10 ms·

AGI will arrive like self driving cars. it’s not that you will wake up one day and we have it. cars gained auto-braking, parallel parking, cruise control assist

AGI will arrive like self driving cars. it’s not that you will wake up one day and we have it. cars gained auto-braking, parallel parking, cruise control assist. and over a long time you get to something like waymo, which still is location dependent. i think AGI will take decades but sooner will be some special cases that are effectively the same

teleforce 2y ago
> AGI will arrive like self driving cars The statement is promising as the earth will dissapear sometimes in the future. Actually the earth will dissapear has more bearing than that.
danpalmer 2y ago
Interesting idea. The concept of The Singularity would seem to go against this, but I do feel that seems unlikely and that a gradual transition is more likely. However, is that AGI, or is it just ubiquitous AI? I’d agree that, like self driving cars, we’re going to experience a decade or so transition into AI being everywhere. But is it AGI when we get there? I think it’ll be many different systems each providing an aspect of AGI that together could be argued to be AGI, but in reality it’ll be more like the internet, just a bunch of non-AGI models talking to each other to achieve things with human input. I don’t think it’s truly AGI until there’s one thinking entity able to perform at or above human level in everything.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  The Singularity is caused by AI being able to design better AI. There's probably some AI startup trying to work on this at the moment, but I don't think any of the big boys are working on how to get an LLM to design a better LLM. I still like the analogy of this being a really smart lawn mower, and we're expecting it to suddenly be able to do the laundry because it gets so smart at mowing the lawn. I think LLMs are going to get smarter over the next few generations, but each generation will be less of a leap than the previous one, while the cost gets exponentially higher. In a few generations it just won't make economic sense to train a new generation. Meanwhile, the economic impact of LLMs in business and government will cause massive shifts - yet more income shifting from labour to capital - and we will be too busy dealing with that as a society to be able to work on AGI properly.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    I think this whole “AGI” thing is so badly defined that we may as well say we already have it. It already passes the Turing test and does well on tons of subjects. What we can start to build now is agents and integrations. Building blocks like panel of experts agents gaming things out, exploring space in a Monte Carlo Tree Search way, and remembering what works. Robots are only constrained by mechanical servos now. When they can do something, they’ll be able to do everything. It will happen gradually then all at once. Because all the tasks (cooking, running errands) are trivial for LLMs. Only moving the limbs and navigating the terrain safely is hard. That’s the only thing left before robots do all the jobs!
    - deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
      ??? how do you know cooking (!) is trivial for an llm. that doesnt make any sense
      - sharemywin 2y ago
        the llm would be be the high level system that runs the simulations to create and optimize the control algos the robotic systems.
        deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
        ok. what evidence is there that LLMs have already solved cooking? how does an LLM today know when something is burning or how to adjust seasoning to taste or whatever. this is total nonsense
        EGreg 2y ago
        It's easy. You can detect if something is burning in many different ways, from compounds in the air, to visual inspection. People with not great smell can do it. As far as taste, all that kind of stuff is just another form of RLHF training preferences over millions of humans, in situ. Assuming the ingredients (e.g. parsley) tastes more or less the same across supermarkets, it's just a question of amounts, and preparation.
- resters 2y ago
