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I’m getting strong “full self driving by the end of the year (2017)” vibes from this. His business is very hype-based so he’s working the hype machine. AGI is a

I’m getting strong “full self driving by the end of the year (2017)” vibes from this. His business is very hype-based so he’s working the hype machine. AGI is a fantastic promise in this regard because it’s not falsifiable - there is no broadly agreed upon and well understood definition of AGI. Instead the people listening to his promise imagine whatever they want and then get excited. By the time 2025 comes along there will be a new promise. They’ll claim they have AGI but it only handles text, images, and audio, perhaps. Then they will say “and in three years we will double the modalities and have AGI plus” and it will still be broadly meaningless. Meanwhile I’m a robotics engineer and I need systems that can understand large amounts of data in real time and I doubt their 2025 “AGI” will be able to intelligently process LIDAR data. Such narrow systems are hardly general in my eyes, even if they are very compelling chat bots.

timeon 3y ago
> They’ll claim they have AGI but it only handles text, images, and audio, perhaps. We had to rename AI to AGI now when we have 'AI'.
orbital-decay 3y ago
>there is no broadly agreed upon and well understood definition of AGI OpenAI follow their own definition of AGI, and it's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". [0] Whether that includes jobs that require robotics is an open question. [0] https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Robotics in a simulated world perhaps could come under the umbrella of AGI. Building the hardware is definitely out of scope of the field of ML.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Thanks for the reference. I think this only reinforces my point. They’re going to claim something that does economically valuable work on the computer is AGI, but when I hear “most economically valuable work” I think “build buildings, operate factories, grow food”. We’ve just never seen a universal multimodal learner (all modalities) or a system with its own goals and motivations that can learn on its own without massive datasets (meaning things without datasets are hard for it to learn, so how does it for example learn how to do PCB design or CAD modeling), so they’re talking about such a leap it’s hard to fathom. I mean hell take PCB design for example. That’s actually on the computer but there’s no big dataset in existence that actually explains PCB design in a way a system would understand, so approaches that rely on a dataset for training simply can’t begin to solve that task. And if you can’t even do that economically valuable task on the computer then I don’t believe you have AGI. I am quite sure that they’re cooking up some fascinating stuff but I doubt they are going to have a system that can do machine design or PCB design just to name a few important and extremely economically valuable tasks.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    Yeah, obviously anything anyone from OpenAI publicly says is marketing, especially considering that the all-loving cosmic utopia in the link I posted clearly is pure marketing BS. They actually added that definition in 2019, and shifted their priorities from their initial goals - no reason not to do this again any other time.

timeon 3y ago

> They’ll claim they have AGI but it only handles text, images, and audio, perhaps. We had to rename AI to AGI now when we have 'AI'.

orbital-decay 3y ago

>there is no broadly agreed upon and well understood definition of AGI OpenAI follow their own definition of AGI, and it's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". [0] Whether that includes jobs that require robotics is an open question. [0] https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter

zarzavat 3y ago
Robotics in a simulated world perhaps could come under the umbrella of AGI. Building the hardware is definitely out of scope of the field of ML.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Thanks for the reference. I think this only reinforces my point. They’re going to claim something that does economically valuable work on the computer is AGI, but when I hear “most economically valuable work” I think “build buildings, operate factories, grow food”. We’ve just never seen a universal multimodal learner (all modalities) or a system with its own goals and motivations that can learn on its own without massive datasets (meaning things without datasets are hard for it to learn, so how does it for example learn how to do PCB design or CAD modeling), so they’re talking about such a leap it’s hard to fathom. I mean hell take PCB design for example. That’s actually on the computer but there’s no big dataset in existence that actually explains PCB design in a way a system would understand, so approaches that rely on a dataset for training simply can’t begin to solve that task. And if you can’t even do that economically valuable task on the computer then I don’t believe you have AGI. I am quite sure that they’re cooking up some fascinating stuff but I doubt they are going to have a system that can do machine design or PCB design just to name a few important and extremely economically valuable tasks.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Yeah, obviously anything anyone from OpenAI publicly says is marketing, especially considering that the all-loving cosmic utopia in the link I posted clearly is pure marketing BS. They actually added that definition in 2019, and shifted their priorities from their initial goals - no reason not to do this again any other time.