8 ms·

I _hope_ AGI is not right around the corner, for social political reasons we are absolutely not ready for it and it might push the future of humanity into a dys

• twelve40 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • pbreit 1y ago
    "that fool" created a $1.8 trillion company.
    • kulahan 1y ago
      $1.8 trillion in investor hopes and dreams, but of course they make zero dollars in profit, don’t know how to turn a profit, don’t have a product anyone would pay a profitable amount for, and have yet to show any real-world use that isn’t kinda dumb because you can’t trust anything it says anyways.
      • daniel_iversen 1y ago
        Meta makes > $160 billion in revenue and is profitable itself, of course they’re going to invest in future longer term revenue streams! Apple is the counter example in a way who have maintained a lot of cash reserves (which seems to by the way have dwindled a LOT as I just checked..?)
        • kulahan 1y ago
          I’m talking about OpenAI, not companies subsidizing their value-losing LLMs with value-generating branches of the company.
        • ArnoVW 1y ago
          All that money was outside the US. The theory was for some time that they were waiting for the right moment (change of administration/legislation) so that they could officially recognize the profit in the US cheaply
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • the_gastropod 1y ago
      Aren't there enough examples of successful people who are complete buffoons to nuke this silly trope from orbit? Success is no proof of wisdom or intelligence or whatever.
      • umbra07 1y ago
        can you point to someone as successful as zuckerberg, who was later conclusively shown to be a fraud or a total moron?
        • Avshalom 1y ago
          What does the name of his company Meta refer to?
        • chemeril 1y ago
          SBF comes to mind.
          • umbra07 1y ago
            SBF wasn't as successful though. His success wasn't even in the same stratosphere as Zuckerberg. His company was around for 3 years. Facebook has been around for over two decades. In terms of net worth, SBF was somewhere around 60th, I think? Zuckerberg was no. 2. Same thing with their respective companies.
        • fcarraldo 1y ago
          Elon Musk.
        • wetpaws 1y ago
          [dead]
        • twelve40 1y ago
          > a special order, 350 gallons, and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream yes, there are plenty more recent example, every single person who touched epstein
    • twelve40 1y ago
      past performance does not guarantee future results also, great for the Wall Street, mixed bag for us the people
    • AaronAPU 1y ago
      I’m always fascinated when someone equates profit with intelligence. There are many very wealthy fools and there always have been. Plenty of ingredients to substitute for intelligence. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
      • falcor84 1y ago
        I really don't see how a person can build one of the most successful companies in history from scratch without exhibiting intelligence. There are many things we can and should say about Zuckerberg, but I don't think that unintelligent is one them.
        • DanHulton 1y ago
          You can be terribly intelligent and be an incredible fool at the same time. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
          • muzani 1y ago
            Intelligence is the ability to creatively solve problems. Wisdom is picking the right problems to solve.
        • skeeter2020 1y ago
          Intelligence probably IS positively correlated with success, but the formula is complex and involves many other factors, so I have to believe it's relatively weak correlation. Anecdotally I know about as many smart failures as smart successes.
        • Bender 1y ago
          It certainly doesn't hurt when the government profiles and grooms intelligent people out of Stanford SRI the dark side, Harvard, hands them an unlimited credit card and says, "Make this thing that can do x,y,z." and then helps them network with like-minded creators and removes any obstacles in their path. One has to at least admit that was a contributing factor to their success as the vast majority of people do not get these perks. Partially related documentary [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][44 mins]
    • lowsong 1y ago
      No the thousands of people working at Facebook did, he just got rich from it.
      • apsurd 1y ago
        I'm no zuck fanboy, but i'm compelled to ask what purpose rejecting the role of a leader serves? HN is "the smart reddit" as my brother coined, and i'm very aware of how much nonsense is on here, but it is in a relative sense true. All to say, blindly bashing the role of a leader seems faulty and dismissive.
        • emseetech 1y ago
          There's a big discussion in there about the inherent requirement of labor, the definition of leadership, collective vs hierarchical decision-making, hegemonic inertia and market capture and more. This is probably not the best place to have it. Not to say that Zuckerberg is dumb but there's plenty of ways he could have managed to get where he is now without having the acumen to get to other places he wants to be.
        • dandanua 1y ago
          No one is rejecting the role of leader, it's just extremely exaggerated nowadays, like everyone thinks Facebook==Zuckerberg. And the leaders don't worth x1000 (or even x1000000 for some) unless they are doing a job of 1000 people. In most cases they are not even capable of doing 99% of the work people in their companies can do. Egomaniac Musk has already published his thoughts on programming problems, only confirming how dumb he is in this field.
      • cschep 1y ago
        Which they absolutely would not have done if Zuck didn't start it, get funding, pay them handsomely, and tell them exactly what to do. I'm sure that Zuck is worthy of huge amounts of criticism but this is a really silly response.
        • guelo 1y ago
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      He created a company that tracks and profiles people, psychologically manipulates them, and sells ads. And has zero ethical qualms about the massive social harm they have left in their wake. That doesn't tell me anything about his ability to build "augmented reality" or otherwise use artificial intelligence in any way that people will want to pay for. We'll see. Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now. Tesla hit the ball out of the park with EVs but can't figure out self-driving. Being good at one thing does not mean you will be good at everything you try.
      • packetlost 1y ago
        > Ford and GM have a century of experience building cars but they can't seem to figure out EVs despite trying for nearly two decades now. Your EV knowledge is 3 years out of date. Both Ford and GM have well liked and selling EVs. Meanwhile Tesla's sales are cratering.
