4 ms·

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.

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.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Yeah, it is a pretty good bet that any real process that produces something that looks like an exponential curve over time is the early phase of a sigmoid curve, because all real processes have constraints.
- 91bananas 1y ago
  And if we apply the 80/20 rule, feels like we're at about 50-75% right now. So we're almost getting close to done with the easy parts. Then come the hard parts.
blibble 1y ago
> AGI is matter of when, not if. LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for the population to think pushes this further and further out each day
- jwilber 1y ago
  I agree that LLMs are hurting the general population’s capacity to think (assuming they use it often. I’ve certainly noticed a slight trend among students I’ve taught to use less effort, and myself to some extent). I don’t agree that this will affect ML progress much, since the general population isn’t contributing to core ML research.
- delecti 1y ago
  On the other hand, dumbing down the population also lowers the bar for AGI. /s
Kabukks 1y ago
Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can see no clear steps towards AGI.
- streptomycin 1y ago
  https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years_difference_makes_you_wonder_where_ai_will/ https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years_di...
foobiekr 1y ago
I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective. Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI. That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon. There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986). The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era. I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more. So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything. Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.
- quesera 1y ago
  I won't go too far out on this limb, because I kind of agree with you... but to be fair -- 1980s-1990s nanotech did not attract this level of investment, nor was it visible to ordinary people, nor was it useful to anyone except researchers and grant writers. It seems like nanotech is all around us now, but the term "nanotech" has been redefined to mean something different (larger scale, less amazing) from Drexler's molecular assemblers.
  - 1y ago
bdangubic 1y ago
AGI is matter of when, not if probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong
- dbacar 1y ago
  It is already here, kinda. I mean look at how it passes the bar exam, solves math olympiad level questions, generates video, art, music. What else are you looking for? It already has penetrated into job market causing significant disruption in programming. We are not seeing flying cars but we are witnessing things even not talked about around campfire. Seriously even 4 years ago, would you think all these would happen?
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    AGI is here?????! Damn, me, and every other human, must have missed that news… /s
    - dbacar 1y ago
      Such things happen.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    > What else are you looking for? To begin with, systems that don't tell people to use elmer's glue to keep the cheese from sliding off the pizza, displaying a fundamental lack of understanding of.. everything. At minimum it needs to be able to reliably solve hard, unique, but well-defined problems like a group of the most cohesive intelligent people could. It's certainly not AGI until it can do a better job than the most experienced, talented, and intelligent knowledge workers out there. Every major advancement (which LLMs certainly are) has caused some disruption in the fields it affected, but that isn't useful criteria that can differentiate between "crude but useful tool" from "AGI".
manquer 1y ago
Progress is not just a function of technical possibility( even if it exists) it is also economics. It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend. If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources. Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on. From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges. [1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion. [2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> AGI is matter of when, not if We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit in the 80s.)
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> AGI is matter of when, not if. I want to believe, man.

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.

dragonwriter 1y ago
Yeah, it is a pretty good bet that any real process that produces something that looks like an exponential curve over time is the early phase of a sigmoid curve, because all real processes have constraints.
91bananas 1y ago
And if we apply the 80/20 rule, feels like we're at about 50-75% right now. So we're almost getting close to done with the easy parts. Then come the hard parts.

blibble 1y ago

> AGI is matter of when, not if. LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for the population to think pushes this further and further out each day

jwilber 1y ago
I agree that LLMs are hurting the general population’s capacity to think (assuming they use it often. I’ve certainly noticed a slight trend among students I’ve taught to use less effort, and myself to some extent). I don’t agree that this will affect ML progress much, since the general population isn’t contributing to core ML research.
delecti 1y ago
On the other hand, dumbing down the population also lowers the bar for AGI. /s

Kabukks 1y ago

Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can see no clear steps towards AGI.

streptomycin 1y ago
https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years_difference_makes_you_wonder_where_ai_will/ https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years_di...

foobiekr 1y ago

I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective. Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI. That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon. There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986). The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era. I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more. So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything. Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.

quesera 1y ago
I won't go too far out on this limb, because I kind of agree with you... but to be fair -- 1980s-1990s nanotech did not attract this level of investment, nor was it visible to ordinary people, nor was it useful to anyone except researchers and grant writers. It seems like nanotech is all around us now, but the term "nanotech" has been redefined to mean something different (larger scale, less amazing) from Drexler's molecular assemblers.
- 1y ago

bdangubic 1y ago

AGI is matter of when, not if probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong

dbacar 1y ago
It is already here, kinda. I mean look at how it passes the bar exam, solves math olympiad level questions, generates video, art, music. What else are you looking for? It already has penetrated into job market causing significant disruption in programming. We are not seeing flying cars but we are witnessing things even not talked about around campfire. Seriously even 4 years ago, would you think all these would happen?
- bdangubic 1y ago
  AGI is here?????! Damn, me, and every other human, must have missed that news… /s
  - dbacar 1y ago
    Such things happen.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dns_snek 1y ago
  > What else are you looking for? To begin with, systems that don't tell people to use elmer's glue to keep the cheese from sliding off the pizza, displaying a fundamental lack of understanding of.. everything. At minimum it needs to be able to reliably solve hard, unique, but well-defined problems like a group of the most cohesive intelligent people could. It's certainly not AGI until it can do a better job than the most experienced, talented, and intelligent knowledge workers out there. Every major advancement (which LLMs certainly are) has caused some disruption in the fields it affected, but that isn't useful criteria that can differentiate between "crude but useful tool" from "AGI".

manquer 1y ago

Progress is not just a function of technical possibility( even if it exists) it is also economics. It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend. If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources. Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on. From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges. [1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion. [2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> AGI is matter of when, not if We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit in the 80s.)

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

> AGI is matter of when, not if. I want to believe, man.