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to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I th

to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence! and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to bring about "AGI." This is another nail in the coffin

lenerdenator 1y ago
That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just want their payday now. Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting profit above all else.
- foobiekr 1y ago
  If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    Define "imminent". If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world. Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
    - foobiekr 1y ago
      Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about." The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.
the_duke 1y ago
AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common tasks is not that far off.
- schrodinger 1y ago
  I don’t think that’s a safe foregone conclusion. What we’ve seen so far is very very powerful pattern matchers with emergent properties that frankly we don’t fully understand. It very well may be the road to AGI, or it may stop at the kind of things we can do in our subconscious—but not what it takes to produce truly novel solutions to never before seen problems. I don’t think we know.
- runako 1y ago
  Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised, then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI went into hibernation for 10+ years. There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.
  - tim333 1y ago
    But the Moore's law like growth in compute/$ chugs along, boom or bust.
- m_krebs 1y ago
  "X increased exponentially in the past, therefore it will increase exponentially in the same way in the future" is fallacious. There is nothing guaranteeing indefinite uncapped growth in capabilities of LLMs. An exponential curve and a sigmoidal curve look the same until a certain point.
  - 1y ago
tim333 1y ago
I don't read it that way. It reads more like AGIs will be like very smart people and rather than having one smart person/AGI, everyone will have one. There's room for both Beethoven and Einstein although they were both generally intelligent.

lenerdenator 1y ago

That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just want their payday now. Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting profit above all else.

foobiekr 1y ago
If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  Define "imminent". If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world. Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
  - foobiekr 1y ago
    Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about." The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.

the_duke 1y ago

AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common tasks is not that far off.

schrodinger 1y ago
I don’t think that’s a safe foregone conclusion. What we’ve seen so far is very very powerful pattern matchers with emergent properties that frankly we don’t fully understand. It very well may be the road to AGI, or it may stop at the kind of things we can do in our subconscious—but not what it takes to produce truly novel solutions to never before seen problems. I don’t think we know.
runako 1y ago
Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised, then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI went into hibernation for 10+ years. There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.
- tim333 1y ago
  But the Moore's law like growth in compute/$ chugs along, boom or bust.
m_krebs 1y ago
"X increased exponentially in the past, therefore it will increase exponentially in the same way in the future" is fallacious. There is nothing guaranteeing indefinite uncapped growth in capabilities of LLMs. An exponential curve and a sigmoidal curve look the same until a certain point.
- 1y ago

tim333 1y ago

I don't read it that way. It reads more like AGIs will be like very smart people and rather than having one smart person/AGI, everyone will have one. There's room for both Beethoven and Einstein although they were both generally intelligent.