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It is critical to remember that there is a market for people who say "AGI is not coming" It doesn't matter whether they are lying. People want to hear it. It

It is critical to remember that there is a market for people who say "AGI is not coming" It doesn't matter whether they are lying. People want to hear it. It's comforting. So the market fills the void, and people get views and money for saying it. Don't use the fact that people are saying it, as evidence that it is true.

righthand 1y ago
Waiting for Agi-dot… The inverse can be true too: Just because people ARE saying that Agi is coming, isn’t evidence that it is true.
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  OK, but your null hypothesis should always be a first or second degree linear projection. "AI is getting better rapidly" is the current state of affairs. Arguing "AI is about to stop getting better" is the argument that requires strong evidence.
  - camillomiller 1y ago
    Compare Altman outlandish claims about GPT-5 and the reality of this update. Do you think they square out in any reasonable way?
    - bpodgursky 1y ago
      Please, please seriously think back to your 2020 self, and think about whether your 2020 self would be surprised by what AI can do today. You've frog-boiled yourself into timelines where "No WORLD SHAKING AI launches in the past 4 months" means "AI is frozen". In 4 months, you will be shocked if AI doesn't have a major improvement every 2 months. In 6 months, you will be shocked if it doesn't have a major update ever 1 month. It's hard to see exponential curves while you're on it, I'm not trying to fault you here. But it's really important to stretch yourself to try.
      - backpackviolet 1y ago
        I’m still surprised by what AI can do. It’s amazing. … but I still have to double check when it’s important that I get the right answer, I still have to review the code it writes, and I still am not sure there is actually enough business to cover what it will actually cost to run when it needs to pay for itself.
      - th0ma5 1y ago
        To be honest, I had the right idea back then... This technology has fundamental qualities that require it to provide inaccurate token predictions that are only statistically probable. They aren't even trying to change this situation other than trying to find more data to train, saying you have to keep adding layers of them, or are saying it is the user's responsibility. There's been the obvious notion that digitizing the world's information is not enough and that hasn't changed.
      - righthand 1y ago
        What if I’ve not been impressed by giving a bunch of people a spam bot tuned to education materials? Am I frog boiled? Who cares about the actual advancement of this singular component if I was never impressed. You assume everyone is “impressed”.
      - jononor 1y ago
        I for one am quite surprised. Sometimes impressed. But also often frustrated. And occasionally disappointed. Sometimes worried about the negative follow-on effects. Working with current LLMs spans the whole gamut... But for coding we are at the point where even the current level is quite useful. And as the tools/systems get better, the usefilness is going to increase quite a bit. Even if models improve slowly from this point on. It will impact the whole industry over the next years, and since software is eating the world, will impact many other industries as well. Exponential? Perhaps in the same way as computers and Internet have been exponential - cost per X (say tokens) will probably go down exponentially the next years and decades, the same way cost per FLOP went down, on megabytes transferred. But those exponential gains did not results in exponential growth in productivity, or if so, the exponent is much much lower. And I suspect it will likely be the same for artificial intelligence.
  - backpackviolet 1y ago
    > "AI is getting better rapidly" … is it? I hear people saying that. I see “improvement”: the art generally has the right number of fingers more often, the text looks like text, the code agents don’t write stuff that even the linter says is wrong. But I still see the wrong number of fingers sometimes. I still see the chat bots count the wrong number of letters in a word. I still see agents invent libraries that don’t exist. I don’t know what “rapid” is supposed to mean here. It feels like Achilles and the Tortoise and also has the energy costs of a nation-state.
    - righthand 1y ago
      Agreed there really isn’t any metrics that indicate this is true. Considering many models are still too complex to run locally. Llms are getting better for the corporations that sell access to them. Not necessarily for the people that use them.
  - righthand 1y ago
    “AI is getting better rapidly” is a false premise. As AI is a large domain. There is no way to quanitify the better as compared to the entire domain. “Llms are improving rapidly during a short period of time where they gain popularity” is more accurate. Llms getting better != a path to AGI.
    - metalman 1y ago
      the same is true of solar eclipses, there are no partial eclipses, untill the very last instant of the moon covering the sun, it is far to bright to look at, and then the stars come out and the solar flares are visible, the birds sing there evening songs and here I have told you of it, but at best it will be hint. AI is worse, much worse, as we have our own inteligence, but cant even offer a hint of where that line is and how to cross it, where to go to see it
VerminOctopus1 1y ago
One could flip your post to say “AGI is coming” and be claiming the opposite, and it would be equally lacking insight. This is not “critical” to remember. There are interesting and well thought out arguments for why the AGI is not coming with the current state of technology, dismissing those arguments as propaganda/clickbait is not warranted. Yannic is also an AI professional and expert, not one to be offhandedly dismissed because you don’t like the messaging.
- fooqux 1y ago
  I doing think that's fair to the person you replied to. At no time did they say they didn't like/dislike the message. Merely that there's a market for it, and thus, people may be biased. Telling us all to remember that there's potential for bias isn't so bad. It's a hot button issue.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
