6 ms·

If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.

godelski 1y ago
I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/ https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027. >In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 (and definitely by 2024). >Most of their other estimates declined significantly between 2023 and 2022. >The median estimate for achieving ‘high-level machine intelligence’ shortened by 13 years. Basically every median timeline estimate has shrunk like clockwork every year. Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents. I think is reasonable to expect that the pace of "prediction error" won't change significantly since it's been on a straight downward trend over the past 4 years, and if it continues as such, AGI around 2028-2030 is a median estimate.
  - parineum 1y ago
    Those are differences of magnitude, AGI is a difference of kind. No amount of describing pictures in natural language is AGI.
    - atleastoptimal 1y ago
      I never said it was sufficient for AGI, just that it was a milestone in AI that people thought was farther off than it turned out to be. This is applying to all subsets of intelligence AI is reaching earlier than experts initially predicted, giving good reason AGI (perhaps a synthesis of these elements coming together in a single model, or a suite of models) is likely closer than standard expert consensus.
      - parineum 1y ago
        The milestones your citing are all milestones of transformers that were underestimated. If you think an incremental improvement in transformers are what's needed for AGI, I see your angle. However, IMO, transformers haven't shown any evidence of that capability. I see no reason to believe that they'd develop that with a bit more compute or a bit more data.
        godelski 1y ago
        It's also worth pointing out that in the same survey it was well agreed upon that success would come sooner if there was more funding. The question was a counterfactual prediction of how much less progress would be made if there was 50% less funding. The response was about 50% less progress. So honestly, it doesn't seem like many of the predictions are that far off with this in context. That things sped up as funding did too? That was part of the prediction! The other big player here was falling cost of compute. There was pretty strong agreement that if compute was 50% more expensive that this would result in a decrease in progress by >50%. I think uncontextualized, the predictions don't seem that inaccurate. They're reasonably close. Contextualized, they seem pretty accurate.
  - p1esk 1y ago
    Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Remember when he said nanobots would cure all our diseases by a few years ago?
      - p1esk 1y ago
        I don’t actually, did he specify a year? He made a lot of predictions, many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.
        saagarjha 1y ago
        2020s was my understanding; he made this prediction around the time that he made the AGI one. I think he has recently pushed it back to 2030s because it seems unlikely to come true.
        godelski 1y ago
        > many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing. If you make enough predictions eventually one will be right Or at least one will be exciting
  - godelski 1y ago
    > The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress What's your argument? That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions? Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction? Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there is a thing as "more accurate" right? >> In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027. Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 < 2027. And just look at the line that follows > In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 Something doesn't add up here... My guess, as someone who literally took that survey, is what's being referred to as "a simple program" has a different threshold. Here's the actual question from the survey Write concise, efficient, human-readable Python code to implement simple algorithms like quicksort. That is, the system should write code that sorts a list, rather than just being able to sort lists. Suppose the system is given only: A specification of what counts as a sorted list Several examples of lists undergoing sorting by quicksort Is the answer to this question clear? Place your bets now! Here, I asked ChatGPT the question[1], it got it wrong. Yeah, I know it isn't very wrong, but it is still wrong. Here's an example of a correct solution[2] which shows the (at least) two missing lines. Can we get there with another iteration? Sure! But that's not what the question was asking. I'm sure some people will say that GPT gave the right solution. So what that it ignored the case of a singular array and assumed all inputs are arrays. I didn't give it an example of a singular array or non-array inputs, but it did just assume. I mean leetcode questions pull out way more edge cases than I'm griping on here. So maybe you're just cherry-picking. Maybe the author is just cherry-picking. Because their assertion that "AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023" is not unobjectively true. It's not clear that this is true in 2025! [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843 [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0dabc https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0da... [2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-insertion-sort/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-inse...
  - jodrellblank 1y ago
    > "Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents." Claim doesn't check out; here's a YouTube video from Apple uploaded in 2021, explaining how to enable and use the iPhone feature to speak a high level human description of what the camera is pointed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY
catmanjan 1y ago
Even if we spent 1 million years on LLM it will not result in AGI, we are no closer to AGI with LLM technology than we were with toaster technology
- exasperaited 1y ago
  “Would you like a toasted teacake?”
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
Paying attention to trends is how you lose your money on a hype train.

