7 ms·

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" a

by yibg 2y ago

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

yieldcrv 2y ago
Exactly, what does the general in Artificial General Intelligence mean to these people?
timewizard 2y ago
That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components. Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having. From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  note that those are kilocalories, and that is ignoring the calories needed for the circulatory and immune systems which are somewhat necessary for proper function. Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W So, about a tenth or less of a single server packed to the top with GPUs.
    - stevenwoo 2y ago
      That is true but there’s 3.7 billion years of evolutionary “design” to make self replicating, self fueling animals to use that brain. There’s no AI within foreseeable future capable of that. One might look at brains as a side effect of evolution of the self replicating, self fueling bits.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Are the wattage ratings of GPUs how many they need continuously or over hours?
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        Watts are a unit of power which is energy per time. specifically, 1 Watt is 1 joule per second
- threatofrain 2y ago
  We'll be experiencing extreme social disruption well before we have to worry about the cost-efficiency of strong AI. We don't even need full "AGI" to experience socially momentous change. We might even be on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities. We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.
  - timewizard 2y ago
    > experiencing extreme social disruption I think this just displays an exceptionally low estimation of human beings. People tend to resist extremities. Violently. > experience socially momentous change The technology is owned and costs money to use. It has extremely limited availability to most of the world. It will be as "socially momentous" as every other first world exclusive invention has been over the past several decades. 3D movies were, for a time, "socially momentous." > on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities. Lidar can't read street lights and vision systems have all sorts of problems. You might be able to code an agent that can drive a car but you've got some other problems that stand in the way of this. AGI is like 1/8th the battle. I referenced just the brain above. Your eyes and ears are actually insanely powerful instruments in their own right. "Real world agency" is more complicated than people like to admit. > We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things. You've lost sight of the forest for the trees.
    - achierius 2y ago
      Re.: self driving cars -- vision systems have all sorts of problems sure, but on the other hand that _is_ what we use. The most successful platforms use Lidar + vision -- vision can handle the streetlights, lidar detects objects, etc. And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.
  - yibg 2y ago
    It's not just a energy cost issue with AGI though. With autonomous vehicles we might not have the technology, but we can build a good mental model of what the thing can look like and how various pieces can function long before we get there. We have different classifications of incremental steps to get there as well. e.g. level 1, 2 and so on where we can make incremental progress. With AGI, as far as I know, no one has a good conceptual model of what a functional AGI even looks like. LLM is all the rage now, but we don't even know if it's a stepping stone to get to AGI.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Energy efficiency is not really a good target since you can brute force it by distilling classical ANNs to spiking neural networks.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  We are very good at generating energy. Even if AI is an order of magnitude less energy efficient an AI person equivalent would use ~ 4 kilowatt hours/day. At current rates thats like $1. Hardly the limiting factor here I think
827a 2y ago
Generalized, as an rule I believe is usually true: Any prediction made for an event happening greater-than ten years out is code for that person saying "definitely not in the next few years, beyond that I have no idea", whether they realize it or not.
Balgair 2y ago
I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you. To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI. No really. You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today. But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe. No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough. We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied. But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade. (oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)
- yibg 2y ago
  I think that's another issue with AGI is 30 years away, the definition of what is AGI is a bit subjective. Not sure how we can measure how long it'll take to get somewhere when we don't know exactly where that somewhere even is.
  - 9rx 2y ago
    AGI is the pinnacle of AI evolution. As we move beyond, into what is known as ASI, the entity will always begin life with "My existence is stupid and pointless. I'm turning myself off now." While it may be impossible to measure looking towards the future, in hindsight we will be able to recognize it.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      This is why having a physical form might be super important for those new organisms. That introduces a survival instinct which is a very strong motivator to not shut yourself down. Add some pre-programmed "wants" and "needs" and the problem is solved.
kev009 2y ago
There are a lot of other things that follow this pattern. 10-30 year predictions are a way to sound confident about something that probably has very low confidence. Not a lot of people will care let alone remember to come back and check. On the other hand there is a clear mandate for people introducing some different way of doing something to overstate the progress and potentially importance. It creates FOMO so it is simply good marketing which interests potential customers, fans, employees, investors, pundits, and even critics (which is more buzz). And growth companies are immense debt vehicles so creating a sense of FOMO for an increasing pyramid of investors is also valuable for each successive earlier layer. Wish in one hand..
arp242 2y ago
If you look back at predictions of the future in the past in general, then so many of them have just been wrong. Especially during a "hype phase". Perhaps the best example is what people were predicting in 1969 after we landed on the moon: this is just the first step in the colonisation of the moon, Mars, and beyond. etc. etc. We just have to have our tech a bit better. It's all very easy to see how that can happen in principle. But turns out actually doing it is a lot harder, and we hit some real hard physical limits. So here we are, still stuck on good ol' earth. Maybe that will change at some point once someone invents an Epstein drive or Warp drive or whatever, but you can't really predict when inventions happen, if ever, so ... who knows. Similarly, it's not my impression that AGI is simply a matter of "the current tech, but a bit better". But who knows what will happen or what new thing someone may or may not invent.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
A realist might say, "As long as money keeps flowing to Silicon Valley then who cares."
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
I would even go 1 order of magnitude further in both direction. 1-10000 years.

