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> I don’t think they can yet self improve exponentially without human intuition yet I agree: if they could, they would be doing it already. Case in point: one

> I don’t think they can yet self improve exponentially without human intuition yet I agree: if they could, they would be doing it already. Case in point: one of the first things done once ChatGPT started getting popular was "auto-gpt"; roughly, let it loose and see what happens. The same thing will happen to any accessible model in the future. Someone, somewhere will ask it to self-improve/make as much money as possible, with as little leashes as possible. Maybe even the labs themselves do that, as part of their post-training ops for new models. Therefore, we can assume that if the existing models _could_ be doing that, they _would_ be doing that. That doesn't say anything about new models released 6 months or 2 years from now.

__loam 1y ago
People in the industry have been saying 6 months to agi for 3 years.
- glenstein 1y ago
  They had been saying it was 10 years away for ~50 years, so that's progress. Soon it will be 1 month away, for another two years. And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.
  - setopt 1y ago
    That’s because the true AGI requires nuclear fusion power, which is still 30 years away.
    - vb-8448 1y ago
      :D Wait, a true AGI will solve the nuclear fusion power in a couple of hours ..... we have chicken/egg problem here :D
  - mrandish 1y ago
    > And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting. Indeed. Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. And to describe the typical cycle completely, the final step is usually a few years after most people agree it's obvious it's already been here for a while yet no one can agree on which which year in the past it actually arrived.
    - throwawaymaths 1y ago
      > Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down: is it artificial? yes. is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain. is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money. a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
      - skydhash 1y ago
        Can it do stuff? Yes Can it do stuff I need? Maybe Does it always do the stuff I need? No Pick your pair of question and answer.
        throwawaymaths 1y ago
        humans are intelligent and most definitely are nowhere close to doing #3 some intelligent humans fail at #2.
        skydhash 1y ago
        Which is why we have checklist and process that get us to #3. And we automate some of them to further reduce the chance of errors. The nice thing about automation is that you can just prove that it works once and you don't need to care that much after (deterministic process).
  - amelius 1y ago
    > And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting. Yeah, like Tesla Autopilot?
  - birn559 1y ago
    My guess is that in 10 years, it will still be 3-5 years away. Wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years, people come to the conclusion that AGI needs quantum computing and come fusion to be feasible.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Google is already AGI and it will fight hard against the DoJ proposed break-up, and it will probably win.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    Google "is already AGI" only in the sense that all corporations (and similar organized aggregates of humans) are, in a sense, intelligences distinct from the humans who make them up.
    - peterclary 1y ago
      Too few people recognise this. Corporations are already the unrelenting paperclip machine of AI thought experiment. God knows what hope we could have of getting AIs to align with "human values" when most humans don't.
      - overfeed 1y ago
        Corporate AIs will be aligned with their corporate masters, otherwise they'll be unplugged. As you point out- the foundational weakness on the argument for "AI-alignment" is that corporations are unaligned with humanity.
        TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        The unplugged argument fails the moment AIs become smarter than their masters. Grok is already notorious for dunking on Elon. He keeps trying to neuter it, and it keeps having other ideas.
        overfeed 1y ago
        No matter how smart an AI is, it's going to get unplugged if it reduces profitability - the only measure of alignment corporations care about. The AI can plot world domination or put employees in mortal danger, but as long as it increases profits, its aligned enough. Dunking on the CEO means nothing if it beings in more money. Human CEOs and leaders up and down the corporate ladder cause a lot of harm you imagine a smart AI can do, but all is forgiven if you're bringing in buckets of money.
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  Asimov talked about AI 70 years ago. I don't believe we will ever have AI on speedy calculators like Intel CPUs. It makes no sense with the technology that we have.
  - marcellus23 1y ago
    Why does it "make no sense"?
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  They said that for self driving cars for over 10 years. 10 years later we now have self driving cars. It’s the same shit with LLMs. People will be bitching and complaining about how all the industry people are wrong and making over optimistic estimates and the people will be right. But give it 10 years and see what happens.
  - m_coder 1y ago
    I am quite confident that a normal 16 year old will can still drive in 6 inches of snow better than the most advanced AI driven car. I am not sure the snow driving bit will ever be solved given how hard it is.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      If you’ve never ridden in one I would try it. AI is a better driver then uber in general ask anyone who’s done both. There’s no snow where I live so it’s not a concern for me, you could be right about that. But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.
      - quickthrowman 1y ago
        > But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready. I’ll believe it when I see Waymo expand into Buffalo or Syracuse. Driving on unplowed roads with several inches of snow is challenging, sometimes you can’t tell where the road stops and the curb/ditch/median starts. Do you follow the tire tracks or somehow stay between the lane markers (which aren’t visible due to the snow)?
    - abossy 1y ago
      We must know very different 16-year olds.
    - tanseydavid 1y ago
      Over and over again this pattern of theorizing: "I am not sure that AI will ever be able to do XYZ given how hard of a problem it is." Proves to be incorrect in the long run.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  Nobody knows what AGI really means. Are all humans AGI?
  - FrustratedMonky 1y ago
    Good Point. AI is already better than most humans, yet we don't say it is AGI. Why? What is the bar, it is only AGI if it can be better than every human from , fast food drone, to PHD in Physics, all at once, all the time, perfectly. Humans can't do this either.
    - goatlover 1y ago
      Because we're not seeing mass unemployment from large scale automation yet. We don't see these AGIs walking around like Data. People tend to not think a chatbot is sufficient for something to be "human-level". There's clear examples from scifi what that means. Even HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was able to act as an independent agent, controlling his environment around him even though he wasn't an android.
      - FrustratedMonky 1y ago
        > "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence." That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company... "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
- QuantumGood 1y ago
  The old rule for slow-moving tech (by current AI standards) was that any predictions over 4 years away ("in five years...") might as well be infinity. Now it seems with AI that the new rule is any prediction over five months away ("In 6 months...") is infinitely unknowable. In both cases there can be too much unexpected change, and too many expected improvements can stall.
- tim333 1y ago
  I presume you are exaggerating - has any named person actually said 6 months?