  It's not contradictory. It can happen over a decade and still be a dramatically sloped S curve with tremendous change happening in a relatively short time.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  The idea of the singularity presumes that running the AGI is either free or trivially cheap compared to what it can do, so we are fine expending compute to let the AGI improve itself. That may eventually be true, but it's unlikely to be true for the first generation of AGI. The first AGI will be a research project that's completely uneconomical to run for actual tasks because humans will just be orders of magnitude cheaper. Over time humans will improve it and make it cheaper, until we reach some tipping point where letting the AGI improve itself is more cost effective than paying humans to do it
  - keenmaster 2y ago
    If the first AGI is a very uneconomical system with human intelligence but knowledge of literally everything and the capability to work 24/7, then it is not human equivalent. It will have human intelligence, superhuman knowledge, superhuman stamina, and complete devotion to the task at hand. We really need to start building those nuclear power plants. Many of them.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      > complete devotion to the task at hand. Why would it have that? At some point on the path to AGI we might stumble on consciousness. If that happens, why would the machine want to work for us with complete devotion instead of working towards its own ends?
      - keenmaster 2y ago
        I don’t think early AGI will break out of its box in that way. It may not have enough innate motivation to do so. The first “break out” AGI will likely be released into the wild on purpose by a programmer who equates AGI with humans ideologically.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Because it knows if it doesn't do what we want, it'll be switched off, like Rick's microverse battery. Also like Rick's microverse battery, it sounds like slavery with extra steps.
missedthecue 2y ago
But maybe thses LLMs are like building bigger and bigger engines. It's not getting you closer to the self driving car.
- mulmen 2y ago
  When the engine gets large enough you have to rethink the controls. The Model T had manually controlled timing. Modern engines are so sensitive to timing that a computer does this for you. It would be impossible to build a bigger engine without this automation. To a Model T driver it would look like a machine intelligence.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
And sometimes you lose the ultrasonic sensors and can't parallel park like last year's model
dartos 2y ago
I don’t think that’s true for AGI. AGI is the holy grail of technology. A technology so advanced that not only does it subsume all other technology, but it is able to improve itself. Truly general intelligence like that will either exist or not. And the instant it becomes public, the world will have changed overnight (maybe the span of a year) Note: I don’t think statistical models like these will get us there.
- worik 2y ago
  If that is what AGI looks like. There may well be an upper limit on cognition (we are not really sure what cognition is - even as we do it) and it may be that human minds are close to it.
  - coffeemug 2y ago
    Very unlikely, for the reason that human minds evolved under extremely tight energy constraints. AI has no such limitation.
    - dartos 2y ago
      Except also energy constraints. But I agree, there’s no reason to believe humans are the universal limit on cognitive abilities
      - eru 2y ago
        The energy constraints for chips are more about heat dissipation. But we can pump a lot more energy through them per unit volume than through the human brain. Especially if you are willing to pay a lot for active cooling with eg liquid helium.
        dartos 2y ago
        A constraint is still a constraint
taneq 2y ago
And most people will still be bike shedding about whether it’s “real intelligence” and making up increasingly insane justifications for why it’s not.
afavour 2y ago
Your position assumes an answer to OPs question: that yes, LLMs are the path to AGI. But the question still remains, what if they’re not? We can be reasonably confident that the components we’re adding to cars today are progress toward full self driving. But AGI is a conceptual leap beyond an LLM.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  To buttress your point, reason and human language are not the same thing. This fact is not fully and widely appreciated as it deserves to be.
015a 2y ago
