41 ms·

> We don't even know if AGI is possible. My response to a very similar statement is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612641 https://news.ycombinat

> We don't even know if AGI is possible. My response to a very similar statement is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612641 > That's just... not how it's going to be done. I agree. I think there are some critical ingredients missing. Obviously the weights need to be able to update to new data in a semi-online fashion, for example. But I think there are less ingredients missing than there were a decade ago, by a much larger factor than I expected at the time, and a decade from now, the number of missing ingredients might be zero. My uncertainty on this is not because I think GPT is more than it seems,but because it's unclear how much of the amazing cognitive capability that humans have is, under the hood, much simpler than it seems. I really want humanity to exist even ten decades from now; I want my kids to have grandkids. So I care about this even if I don't expect AGI from a 2025 Q1 product launch. And I don't think it's too early to worry about it, just like I don't think 1980 was too early to worry about climate change.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> Reading this is like hearing "there is no evidence that heavier-than-air flight is even possible" being spoken, by a bird. This is a vivid bit of rhetoric to underscore this point, but if you think about it for any length of time it starts to fall apart really, really quickly. The Wright brothers and the dozens if not hundreds of inventors forgotten who came before them drew upon the physics of what they observed in heavier than air flight to create the winged shape we know today that reliably causes lift, and then set about constructing it. That's not what OpenAI is doing. We still do not have a very solid understanding of where our own intelligence emerges from, apart from having particularly large brains relative to our body's size. So, to borrow your metaphor, it is indeed like a bird saying that there's no evidence to say that heavier than air flight is possible, because the bird lives in a world without atmosphere upon which to glide.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Maybe by "we don't know if it's possible" you meant "we don't presently have a step-by-step plan to implement AGI using the tools we already have in our toolbox, and no new ones"? If so then I certainly agree. But when you look at, say, Sora's videos... How certain are you that there's no path between that and the human visual cortex? How certain are you that they aren't solving at least some of the same problems in structurally analogous ways? Given that nature built a visual cortex (more than once!) by applying survival pressure and turning a crank, just how hard can it be? When we apply a bunch of optimization pressure and billions of dollars turning cranks and something eerily similar pops out, that tells me that there's just less magic to our own brain than we thought. Like when spent centuries wondering if our solar system is unique, and then we finally put Kepler up there and it turns out that planets are everywhere you look.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> Reading this is like hearing "there is no evidence that heavier-than-air flight is even possible" being spoken, by a bird. This is a vivid bit of rhetoric to underscore this point, but if you think about it for any length of time it starts to fall apart really, really quickly. The Wright brothers and the dozens if not hundreds of inventors forgotten who came before them drew upon the physics of what they observed in heavier than air flight to create the winged shape we know today that reliably causes lift, and then set about constructing it. That's not what OpenAI is doing. We still do not have a very solid understanding of where our own intelligence emerges from, apart from having particularly large brains relative to our body's size. So, to borrow your metaphor, it is indeed like a bird saying that there's no evidence to say that heavier than air flight is possible, because the bird lives in a world without atmosphere upon which to glide.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
Maybe by "we don't know if it's possible" you meant "we don't presently have a step-by-step plan to implement AGI using the tools we already have in our toolbox, and no new ones"? If so then I certainly agree. But when you look at, say, Sora's videos... How certain are you that there's no path between that and the human visual cortex? How certain are you that they aren't solving at least some of the same problems in structurally analogous ways? Given that nature built a visual cortex (more than once!) by applying survival pressure and turning a crank, just how hard can it be? When we apply a bunch of optimization pressure and billions of dollars turning cranks and something eerily similar pops out, that tells me that there's just less magic to our own brain than we thought. Like when spent centuries wondering if our solar system is unique, and then we finally put Kepler up there and it turns out that planets are everywhere you look.