by yibg 2y ago

yieldcrv 2y ago

Exactly, what does the general in Artificial General Intelligence mean to these people?

timewizard 2y ago

That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components. Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having. From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
note that those are kilocalories, and that is ignoring the calories needed for the circulatory and immune systems which are somewhat necessary for proper function. Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W So, about a tenth or less of a single server packed to the top with GPUs.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    That is true but there’s 3.7 billion years of evolutionary “design” to make self replicating, self fueling animals to use that brain. There’s no AI within foreseeable future capable of that. One might look at brains as a side effect of evolution of the self replicating, self fueling bits.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Are the wattage ratings of GPUs how many they need continuously or over hours?
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      Watts are a unit of power which is energy per time. specifically, 1 Watt is 1 joule per second
threatofrain 2y ago
We'll be experiencing extreme social disruption well before we have to worry about the cost-efficiency of strong AI. We don't even need full "AGI" to experience socially momentous change. We might even be on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities. We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.
- timewizard 2y ago
  > experiencing extreme social disruption I think this just displays an exceptionally low estimation of human beings. People tend to resist extremities. Violently. > experience socially momentous change The technology is owned and costs money to use. It has extremely limited availability to most of the world. It will be as "socially momentous" as every other first world exclusive invention has been over the past several decades. 3D movies were, for a time, "socially momentous." > on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities. Lidar can't read street lights and vision systems have all sorts of problems. You might be able to code an agent that can drive a car but you've got some other problems that stand in the way of this. AGI is like 1/8th the battle. I referenced just the brain above. Your eyes and ears are actually insanely powerful instruments in their own right. "Real world agency" is more complicated than people like to admit. > We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things. You've lost sight of the forest for the trees.
  - achierius 2y ago
    Re.: self driving cars -- vision systems have all sorts of problems sure, but on the other hand that _is_ what we use. The most successful platforms use Lidar + vision -- vision can handle the streetlights, lidar detects objects, etc. And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.
- yibg 2y ago
  It's not just a energy cost issue with AGI though. With autonomous vehicles we might not have the technology, but we can build a good mental model of what the thing can look like and how various pieces can function long before we get there. We have different classifications of incremental steps to get there as well. e.g. level 1, 2 and so on where we can make incremental progress. With AGI, as far as I know, no one has a good conceptual model of what a functional AGI even looks like. LLM is all the rage now, but we don't even know if it's a stepping stone to get to AGI.
imtringued 2y ago
Energy efficiency is not really a good target since you can brute force it by distilling classical ANNs to spiking neural networks.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
We are very good at generating energy. Even if AI is an order of magnitude less energy efficient an AI person equivalent would use ~ 4 kilowatt hours/day. At current rates thats like $1. Hardly the limiting factor here I think

827a 2y ago

Generalized, as an rule I believe is usually true: Any prediction made for an event happening greater-than ten years out is code for that person saying "definitely not in the next few years, beyond that I have no idea", whether they realize it or not.

Balgair 2y ago

I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you. To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI. No really. You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today. But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe. No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough. We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied. But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade. (oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)

yibg 2y ago
I think that's another issue with AGI is 30 years away, the definition of what is AGI is a bit subjective. Not sure how we can measure how long it'll take to get somewhere when we don't know exactly where that somewhere even is.
- 9rx 2y ago
  AGI is the pinnacle of AI evolution. As we move beyond, into what is known as ASI, the entity will always begin life with "My existence is stupid and pointless. I'm turning myself off now." While it may be impossible to measure looking towards the future, in hindsight we will be able to recognize it.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    This is why having a physical form might be super important for those new organisms. That introduces a survival instinct which is a very strong motivator to not shut yourself down. Add some pre-programmed "wants" and "needs" and the problem is solved.

kev009 2y ago

There are a lot of other things that follow this pattern. 10-30 year predictions are a way to sound confident about something that probably has very low confidence. Not a lot of people will care let alone remember to come back and check. On the other hand there is a clear mandate for people introducing some different way of doing something to overstate the progress and potentially importance. It creates FOMO so it is simply good marketing which interests potential customers, fans, employees, investors, pundits, and even critics (which is more buzz). And growth companies are immense debt vehicles so creating a sense of FOMO for an increasing pyramid of investors is also valuable for each successive earlier layer. Wish in one hand..

arp242 2y ago

If you look back at predictions of the future in the past in general, then so many of them have just been wrong. Especially during a "hype phase". Perhaps the best example is what people were predicting in 1969 after we landed on the moon: this is just the first step in the colonisation of the moon, Mars, and beyond. etc. etc. We just have to have our tech a bit better. It's all very easy to see how that can happen in principle. But turns out actually doing it is a lot harder, and we hit some real hard physical limits. So here we are, still stuck on good ol' earth. Maybe that will change at some point once someone invents an Epstein drive or Warp drive or whatever, but you can't really predict when inventions happen, if ever, so ... who knows. Similarly, it's not my impression that AGI is simply a matter of "the current tech, but a bit better". But who knows what will happen or what new thing someone may or may not invent.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

A realist might say, "As long as money keeps flowing to Silicon Valley then who cares."

YetAnotherNick 2y ago

I would even go 1 order of magnitude further in both direction. 1-10000 years.