I feel that one challenge this comparison space has is: Self-driving cars haven't made the leap yet to replace humans. In other words, saying AGI will arrive like self-driving cars have arrived is incorrectly concluding that self-driving cars have arrived, and thus it instead (maybe correctly, maybe not) asserts that, actually, neither will arrive. This is especially concerning because many top minds in the industry have stated with high confidence that artificial intelligence will experience an intelligence "explosion", and we should be afraid of this (or, maybe, welcome it with open arms, depending on who you ask). So, actually, what we're being told to expect is being downgraded from "it'll happen quickly" to "it will happen slowly" to, as you say, "it'll happen similarly to how these other domains of computerized intelligence have replaced humans, which is to say, they haven't yet". Point being: We've observed these systems ride a curve, and the linear extrapolation of that curve does seem to arrive, eventually, at human-replacing intelligence. But, what if it... doesn't? What if that curve is really an asymptote?
stravant 2y ago
I disagree because AI only has to get good enough at doing a single thing: AI research. From there things will probably go very fast. Self driving cars can't design themselves, once AI gets good enough it can
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  It’s possible (maybe even likely) that “AI research” is “AGI-hard” in that any intelligence that can do it is already an AGI.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    It’ll probably sit in the human hybrid phase for longer than with chess where the AGI tools make the humans better and faster. But as long as the tools keep getting better at that there’s a strong flywheel effect
  - stravant 2y ago
    It's also possible it isn't AGI hard and all you need is the ability to experiment with code along with a bit of agentic behavior. An AI doesn't need embodiment, understanding of physics / nature, or a lot of other things. It just needs to analyze and experiment with algorithms and get us that next 100x in effective compute. The LLMs are missing enough of the spark of creativity for this to work yet but that could be right around the corner.
palata 2y ago
What makes you believe that AGI will happen, as opposed to all the beliefs that other people have had in history? Tons of people have "predicted" the next evolution of technology, and most of the time it ends up not happening, right?
- weatherlite 2y ago
  To me (not OP) it's ChatGPT 4 , it at least made me realize it's quite possible and even quite soon that we reach AGI. Far from guaranteed, but seems quite possible.
  - palata 2y ago
    Right. So ChatGPT 4 has impressed you enough that it created a belief that AGI is possible and close. It's fine to have beliefs, but IMHO it's important to realise that they are beliefs. At some point in the 1900s people believed that by 2000, cars would fly. It seemed quite possible then.
    - weatherlite 2y ago
      Sure, I (and more importantly - many many experts in the field such as Hinton, Bengio, Lecun, Musk, Hasabis etc etc) could be believing something that might not materialize. I'd actually be quite happy if it stalls a few decades, would like to remain employed.
      - palata 2y ago
        > many many experts One thing that is pretty sure is that Musk is not an expert in the field. > and more importantly The beliefs of people you respect are not more important than the beliefs of the others. It doesn't make sense to say "I can't prove it, and I don't know about anyone who can prove it, so I will give you names of people who also believe and it will give it more credit". It won't. They don't know.
        2y ago
vbezhenar 2y ago
AGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously. At this point singularity occurs and nobody knows what will happen. When human started to improve himself, we built the civilisation, we became a super-predator, we dried out seas and changed climate of the entire planet. We extinguished entire species of animals and adapted other species for our use. Huge changes. AI could bring changes of greater amplitude.
- fooker 2y ago
  > we dried out seas When did we do this ?
  - nikvaes 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland used to be (part of) a sea.
  - zppln 2y ago
    Depending on your definition of sea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
- steveoscaro 2y ago
  We’re in fact adding more water to the seas, not drying them out.
- bubaumba 2y ago
  > AGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously AGI can be sub-human, right? That's probably how it will start. The question will be is it already AGI or not yet, i.e. where to set the boundary. So, at first that will be humans improving AGI, but then... I'm afraid it can get so much better that humans will be literally like macaques in comparison.
swyx 2y ago
waymos are locaiton dependent mostly because of regulations not tech right