I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.

atleastoptimal 1y ago
The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/ https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027. >In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 (and definitely by 2024). >Most of their other estimates declined significantly between 2023 and 2022. >The median estimate for achieving ‘high-level machine intelligence’ shortened by 13 years. Basically every median timeline estimate has shrunk like clockwork every year. Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents. I think is reasonable to expect that the pace of "prediction error" won't change significantly since it's been on a straight downward trend over the past 4 years, and if it continues as such, AGI around 2028-2030 is a median estimate.
- parineum 1y ago
  Those are differences of magnitude, AGI is a difference of kind. No amount of describing pictures in natural language is AGI.
  - atleastoptimal 1y ago
    I never said it was sufficient for AGI, just that it was a milestone in AI that people thought was farther off than it turned out to be. This is applying to all subsets of intelligence AI is reaching earlier than experts initially predicted, giving good reason AGI (perhaps a synthesis of these elements coming together in a single model, or a suite of models) is likely closer than standard expert consensus.
    - parineum 1y ago
      The milestones your citing are all milestones of transformers that were underestimated. If you think an incremental improvement in transformers are what's needed for AGI, I see your angle. However, IMO, transformers haven't shown any evidence of that capability. I see no reason to believe that they'd develop that with a bit more compute or a bit more data.
      - godelski 1y ago
        It's also worth pointing out that in the same survey it was well agreed upon that success would come sooner if there was more funding. The question was a counterfactual prediction of how much less progress would be made if there was 50% less funding. The response was about 50% less progress. So honestly, it doesn't seem like many of the predictions are that far off with this in context. That things sped up as funding did too? That was part of the prediction! The other big player here was falling cost of compute. There was pretty strong agreement that if compute was 50% more expensive that this would result in a decrease in progress by >50%. I think uncontextualized, the predictions don't seem that inaccurate. They're reasonably close. Contextualized, they seem pretty accurate.
- p1esk 1y ago
  Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Remember when he said nanobots would cure all our diseases by a few years ago?
    - p1esk 1y ago
      I don’t actually, did he specify a year? He made a lot of predictions, many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.
      - saagarjha 1y ago
        2020s was my understanding; he made this prediction around the time that he made the AGI one. I think he has recently pushed it back to 2030s because it seems unlikely to come true.
      - godelski 1y ago
        > many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing. If you make enough predictions eventually one will be right Or at least one will be exciting
- godelski 1y ago
  > The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress What's your argument? That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions? Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction? Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there is a thing as "more accurate" right? >> In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027. Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 < 2027. And just look at the line that follows > In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 Something doesn't add up here... My guess, as someone who literally took that survey, is what's being referred to as "a simple program" has a different threshold. Here's the actual question from the survey Write concise, efficient, human-readable Python code to implement simple algorithms like quicksort. That is, the system should write code that sorts a list, rather than just being able to sort lists. Suppose the system is given only: A specification of what counts as a sorted list Several examples of lists undergoing sorting by quicksort Is the answer to this question clear? Place your bets now! Here, I asked ChatGPT the question[1], it got it wrong. Yeah, I know it isn't very wrong, but it is still wrong. Here's an example of a correct solution[2] which shows the (at least) two missing lines. Can we get there with another iteration? Sure! But that's not what the question was asking. I'm sure some people will say that GPT gave the right solution. So what that it ignored the case of a singular array and assumed all inputs are arrays. I didn't give it an example of a singular array or non-array inputs, but it did just assume. I mean leetcode questions pull out way more edge cases than I'm griping on here. So maybe you're just cherry-picking. Maybe the author is just cherry-picking. Because their assertion that "AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023" is not unobjectively true. It's not clear that this is true in 2025! [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843 [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0dabc https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0da... [2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-insertion-sort/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-inse...
- jodrellblank 1y ago
  > "Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents." Claim doesn't check out; here's a YouTube video from Apple uploaded in 2021, explaining how to enable and use the iPhone feature to speak a high level human description of what the camera is pointed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY

catmanjan 1y ago

Even if we spent 1 million years on LLM it will not result in AGI, we are no closer to AGI with LLM technology than we were with toaster technology

exasperaited 1y ago
“Would you like a toasted teacake?”

BeFlatXIII 1y ago

Paying attention to trends is how you lose your money on a hype train.