in the 2040s. Moore's law will surpass the human brain before then.

Would be interested to know how you reached that 40 years number. I don't think we are even remotely close to AGI, 40 years to me seems extremely optimistic. That's within my lifetime.

adrianN 9y ago

They're a scientist: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
That's a little sadder now that I've had the "fourth quarter next year" thing happen to me personally.

ewjordan 9y ago

Probably the same way everyone does, by pulling it out of thin air as a guess. When nobody even knows what theoretical breakthroughs are necessary, you'll always end up with a scattershot all over the place, even amongst experts. Try asking working mathematicians how long until the Riemann hypothesis is resolved one way or another, or look at what people were saying about Fermat's Last Theorem up until it was solved. What we do know is that current techniques won't get us close to AGI, so something new is needed (or perhaps like backprop, something old will work once we have enough compute power). Personally I'm bullish on AGI because I have strikingly low faith in the ability of evolution to operate very effectively as a tool for algorithm discovery, so I suspect that once we've hit the compute threshold we'll find that many different algorithms can do the trick, and 40 years is probably not out of the question for us to hit that point (or 10, or 100), depending who you talk to about what the compute threshold might be. I'd caution against putting too much weight in what experts say, though, since with a tiny few set of exceptions anyone working on "AI" today is actually just working on narrow AI, which is, as someone put it, just glorified linear regression. Those tools will almost certainly be part of the solution, but only in the sense that the classical theory of Diophantine equations was part of Weil's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem - they are not the core of the theoretical approach.

evc123 9y ago
Evolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/ http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther... Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads shouldn't be viewed as trivial.
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  The massive compute/time advantage evolution has makes me bearish about AGI. We really need to fix our compute capabilities before we can start overruning evolution. The math dictates it'll happen, but exponentially slowly if we don't innovate in compute.
  - espadrine 9y ago
    There's more to the story, too: advances on top of CRISP may give us better tools to self-improve the species, accelerating evolution. Personally, I'm bearish about AGI because I believe we will eventually realize that the brain is a glorified linear regression too, with a custom wiring to help learn language and vision.
    - computerex 9y ago
      What do you mean when you say that the brain is a glorified linear regression?
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>What we do know is that current techniques won't get us close to AGI, so something new is needed (or perhaps like backprop, something old will work once we have enough compute power). With backprop we didn't just need bigger machines, we needed better algorithms, palliatives for the exploding-gradient problem that made values exceed our numerical representations, and then hardware specifically designed for doing the matrix-ops involved. If I saw something capable of speeding up probabilistic program inference the way GPUs sped up backprop, I'd start saying we should expect to see powerful AI applications quite soon.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Houshalter 9y ago

40 years is very pessimistic. The median estimate given by AI experts is in the 2040s. Moore's law will surpass the human brain before then.