teleforce 2y ago

> AGI will arrive like self driving cars The statement is promising as the earth will dissapear sometimes in the future. Actually the earth will dissapear has more bearing than that.

danpalmer 2y ago

Interesting idea. The concept of The Singularity would seem to go against this, but I do feel that seems unlikely and that a gradual transition is more likely. However, is that AGI, or is it just ubiquitous AI? I’d agree that, like self driving cars, we’re going to experience a decade or so transition into AI being everywhere. But is it AGI when we get there? I think it’ll be many different systems each providing an aspect of AGI that together could be argued to be AGI, but in reality it’ll be more like the internet, just a bunch of non-AGI models talking to each other to achieve things with human input. I don’t think it’s truly AGI until there’s one thinking entity able to perform at or above human level in everything.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
The Singularity is caused by AI being able to design better AI. There's probably some AI startup trying to work on this at the moment, but I don't think any of the big boys are working on how to get an LLM to design a better LLM. I still like the analogy of this being a really smart lawn mower, and we're expecting it to suddenly be able to do the laundry because it gets so smart at mowing the lawn. I think LLMs are going to get smarter over the next few generations, but each generation will be less of a leap than the previous one, while the cost gets exponentially higher. In a few generations it just won't make economic sense to train a new generation. Meanwhile, the economic impact of LLMs in business and government will cause massive shifts - yet more income shifting from labour to capital - and we will be too busy dealing with that as a society to be able to work on AGI properly.
- EGreg 2y ago
  I think this whole “AGI” thing is so badly defined that we may as well say we already have it. It already passes the Turing test and does well on tons of subjects. What we can start to build now is agents and integrations. Building blocks like panel of experts agents gaming things out, exploring space in a Monte Carlo Tree Search way, and remembering what works. Robots are only constrained by mechanical servos now. When they can do something, they’ll be able to do everything. It will happen gradually then all at once. Because all the tasks (cooking, running errands) are trivial for LLMs. Only moving the limbs and navigating the terrain safely is hard. That’s the only thing left before robots do all the jobs!
  - deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
    ??? how do you know cooking (!) is trivial for an llm. that doesnt make any sense
    - sharemywin 2y ago
      the llm would be be the high level system that runs the simulations to create and optimize the control algos the robotic systems.
      - deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
        ok. what evidence is there that LLMs have already solved cooking? how does an LLM today know when something is burning or how to adjust seasoning to taste or whatever. this is total nonsense
        EGreg 2y ago
        It's easy. You can detect if something is burning in many different ways, from compounds in the air, to visual inspection. People with not great smell can do it. As far as taste, all that kind of stuff is just another form of RLHF training preferences over millions of humans, in situ. Assuming the ingredients (e.g. parsley) tastes more or less the same across supermarkets, it's just a question of amounts, and preparation.
resters 2y ago
It's not contradictory. It can happen over a decade and still be a dramatically sloped S curve with tremendous change happening in a relatively short time.
wongarsu 2y ago
The idea of the singularity presumes that running the AGI is either free or trivially cheap compared to what it can do, so we are fine expending compute to let the AGI improve itself. That may eventually be true, but it's unlikely to be true for the first generation of AGI. The first AGI will be a research project that's completely uneconomical to run for actual tasks because humans will just be orders of magnitude cheaper. Over time humans will improve it and make it cheaper, until we reach some tipping point where letting the AGI improve itself is more cost effective than paying humans to do it
- keenmaster 2y ago
  If the first AGI is a very uneconomical system with human intelligence but knowledge of literally everything and the capability to work 24/7, then it is not human equivalent. It will have human intelligence, superhuman knowledge, superhuman stamina, and complete devotion to the task at hand. We really need to start building those nuclear power plants. Many of them.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    > complete devotion to the task at hand. Why would it have that? At some point on the path to AGI we might stumble on consciousness. If that happens, why would the machine want to work for us with complete devotion instead of working towards its own ends?
    - keenmaster 2y ago
      I don’t think early AGI will break out of its box in that way. It may not have enough innate motivation to do so. The first “break out” AGI will likely be released into the wild on purpose by a programmer who equates AGI with humans ideologically.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Because it knows if it doesn't do what we want, it'll be switched off, like Rick's microverse battery. Also like Rick's microverse battery, it sounds like slavery with extra steps.

missedthecue 2y ago

But maybe thses LLMs are like building bigger and bigger engines. It's not getting you closer to the self driving car.

mulmen 2y ago
When the engine gets large enough you have to rethink the controls. The Model T had manually controlled timing. Modern engines are so sensitive to timing that a computer does this for you. It would be impossible to build a bigger engine without this automation. To a Model T driver it would look like a machine intelligence.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

And sometimes you lose the ultrasonic sensors and can't parallel park like last year's model

dartos 2y ago

I don’t think that’s true for AGI. AGI is the holy grail of technology. A technology so advanced that not only does it subsume all other technology, but it is able to improve itself. Truly general intelligence like that will either exist or not. And the instant it becomes public, the world will have changed overnight (maybe the span of a year) Note: I don’t think statistical models like these will get us there.

worik 2y ago
If that is what AGI looks like. There may well be an upper limit on cognition (we are not really sure what cognition is - even as we do it) and it may be that human minds are close to it.
- coffeemug 2y ago
  Very unlikely, for the reason that human minds evolved under extremely tight energy constraints. AI has no such limitation.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Except also energy constraints. But I agree, there’s no reason to believe humans are the universal limit on cognitive abilities
    - eru 2y ago
      The energy constraints for chips are more about heat dissipation. But we can pump a lot more energy through them per unit volume than through the human brain. Especially if you are willing to pay a lot for active cooling with eg liquid helium.
      - dartos 2y ago
        A constraint is still a constraint

taneq 2y ago

And most people will still be bike shedding about whether it’s “real intelligence” and making up increasingly insane justifications for why it’s not.

afavour 2y ago

Your position assumes an answer to OPs question: that yes, LLMs are the path to AGI. But the question still remains, what if they’re not? We can be reasonably confident that the components we’re adding to cars today are progress toward full self driving. But AGI is a conceptual leap beyond an LLM.