You can remove the "not" and everything you wrote is just as true. If not more so. It's not the AGI sceptics who are getting $500bn valuations.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  Oddly, in a bubble the highest valuations come just before the burst. This is obvious mathematical certainty that can be read by anyone viewing an exponential growth curve.
  - kbrkbr 1y ago
    > obvious mathematical certainty You mean like euclidean geometry?
    - d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
      I mean that as valuations rise before a bubble bursts, the curve provides that successive values grow, sometimes at an increasing rate. The greatest values, and change in values comes just before the bubble bursts. The point being that high valuations and increasing valuations are not very capable of distinguishing bubble/non-bubble. In fact, tulips were most valuable, and those values were climbing at the highest rate before the tulip bubble burst.
      - kbrkbr 1y ago
        Look, I asked >> obvious mathematical certainty > You mean like euclidean geometry To which you reply stuff about values and bubble bursts. What you said may or may not be true. But it's hard for me to tell how it is related to what I asked.
        d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
        I said that high valuation or valuations rising at an increasing rate is common to bubbles. This clearly refers back to the comment about the current high and rising valuations for AGI prospects.
camillomiller 1y ago
By this measure, considering the current capex all over the board, there is a lot more incentive in pushing the “AGI IS NEAR AND WE AINT READY” narrative than the opposite. If AGI won’t come, as it’s highly probable, these companies are bust for billions and billions…
good_stuffs 1y ago
Nobody even knows what AGI even is. This will most likely be defined by a corporation, not science. Due to obvious incentives.
- asimpletune 1y ago
  AGI is being able to learn from first principles, not being trained on trillions of examples. If you can start with priors and perform a demonstration that is not already a prior then you are intelligent. It’s the difference between the result and understanding the process that produces the result.
  - kbrkbr 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on the process by which you created this definition?
    - asimpletune 1y ago
      I just applied some stuff that’s been known for a long time in a different context. But let me give you a scenario to think about as a demonstration of how I mean. Imagine we trained an AI on everything ever written, but the catch is we’ve restricted the training data to the year, let’s say, 400 BCE and earlier (Ignore the fact that most of what was written then is lost to us now and just pretend that’s not issue for our thought experiment) The AI is also programmed to seek new knowledge based off that starting knowledge. Also pretend that this AI has an oracle it could talk to that would help the AI simulate experiments. So the AI could ask questions and get answers but only in a way that builds ever so slightly off what it already knows. Making any progress at all in this experiment and discovering new knowledge is what we’re after and “new knowledge” would be defined as some r that’s demonstrated using some p and q as propositions, where r is neither p or q, and r is also correct in terms of 2025 knowledge. If the AI, with the aid of the knowledge it started with and the help of the oracle to let it ask questions about the world and build off that knowledge, can ever arrive, or exceed, 2025 knowledge then it’s at least generally intelligent and equal to a human. Although the bar could maybe be even less. It loses, however, if it never advances, gets stuck in a loop, or in some other sense can’t make progress. This is intelligence: to proceed from things everyone agrees on and ask questions and formulate assertions that depend on propositions holding true, and in the process demonstrate new things that were not already part of common belief. I don’t know how this experiment could be done in real life with an LLM for example but this is a story version of what I mean in my original comment.
politelemon 1y ago
What products are people building on not-AGI?
gls2ro 1y ago
Usually the burden of proof is on the one who is making a positive claim like: AGI is here or even AGI is coming. The default position that does not need any more justification is the one that is skeptic or even agnostic to the claim that is made until proof is shown. So when talking about evidence as a way to prove a claim: AGI is coming is the team that needs to provide this evidence. Someone saying AGI is not coming can add as many arguments or opinions as they like but it does not usually invite to such a high scrutiny as saying they need to provide evidence.
- lostmsu 1y ago
  Using the very basic definition of AGI where "general" is just cross-domain, as in e.g. chemistry and law, the very first ChatGPT was already it. Not very smart one though. "Modern" definitions that include non-intelligence related stuff like agency sound like goalpost moving, so it's unclear why would you want them.
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    Depends on definition of “cross-domain”. Can any of the current models be plugged in in an emulator of a human with equivalent senses (vision, hearing etc) and process those inputs in real time with the same speed of reaction, i.e. emulate human or animal intelligence in interactions with environment? That would be truly cross-domain.
    - lostmsu 1y ago
      I defined cross-domain with an example. ChatGPT is not trained to practice chemistry and law, yet it can do both. It is cross-domain. You can make it stronger at being cross domain, but it satisfies the minimum requirement.
      - ivan_gammel 1y ago
        It cannot. It doesn’t reason. Gambling and winning (1-10^N)*100% times is not the same as reasoning and providing accurate answers the same amount of times. If you reason about something, your errors fall into certain categories of fallacies often related to incomplete information. LLM hallucinations are easy to spot with reasoning, they are of statistical nature.
nkrisc 1y ago
Faster than light travel is not coming. Given that AGI does not exist, “AGI is not coming” is the status quo until someone disproves it.
- kbelder 1y ago
  We have no reason to believe faster than light travel is possible. We know that AGI is possible, even if we don't know when or how. The comparison isn't apt.

