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Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me. They clearly want to be a for profit comp

Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me. They clearly want to be a for profit company, is this the threat of Elon talking?

llamaimperative 2y ago
It’s a really idiosyncratic and very subtle, intelligent, calculated imperative called “want yacht.”
- causal 2y ago
  Want yacht before world realizes they've run out of ideas
- yalogin 2y ago
  Ha actually like elon showed his peers recently, its "want countries" rather than "want yacht"
jprete 2y ago
I think it's entirely a legal dodge to pretend that they aren't gutting the non-profit mission.
aimazon 2y ago
If AGI were in reach, why would something so human as money matter to these people? The choice to transition to a more pocket-lining structure is surely a vote of no-confidence in reaching AGI anytime soon.
jasfi 2y ago
The only proof is in benchmarks and carefully selected demos. What we have is enough AI to do some interesting things, and that's good enough for now. AGI is a fuzzy goal that keeps the AI companies working at an incredible pace.
llm_trw 2y ago
Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it. I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open question. It's still the case that no one has build an interactive system that _really_ scales - even the startups and off the record conversations I've had with people in these companies say that they are still using python across a single data center. AGI is now no longer a dream but a question of if we want to: 1). Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout. 2). Wait and hope that Moore's law keeps applying to GPUs until the cost of something like o3 drops to something affordable, in both dollar terms and watts.
- apsec112 2y ago
  We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)
  - layer8 2y ago
    Not that I necessarily disagree on the conclusion, but why should percentage of labor hours constitute a measure for general intelligence?
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    AGI isn't until it meets some arbitrary criteria you made up. When it does it's the next arbitrary criteria that you just made up.
- throw-qqqqq 2y ago
  > Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout Nuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery storage) in many or most parts of the world. Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. “market share”) but in absolute numbers. If you want energy generation cheap and fast, invest in renewables.
Keyframe 2y ago
The more I look the more I think it's ever so more out of reach and if there's a chance at it, OpenAI doesn't seem to be the one that will deliver it. To extrapolate, (of LLMs and GenAI) the more I see use of and how it's used the more it shows severe upwards limits, even though the introduction of those tools has been phenomenal. On business side, OpenAI lost key personnel and seemingly the plot as well. I think we've all been drinking a bit too much on the hype of it all. It'll al;l settle down into wonderful set of (new) tools, but not on AGI. Few more (AI) winters down the road, maybe..
ben_w 2y ago
Every letter of "AGI" means different things to different people, and the thing as a whole sometimes means things not found in any of the letters. We had what I, personally, would count as a "general-purpose AI" already with the original release of ChatGPT… but that made me realise that "generality" is a continuum not a boolean, as it definitely became more general-purpose with multiple modalities, sound and vision not just text, being added. And it's still not "done" yet: while it's more general across academic fields than any human, there's still plenty that most humans can do easily that these models can't — and not just counting letters, until recently they also couldn't (control a hand to) tie shoelaces*. There's also the question of "what even is intelligence?", where for some questions it just matters what the capabilities are, and for other questions it matters how well it can learn from limited examples: where you have lots of examples, ChatGPT-type models can be economically transformative**; where you don't, the same models *really suck*. (I've also seen loads of arguments about how much "artificial" counts, but this is more about if the origin of the training data makes them fundamentally unethical for copyright reasons). * 2024, September 12, uses both transformer and diffusion models: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dexterity/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext... ** the original OpenAI definition of AGI: "by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" — found on https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/ at time of writing
abecedarius 2y ago
I believe e.g. Ilya Sutskever believed AGI is in reach at the founding, and was in earnest about the reasons for the nonprofit. AFAICT the founders who still think that way all left. It's not that the remainder want nonprofit ownership, it's that they can't legally just jettison it, they need a story how altering the deal is good actually.

llamaimperative 2y ago

It’s a really idiosyncratic and very subtle, intelligent, calculated imperative called “want yacht.”

causal 2y ago
Want yacht before world realizes they've run out of ideas
yalogin 2y ago
Ha actually like elon showed his peers recently, its "want countries" rather than "want yacht"

jprete 2y ago

I think it's entirely a legal dodge to pretend that they aren't gutting the non-profit mission.

aimazon 2y ago

If AGI were in reach, why would something so human as money matter to these people? The choice to transition to a more pocket-lining structure is surely a vote of no-confidence in reaching AGI anytime soon.

jasfi 2y ago

The only proof is in benchmarks and carefully selected demos. What we have is enough AI to do some interesting things, and that's good enough for now. AGI is a fuzzy goal that keeps the AI companies working at an incredible pace.

llm_trw 2y ago

Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it. I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open question. It's still the case that no one has build an interactive system that _really_ scales - even the startups and off the record conversations I've had with people in these companies say that they are still using python across a single data center. AGI is now no longer a dream but a question of if we want to: 1). Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout. 2). Wait and hope that Moore's law keeps applying to GPUs until the cost of something like o3 drops to something affordable, in both dollar terms and watts.

apsec112 2y ago
We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)
- layer8 2y ago
  Not that I necessarily disagree on the conclusion, but why should percentage of labor hours constitute a measure for general intelligence?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  AGI isn't until it meets some arbitrary criteria you made up. When it does it's the next arbitrary criteria that you just made up.
throw-qqqqq 2y ago
> Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout Nuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery storage) in many or most parts of the world. Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. “market share”) but in absolute numbers. If you want energy generation cheap and fast, invest in renewables.

Keyframe 2y ago

The more I look the more I think it's ever so more out of reach and if there's a chance at it, OpenAI doesn't seem to be the one that will deliver it. To extrapolate, (of LLMs and GenAI) the more I see use of and how it's used the more it shows severe upwards limits, even though the introduction of those tools has been phenomenal. On business side, OpenAI lost key personnel and seemingly the plot as well. I think we've all been drinking a bit too much on the hype of it all. It'll al;l settle down into wonderful set of (new) tools, but not on AGI. Few more (AI) winters down the road, maybe..

ben_w 2y ago

Every letter of "AGI" means different things to different people, and the thing as a whole sometimes means things not found in any of the letters. We had what I, personally, would count as a "general-purpose AI" already with the original release of ChatGPT… but that made me realise that "generality" is a continuum not a boolean, as it definitely became more general-purpose with multiple modalities, sound and vision not just text, being added. And it's still not "done" yet: while it's more general across academic fields than any human, there's still plenty that most humans can do easily that these models can't — and not just counting letters, until recently they also couldn't (control a hand to) tie shoelaces*. There's also the question of "what even is intelligence?", where for some questions it just matters what the capabilities are, and for other questions it matters how well it can learn from limited examples: where you have lots of examples, ChatGPT-type models can be economically transformative**; where you don't, the same models *really suck*. (I've also seen loads of arguments about how much "artificial" counts, but this is more about if the origin of the training data makes them fundamentally unethical for copyright reasons). * 2024, September 12, uses both transformer and diffusion models: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dexterity/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext... ** the original OpenAI definition of AGI: "by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" — found on https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/ at time of writing

abecedarius 2y ago

I believe e.g. Ilya Sutskever believed AGI is in reach at the founding, and was in earnest about the reasons for the nonprofit. AFAICT the founders who still think that way all left. It's not that the remainder want nonprofit ownership, it's that they can't legally just jettison it, they need a story how altering the deal is good actually.