> if you think that the AGI needs to learn from text. As opposed to conducting its own experiments The 2010s saw two basic approaches to building AI. In one co

> if you think that the AGI needs to learn from text. As opposed to conducting its own experiments The 2010s saw two basic approaches to building AI. In one corner there was the Google Brain approach of building NNs that worked with language motivated by use cases like search and Google Translate. They trained models to predict the next words in sequences extracted from the internet. In the other corner there was reinforcement DL mostly championed by DeepMind, where they trained agents to achieve goals in simplified "real world" environments like video games, based on "sensor data". The former approach won completely. Who is still training RL agents to play games? Last I heard, DeepMind have been almost entirely re-allocated to implementing LLM integrations into Google products. It's been years since we heard boasts of beating some new video game benchmark, and the papers coming out on that topic now are mostly looking for ways to combine jointly trained vision/LLM models to reason through physical world scenarios. We've run this experiment for over a decade now. All the results suggest that useful artificial intelligence comes from training on the internet, not birthing some blank slate that rediscovers fire from first principles. So this really isn't an unreasonable perspective for the author to take. Nor is the first statement wrong either. Have we already forgotten the one-sentence open letter by hundreds of assorted experts which said "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war". https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/policy-makers-should-plan-for-superintelligent-ai-even-if-it-never-happens/ https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/policy-makers-should-plan-fo... The only type of human level AI we currently have are LLMs and related models, yet they claimed that mitigating extinction risk should be a "global priority". This is some sort of reverse motte-and-bailey strategy in which existing tech is used to create interest, and then the the imaginary risks of a hypothetical technology is used to demand power.