righthand 1y ago

Waiting for Agi-dot… The inverse can be true too: Just because people ARE saying that Agi is coming, isn’t evidence that it is true.

bpodgursky 1y ago
OK, but your null hypothesis should always be a first or second degree linear projection. "AI is getting better rapidly" is the current state of affairs. Arguing "AI is about to stop getting better" is the argument that requires strong evidence.
- camillomiller 1y ago
  Compare Altman outlandish claims about GPT-5 and the reality of this update. Do you think they square out in any reasonable way?
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    Please, please seriously think back to your 2020 self, and think about whether your 2020 self would be surprised by what AI can do today. You've frog-boiled yourself into timelines where "No WORLD SHAKING AI launches in the past 4 months" means "AI is frozen". In 4 months, you will be shocked if AI doesn't have a major improvement every 2 months. In 6 months, you will be shocked if it doesn't have a major update ever 1 month. It's hard to see exponential curves while you're on it, I'm not trying to fault you here. But it's really important to stretch yourself to try.
    - backpackviolet 1y ago
      I’m still surprised by what AI can do. It’s amazing. … but I still have to double check when it’s important that I get the right answer, I still have to review the code it writes, and I still am not sure there is actually enough business to cover what it will actually cost to run when it needs to pay for itself.
    - th0ma5 1y ago
      To be honest, I had the right idea back then... This technology has fundamental qualities that require it to provide inaccurate token predictions that are only statistically probable. They aren't even trying to change this situation other than trying to find more data to train, saying you have to keep adding layers of them, or are saying it is the user's responsibility. There's been the obvious notion that digitizing the world's information is not enough and that hasn't changed.
    - righthand 1y ago
      What if I’ve not been impressed by giving a bunch of people a spam bot tuned to education materials? Am I frog boiled? Who cares about the actual advancement of this singular component if I was never impressed. You assume everyone is “impressed”.
    - jononor 1y ago
      I for one am quite surprised. Sometimes impressed. But also often frustrated. And occasionally disappointed. Sometimes worried about the negative follow-on effects. Working with current LLMs spans the whole gamut... But for coding we are at the point where even the current level is quite useful. And as the tools/systems get better, the usefilness is going to increase quite a bit. Even if models improve slowly from this point on. It will impact the whole industry over the next years, and since software is eating the world, will impact many other industries as well. Exponential? Perhaps in the same way as computers and Internet have been exponential - cost per X (say tokens) will probably go down exponentially the next years and decades, the same way cost per FLOP went down, on megabytes transferred. But those exponential gains did not results in exponential growth in productivity, or if so, the exponent is much much lower. And I suspect it will likely be the same for artificial intelligence.
- backpackviolet 1y ago
  > "AI is getting better rapidly" … is it? I hear people saying that. I see “improvement”: the art generally has the right number of fingers more often, the text looks like text, the code agents don’t write stuff that even the linter says is wrong. But I still see the wrong number of fingers sometimes. I still see the chat bots count the wrong number of letters in a word. I still see agents invent libraries that don’t exist. I don’t know what “rapid” is supposed to mean here. It feels like Achilles and the Tortoise and also has the energy costs of a nation-state.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Agreed there really isn’t any metrics that indicate this is true. Considering many models are still too complex to run locally. Llms are getting better for the corporations that sell access to them. Not necessarily for the people that use them.
- righthand 1y ago
  “AI is getting better rapidly” is a false premise. As AI is a large domain. There is no way to quanitify the better as compared to the entire domain. “Llms are improving rapidly during a short period of time where they gain popularity” is more accurate. Llms getting better != a path to AGI.
  - metalman 1y ago
    the same is true of solar eclipses, there are no partial eclipses, untill the very last instant of the moon covering the sun, it is far to bright to look at, and then the stars come out and the solar flares are visible, the birds sing there evening songs and here I have told you of it, but at best it will be hint. AI is worse, much worse, as we have our own inteligence, but cant even offer a hint of where that line is and how to cross it, where to go to see it

