Anyone trying to connect dots might also look at Altman's Hawking Fellowship appearance at (great-tasting original) Cambridge on 1 November, specifically his an

Anyone trying to connect dots might also look at Altman's Hawking Fellowship appearance at (great-tasting original) Cambridge on 1 November, specifically his answer to one question: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman_there_are_more_breakthroughs_required_in/?rdt=41223 https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman... https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?t=3705 https://youtu.be/NjpNG0CJRMM?t=3705 > *Cambridge Student:* "To get to AGI, can we just keep min maxing language models, or is there another breakthrough that we haven't really found yet to get to AGI?" > *Sam Altman:* "We need another breakthrough. We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that. We can take the hill that we're on and keep climbing it, and the peak of that is still pretty far away. But, within reason, I don't think that doing that will (get us to) AGI. If (for example) super intelligence can't discover novel physics I don't think it's a superintelligence. And teaching it to clone the behavior of humans and human text - I don't think that's going to get there.And so there's this question which has been debated in the field for a long time: what do we have to do in addition to a language model to make a system that can go discover new physics?" [transcription by Reddit's https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ https://www.reddit.com/user/floodgater/ ] The video came out on the 15th. In the time between then and the firing of Altman on the 17th a number of people (including Gary Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-gary-marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/has-sam-altman-gone-full-g... ) picked up on that answer and saw it as a significant shift compared to Altman's earlier bullishness on AGI timelines and deep learning. I haven't been following nearly closely enough to say if that is an accurate conclusion or not. It does at least gesture at the possibility that the board's alleged loss of trust in Altman was because in their eyes he had been promising too much technical progress, too soon. That would obviously be quite a different explanation to eg. the theories that the firing was a coup by anxious decelerationists.