5 ms·
Man, remember when everyone was like 'AGI just around the corner!' Funny how well the Gartner hype cycle captures these sorts of things
by actinium226 1y ago
Man, remember when everyone was like 'AGI just around the corner!' Funny how well the Gartner hype cycle captures these sorts of things
- bayindirh 1y agoThey're similar to self-driving vehicles. Both are around the corner, but neither can negotiate the turn.
- hskalin 1y agoAnd commerically viable nuclear fusion
- mgiampapa 1y agoI harvest fusion energy every single day... It's just there in the sky, for free!
- einrealist 1y agoAll that to keep the investment pyramid schemes going.
- kfarr 1y agoWaymo's pretty good at unprotected lefts
- bayindirh 1y agoWaymo is pretty good at (a finite number of) unprotected lefts, and this doesn't count as "level 5 autonomous driving".
- nmca 1y agoI saw your comment and counted — in May I took a Waymo thirty times.
- bayindirh 1y agoWaymo is a popular argument in self-driving cars, and they do well. However, Waymo is Deep Blue of self-driving cars. Doing very well in a closed space. As a result of this geofencing, they have effectively exhausted their search space, hence they work well as a consequence of lack of surprises. AI works well when search space is limited, but General AI in any category needs to handle a vastly larger search space, and they fall flat. At the end of the day, AI is informed search. They get inputs, and generate a suitable output as deemed by their trainers.
- anonzzzies 1y agoYeah, AI has been good for a long time in limited search space areas. So good that many of these things that were called AI in the past are not called AI now, but 'just' 'algorithm'.
- bayindirh 1y agoEverything is “just” an algorithm. LLM is a weighted graph with some randomization which is tuned with tons of data. You have input and output encoders on top of it. That’s all.
- MattRix 1y agoThis view of Waymo doesn’t account for the fact that self driving is about a lot more than just taking the right roads. It has to deal with other drivers, construction, road closures, pedestrians, bikes, etc.
- bayindirh 1y agoWhat I wrote is exactly the opposite. Quoting myself: > hence they work well as a consequence of lack of surprises. Emphasis mine. In this context, "lack of surprises" is exactly the rest of the driving besides road choice. In the same space, the behaviors of other actors are also a finite set, or more precisely, can be predicted with much better accuracy. I drive the same route for ~20 years for commute. The events which surprise me are few and far between, because other people's behavior in that environment is a finite set, and they all behave very predictably, incl. pedestrians, bikes, and other drivers. Choosing roads are easy, handling surprises hard, but if you saw most potential surprises, then you can drive even without thinking. While I'm not proud of it, my brain took over and drove me home a couple of times on that route when I was too tired to think.
- yahoozoo 1y agoWe will be treating LLMs “like a junior developer” forever.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoAnd I'm fine with that.
- sneak 1y agoEven if they never get better than they are today (unlikely) they are still the biggest change in software development and the software development industry in my 28 year career.
- anonzzzies 1y agoThat's for sure; I said with the original chatgpt already ; if this is the level it stays at but just becomes (much) faster and open, it's already a bizar revolution. Something many old former (and current, as I see online, but I don't know any personally) AI students/researchers did not think possible in our lifetime, and there it was.
- tonyhart7 1y agoI think we just around at 80% of progress the easy part is done but the hard part is so hard it takes years to progress
- georgemcbay 1y ago> the easy part is done but the hard part is so hard it takes years to progress There is also no guarantee of continued progress to a breakthrough. We have been through several "AI Winters" before where promising new technology was discovered and people in the field were convinced that the breakthrough was just around the corner and it never came. LLMs aren't quite the same situation as they do have some undeniable utility to a wide variety of people even without AGI springing out of them, but the blind optimism that surely progress will continue at a rapid pace until the assumed breakthrough is realized feels pretty familiar to the hype cycle preceding past AI "Winters".
- Swizec 1y ago> We have been through several "AI Winters" before Yeah, remember when we spent 15 years (~2000 to ~2015) calling it “machine learning” because AI was a bad word? We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soon as a technology becomes useful, we stop calling it AI. Then it’s suddenly “just face recognition” or “just product recommendations” or “just [plane] autopilot” or “just adaptive cruise control” etc You know a technology isn’t practical yet because it’s still being called AI.