        • buzzerbetrayed 1y ago
          [flagged]
      • masfoobar 1y ago
        I was rather sad when everyone moved away from MySpace to Facebook. While the interface today would likely be poor, I felt it was much better than what Facebook was offering. Still its hard to believe it was around 19 years ago many started to move over. While I cannot remember the names of these sites, there were various attempts to create a shared platform website where you could create a profile and communicate with others. I remember joining a few at least back in 2002 before MySpace, Yahoo360. There was also Bebo which, I think, was for the younger kids of the day. Lets not forget about friendsreunited. Many Companies become successful being at the right place at the right time. Facebook is one of those companies. Had facebook been created a year or so beforehand (or a year or two after) we would likely be using some other "social media" today. Be interesting how that would have compared to facebook. Would it be "more evil" ??? Regardless, whether its Facebook/MarkZuckerberg or [insert_social_media]/[owner]... we would still end up with a new celebrity millionnaire/billionnaire.. and would still be considered "a fool" one way or another.
    • notTooFarGone 1y ago
      If you would let a billion monkeys invest there also would be a monkey billionaire by chance.
• pbreit 1y ago
  Must "AGI" match human intelligence exactly or would outperforming in some functions and underpformin in others qualify?
  • saubeidl 1y ago
    Where would you draw the line? Any ol' computer outperforms me in doing basic arithmetic.
    • hkt 1y ago
      I'd suggest anything able to match a professional doing knowledge work. Original research from recognisably equivalent cognition, or equal abilities with a skilled practitioner of (eg) medicine. This sets the bar high, though. I think there's something to the idea of being able to pass for human in the workplace though. That's the real, consequential outcome here: AGI genuinely replacing humans, without need for supervision. That's what will have consequences. At the moment we aren't there (pre-first-line-support doesn't count).
    • kulahan 1y ago
      This is a question of how we quantify intelligence, and there aren’t many great answers. Still, basic arithmetic is probably not the right guideline for intelligence. My guess has always been that it’ll lie somewhere in ability to think critically, which they still have not even attempted yet, because it doesn’t really work with LLMs as they’re structured today.
  • crooked-v 1y ago
    For me, "AGI" would come in with being able to reliably perform simple open-ended tasks successfully without needing any specialized aid or tooling. Not necessarily very well, just being capable of it in the first place. For a specific example of what I mean, there's Vending-Bench - even very 'dumb' humans could reliably succeed on that test indefinitely, at least until they got terminally bored of it. Current LLMs, by contrast, are just fundamentally incapable of that, despite seeming very 'smart' if all you pay attention to is their eloquence.
• appleaday1 1y ago
  what social political reasons, can you name some of these? we are 100% ready for AGI.
  • kadushka 1y ago
    Are you ready to lose your job, permanently?
    • kiney 1y ago
      looking forward to it
    • hackable_sand 1y ago
      I'd be down for that. Making fast food is tiring work.
    • lelanthran 1y ago
      > Are you ready to lose your job, permanently? You're asking the wrong question and, predictably, some significant portion of people are going to answer "yes". Better to ask the question "Are you ready to starve to death already?", which is a more accurate version of "Are you ready to lose you income, permanently".
• tshaddox 1y ago
  If birth rates are as much a cause for concern as many people seem to think, and we absolutely need to solve it (instead of solving, for instance, the fact that the economy purportedly requires exponential population growth forever), perhaps we should hope that AGI comes soon.
  • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    We're not in a stable state now, it's not about population growth, it's about not literally dying out. With a birth rate of 1 population will halve every generation. This is an apocalyptic scenario and incompatible with industrial civilization.
    • tshaddox 1y ago
      I am worried about what will happen to various nations' economies relatively soon, long before the population actually halves, but I'm not worried that the fertility rate would continue on its trend as demographics change. Ignoring the potential second-order effects of economic collapse, wars over resources, etc., I think fertility rate would stabilize given that culture and genetics would by definition quickly become dominated by the people who do reproduce.
      • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
        > culture and genetics would by definition quickly become dominated by the people who do reproduce Yeah, but in how many generations? Four, five? That's a lot of collapse before we get to that point.
• 9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
  When it comes to recouping cost, a lot of people don't consider the insane amount of depreciation expense brought on by the up to 1 trillion (depending on which estimate) that has been invested in AI buildouts. That depreciation expense could easily be more than the combined revenue of all AI companies.
• Davidzheng 1y ago
  I think it's rather easy for them to recoup those costs, if you can disrupt some industry with a full AI company with almost no employees and outcompete everyone else, that's free money for you.
  • energy123 1y ago
    Possibly but not necessarily. Competition can erode all economic rents, no matter how useful a product is.
  • dathinab 1y ago
    I think they are trying to do something like this(1) by long term providing a "business suite", i.e. something comparable to g suite or microsoft 360. For a lot of the things which work well with current AI technology it's supper convenient to have access to all your customer private data (even if you don't train on them, but e.g. stuff like RAG systems for information retrieval are one of the things which already with the current state of LLMs work quite well). This also allows you to compensate hallucinations, non understanding of LLMs and similar by providing (working) links (or inclusions of snippets of) sources where you have the information from and by having all relevant information in the context window of the LLM instead of it's "learned" data from training you in general get better results. I mean RAG systems already did work well without LLMs to be used in some information retrieval products. And the thing is if your user has to manually upload all potentially relevant business documents you can't really make it work well, but what if they anyway upload all of them to your company because they use your companies file sharing/drive solution? And lets not even consider the benefits you could get from a cheaper plan where you are allowed to train on the companies data after anonymizing (like for micro companies, too many people thing "they have nothing to hide" and it's anonymized so okay right? (no)). Or you going rogue and just steal trade secrets to then breach into other markets it's not like some bigger SF companies had been found to do exactly that (I think it was amazon/amazon basics). (1:) Through in that case you still have employees until you AI becomes good enough to write all you code, instead of "just" being a tool for developers to work faster ;)