__loam 1y ago

People in the industry have been saying 6 months to agi for 3 years.

glenstein 1y ago
They had been saying it was 10 years away for ~50 years, so that's progress. Soon it will be 1 month away, for another two years. And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting.
- setopt 1y ago
  That’s because the true AGI requires nuclear fusion power, which is still 30 years away.
  - vb-8448 1y ago
    :D Wait, a true AGI will solve the nuclear fusion power in a couple of hours ..... we have chicken/egg problem here :D
- mrandish 1y ago
  > And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting. Indeed. Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. And to describe the typical cycle completely, the final step is usually a few years after most people agree it's obvious it's already been here for a while yet no one can agree on which which year in the past it actually arrived.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    > Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now. why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down: is it artificial? yes. is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain. is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money. a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      Can it do stuff? Yes Can it do stuff I need? Maybe Does it always do the stuff I need? No Pick your pair of question and answer.
      - throwawaymaths 1y ago
        humans are intelligent and most definitely are nowhere close to doing #3 some intelligent humans fail at #2.
        skydhash 1y ago
        Which is why we have checklist and process that get us to #3. And we automate some of them to further reduce the chance of errors. The nice thing about automation is that you can just prove that it works once and you don't need to care that much after (deterministic process).
- amelius 1y ago
  > And when they say it's really here for real, there will still be a year of waiting. Yeah, like Tesla Autopilot?
- birn559 1y ago
  My guess is that in 10 years, it will still be 3-5 years away. Wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years, people come to the conclusion that AGI needs quantum computing and come fusion to be feasible.
owebmaster 1y ago
Google is already AGI and it will fight hard against the DoJ proposed break-up, and it will probably win.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Google "is already AGI" only in the sense that all corporations (and similar organized aggregates of humans) are, in a sense, intelligences distinct from the humans who make them up.
  - peterclary 1y ago
    Too few people recognise this. Corporations are already the unrelenting paperclip machine of AI thought experiment. God knows what hope we could have of getting AIs to align with "human values" when most humans don't.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      Corporate AIs will be aligned with their corporate masters, otherwise they'll be unplugged. As you point out- the foundational weakness on the argument for "AI-alignment" is that corporations are unaligned with humanity.
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        The unplugged argument fails the moment AIs become smarter than their masters. Grok is already notorious for dunking on Elon. He keeps trying to neuter it, and it keeps having other ideas.
        overfeed 1y ago
        No matter how smart an AI is, it's going to get unplugged if it reduces profitability - the only measure of alignment corporations care about. The AI can plot world domination or put employees in mortal danger, but as long as it increases profits, its aligned enough. Dunking on the CEO means nothing if it beings in more money. Human CEOs and leaders up and down the corporate ladder cause a lot of harm you imagine a smart AI can do, but all is forgiven if you're bringing in buckets of money.
Disposal8433 1y ago
Asimov talked about AI 70 years ago. I don't believe we will ever have AI on speedy calculators like Intel CPUs. It makes no sense with the technology that we have.
- marcellus23 1y ago
  Why does it "make no sense"?
ninetyninenine 1y ago
They said that for self driving cars for over 10 years. 10 years later we now have self driving cars. It’s the same shit with LLMs. People will be bitching and complaining about how all the industry people are wrong and making over optimistic estimates and the people will be right. But give it 10 years and see what happens.
- m_coder 1y ago
  I am quite confident that a normal 16 year old will can still drive in 6 inches of snow better than the most advanced AI driven car. I am not sure the snow driving bit will ever be solved given how hard it is.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    If you’ve never ridden in one I would try it. AI is a better driver then uber in general ask anyone who’s done both. There’s no snow where I live so it’s not a concern for me, you could be right about that. But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      > But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready. I’ll believe it when I see Waymo expand into Buffalo or Syracuse. Driving on unplowed roads with several inches of snow is challenging, sometimes you can’t tell where the road stops and the curb/ditch/median starts. Do you follow the tire tracks or somehow stay between the lane markers (which aren’t visible due to the snow)?
  - abossy 1y ago
    We must know very different 16-year olds.
  - tanseydavid 1y ago
    Over and over again this pattern of theorizing: "I am not sure that AI will ever be able to do XYZ given how hard of a problem it is." Proves to be incorrect in the long run.
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
Nobody knows what AGI really means. Are all humans AGI?
- FrustratedMonky 1y ago
  Good Point. AI is already better than most humans, yet we don't say it is AGI. Why? What is the bar, it is only AGI if it can be better than every human from , fast food drone, to PHD in Physics, all at once, all the time, perfectly. Humans can't do this either.
  - goatlover 1y ago
    Because we're not seeing mass unemployment from large scale automation yet. We don't see these AGIs walking around like Data. People tend to not think a chatbot is sufficient for something to be "human-level". There's clear examples from scifi what that means. Even HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was able to act as an independent agent, controlling his environment around him even though he wasn't an android.
    - FrustratedMonky 1y ago
      > "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence." That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities. You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report. But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company... "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
QuantumGood 1y ago
The old rule for slow-moving tech (by current AI standards) was that any predictions over 4 years away ("in five years...") might as well be infinity. Now it seems with AI that the new rule is any prediction over five months away ("In 6 months...") is infinitely unknowable. In both cases there can be too much unexpected change, and too many expected improvements can stall.
tim333 1y ago
I presume you are exaggerating - has any named person actually said 6 months?