- blks 1y agoI don’t think there’s any “AI” in aircraft autopilots.
- withinboredom 1y agoAI encompasses a wide range of algorithms and techniques; not just LLMs or neural nets. Also, it is worth pointing out that the definition of AI has changed drastically over the last few years and narrowed pretty significantly. If you’re viewing the definition from the 80–90’s, most of what we call "automation" today would have been considered AI.
- roenxi 1y agoWhat do you think has changed? The situation is still about as promising for AGI in a few years - if not more so. Papers like this are the academics mapping out where the engineering efforts need to be directed to get there and it seems to be a relatively small number of challenges that are easier as the ones already overcome - we know machine learning can solve Towers of Hanoi, for example. It isn't fundamentally complicated like Baduk is. The next wall to overcome is more of a low fence. Besides, AI already passes the Turing test (or at least, is most likely to fail because it is too articulate and reasonable). There is a pretty good argument we've already achieved AGI and now we're working on achieving human- and superhuman-level intelligence in AGI.
- MoonGhost 1y ago> What do you think has changed? The situation is still about as promising for AGI in a few years - if not more so It's better today. Hoping that LLMs can get us to AGI in one hop was naive. Depending on definition of AGI we might be already there. But for superhuman level in all possible tasks there are many steps to be done. The obvious way is to find a solution for each type of tasks. We have already for math calculations, it's using tools. Many other types can be solved the same way. After a while we'll gradually get to well rounded 'brain', or model(s) + support tools. So, so far future looks bright, there is progress, problems, but not deadlocks. PS: Turing test is a <beep> nobody seriously talks about today.
- latchup 1y agoTo be fair, the technology sigmoid curve rises fastest just before its inflection point, so it is hard to predict at what point innovation slows down due to its very nature. The first Boeing 747 was rolled out in 1968, only 65 years after the first successful heavier-than-air flight. If you told people back then that not much will fundamentally change in civil aviation over the next 57 years, no one would have believed you.
- PantaloonFlames 1y agoAnd not just in aviation. Consider what aviation did to make the world smaller. Huge 2nd order changes. The COVID-19 pandemic would not have happened the way it did, if there were no Boeing or Airbus. Big hard-to-predict changes ahead.
- brookst 1y ago…but that was, like, two years ago? If we go from GPT2 to AGI in ten years that will still feel insanely fast.
- piskov 1y agoWe won’t
- mirekrusin 1y agoI remember "stochastic parrot" and people saying it's fancy markov chain/dead end. You don't hear them much after roughly agentic coding appeared.
- Marazan 1y agoSpicy autocomplete is still spicy autocomplete
- mirekrusin 1y agoI'm not sure if system capable of ie. reasoning over images deserves this label anymore?
- mrbungie 1y agoThe thing is "spicy" or "glorified" autocomplete are not actually bad labels, they are autocomplete machines that are very good up to the point of convincing people that they think.
- empiricus 1y agoMany ppl are good at convincing other ppl that they think, but also many fail at thinking and many fail at convincing.
- PantaloonFlames 1y agoYours seems like a c.2023 perspective of coding assistants. These days it’s well beyond autocomplete and “generate a function that returns the numbers from the Fibonacci sequence.” But I would think that would be well understood here. How can you reduce what is currently possible to spicy autocomplete? That seems pretty dismissive, so much so that I wonder if it is motivated reasoning on your part. I’m not saying it’s good or bad; I’m just saying the capability is well beyond auto complete.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoAGI has always been "just around the corner", ever since computers were invented. Some problems have become more tractable (e.g. language translation), mostly by lowering our expectations of what constitutes a "solution", but AGI is nowhere nearer. AGI is a secular milleniarist religion.
- naasking 1y agoInterpreting "just around the corner" as "this year" sounds like your error. Most projections are are years out, at least.
- IshKebab 1y agoYeah it's already been 2½ years! How long does it take to develop artificial life anyway? Surely no more than 3 years? I demand my money back!