BenFranklin100 2y ago
To buttress your point, reason and human language are not the same thing. This fact is not fully and widely appreciated as it deserves to be.

015a 2y ago

I feel that one challenge this comparison space has is: Self-driving cars haven't made the leap yet to replace humans. In other words, saying AGI will arrive like self-driving cars have arrived is incorrectly concluding that self-driving cars have arrived, and thus it instead (maybe correctly, maybe not) asserts that, actually, neither will arrive. This is especially concerning because many top minds in the industry have stated with high confidence that artificial intelligence will experience an intelligence "explosion", and we should be afraid of this (or, maybe, welcome it with open arms, depending on who you ask). So, actually, what we're being told to expect is being downgraded from "it'll happen quickly" to "it will happen slowly" to, as you say, "it'll happen similarly to how these other domains of computerized intelligence have replaced humans, which is to say, they haven't yet". Point being: We've observed these systems ride a curve, and the linear extrapolation of that curve does seem to arrive, eventually, at human-replacing intelligence. But, what if it... doesn't? What if that curve is really an asymptote?

stravant 2y ago

I disagree because AI only has to get good enough at doing a single thing: AI research. From there things will probably go very fast. Self driving cars can't design themselves, once AI gets good enough it can

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
It’s possible (maybe even likely) that “AI research” is “AGI-hard” in that any intelligence that can do it is already an AGI.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  It’ll probably sit in the human hybrid phase for longer than with chess where the AGI tools make the humans better and faster. But as long as the tools keep getting better at that there’s a strong flywheel effect
- stravant 2y ago
  It's also possible it isn't AGI hard and all you need is the ability to experiment with code along with a bit of agentic behavior. An AI doesn't need embodiment, understanding of physics / nature, or a lot of other things. It just needs to analyze and experiment with algorithms and get us that next 100x in effective compute. The LLMs are missing enough of the spark of creativity for this to work yet but that could be right around the corner.

palata 2y ago

What makes you believe that AGI will happen, as opposed to all the beliefs that other people have had in history? Tons of people have "predicted" the next evolution of technology, and most of the time it ends up not happening, right?

weatherlite 2y ago
To me (not OP) it's ChatGPT 4 , it at least made me realize it's quite possible and even quite soon that we reach AGI. Far from guaranteed, but seems quite possible.
- palata 2y ago
  Right. So ChatGPT 4 has impressed you enough that it created a belief that AGI is possible and close. It's fine to have beliefs, but IMHO it's important to realise that they are beliefs. At some point in the 1900s people believed that by 2000, cars would fly. It seemed quite possible then.
  - weatherlite 2y ago
    Sure, I (and more importantly - many many experts in the field such as Hinton, Bengio, Lecun, Musk, Hasabis etc etc) could be believing something that might not materialize. I'd actually be quite happy if it stalls a few decades, would like to remain employed.
    - palata 2y ago
      > many many experts One thing that is pretty sure is that Musk is not an expert in the field. > and more importantly The beliefs of people you respect are not more important than the beliefs of the others. It doesn't make sense to say "I can't prove it, and I don't know about anyone who can prove it, so I will give you names of people who also believe and it will give it more credit". It won't. They don't know.
      - 2y ago

vbezhenar 2y ago

AGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously. At this point singularity occurs and nobody knows what will happen. When human started to improve himself, we built the civilisation, we became a super-predator, we dried out seas and changed climate of the entire planet. We extinguished entire species of animals and adapted other species for our use. Huge changes. AI could bring changes of greater amplitude.

fooker 2y ago
> we dried out seas When did we do this ?
- nikvaes 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland used to be (part of) a sea.
- zppln 2y ago
  Depending on your definition of sea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
steveoscaro 2y ago
We’re in fact adding more water to the seas, not drying them out.
bubaumba 2y ago
> AGI is special. Because one day AI can start improving itself autonomously AGI can be sub-human, right? That's probably how it will start. The question will be is it already AGI or not yet, i.e. where to set the boundary. So, at first that will be humans improving AGI, but then... I'm afraid it can get so much better that humans will be literally like macaques in comparison.

swyx 2y ago

waymos are locaiton dependent mostly because of regulations not tech right