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>> My personal threshold for AGI is literally: discover something new and significant in science (preferably biology) that is almost certainly true by describin

>> My personal threshold for AGI is literally: discover something new and significant in science (preferably biology) that is almost certainly true by describing an experiment that could be replicated by a large number of scientists and whose interpretation is unambiguous. Done many years ago (2004), without a hint of LLMs or neural networks whatsoever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist Results significant enough to get a publication in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02236 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02236 Obligatory Wired article popularising the result: Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input. Scientists designed “Adam” to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next. https://www.wired.com/2009/04/robotscientist/ https://www.wired.com/2009/04/robotscientist/

dekhn 4y ago
that's a bunch of hooey, that article like most in nature is massively overhyped and simply not at all what I meant. (I work in the field, know those authors, talked to them, elucidated what they actually did, and concluded it was, like many results, simply massively overhyped)
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. In the interest of full disclosure, one of the authors (Stephen Muggleton) is my thesis advisor. I've also met Ross King a few times. Can you elaborate? Why is it a "bunch of hooey"? And btw, what do you mean by "overhyped"? Most people on HN haven't even heard of "Adam", or "Eve" (the sequel). I only knew about them because I'm the PhD student of one of the authors. We are in a thread about an open letter urging companies to stop working towards AGI, essentially. In what sense is the poor, forgotten robot scientist "overhyped", compared to that?

dekhn 4y ago

that's a bunch of hooey, that article like most in nature is massively overhyped and simply not at all what I meant. (I work in the field, know those authors, talked to them, elucidated what they actually did, and concluded it was, like many results, simply massively overhyped)

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
That's an interesting perspective. In the interest of full disclosure, one of the authors (Stephen Muggleton) is my thesis advisor. I've also met Ross King a few times. Can you elaborate? Why is it a "bunch of hooey"? And btw, what do you mean by "overhyped"? Most people on HN haven't even heard of "Adam", or "Eve" (the sequel). I only knew about them because I'm the PhD student of one of the authors. We are in a thread about an open letter urging companies to stop working towards AGI, essentially. In what sense is the poor, forgotten robot scientist "overhyped", compared to that?