VerminOctopus1 1y ago

One could flip your post to say “AGI is coming” and be claiming the opposite, and it would be equally lacking insight. This is not “critical” to remember. There are interesting and well thought out arguments for why the AGI is not coming with the current state of technology, dismissing those arguments as propaganda/clickbait is not warranted. Yannic is also an AI professional and expert, not one to be offhandedly dismissed because you don’t like the messaging.

fooqux 1y ago
I doing think that's fair to the person you replied to. At no time did they say they didn't like/dislike the message. Merely that there's a market for it, and thus, people may be biased. Telling us all to remember that there's potential for bias isn't so bad. It's a hot button issue.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago

You can remove the "not" and everything you wrote is just as true. If not more so. It's not the AGI sceptics who are getting $500bn valuations.

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
Oddly, in a bubble the highest valuations come just before the burst. This is obvious mathematical certainty that can be read by anyone viewing an exponential growth curve.
- kbrkbr 1y ago
  > obvious mathematical certainty You mean like euclidean geometry?
  - d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
    I mean that as valuations rise before a bubble bursts, the curve provides that successive values grow, sometimes at an increasing rate. The greatest values, and change in values comes just before the bubble bursts. The point being that high valuations and increasing valuations are not very capable of distinguishing bubble/non-bubble. In fact, tulips were most valuable, and those values were climbing at the highest rate before the tulip bubble burst.
    - kbrkbr 1y ago
      Look, I asked >> obvious mathematical certainty > You mean like euclidean geometry To which you reply stuff about values and bubble bursts. What you said may or may not be true. But it's hard for me to tell how it is related to what I asked.
      - d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
        I said that high valuation or valuations rising at an increasing rate is common to bubbles. This clearly refers back to the comment about the current high and rising valuations for AGI prospects.

camillomiller 1y ago

By this measure, considering the current capex all over the board, there is a lot more incentive in pushing the “AGI IS NEAR AND WE AINT READY” narrative than the opposite. If AGI won’t come, as it’s highly probable, these companies are bust for billions and billions…

good_stuffs 1y ago

Nobody even knows what AGI even is. This will most likely be defined by a corporation, not science. Due to obvious incentives.

asimpletune 1y ago
AGI is being able to learn from first principles, not being trained on trillions of examples. If you can start with priors and perform a demonstration that is not already a prior then you are intelligent. It’s the difference between the result and understanding the process that produces the result.
- kbrkbr 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on the process by which you created this definition?
  - asimpletune 1y ago
    I just applied some stuff that’s been known for a long time in a different context. But let me give you a scenario to think about as a demonstration of how I mean. Imagine we trained an AI on everything ever written, but the catch is we’ve restricted the training data to the year, let’s say, 400 BCE and earlier (Ignore the fact that most of what was written then is lost to us now and just pretend that’s not issue for our thought experiment) The AI is also programmed to seek new knowledge based off that starting knowledge. Also pretend that this AI has an oracle it could talk to that would help the AI simulate experiments. So the AI could ask questions and get answers but only in a way that builds ever so slightly off what it already knows. Making any progress at all in this experiment and discovering new knowledge is what we’re after and “new knowledge” would be defined as some r that’s demonstrated using some p and q as propositions, where r is neither p or q, and r is also correct in terms of 2025 knowledge. If the AI, with the aid of the knowledge it started with and the help of the oracle to let it ask questions about the world and build off that knowledge, can ever arrive, or exceed, 2025 knowledge then it’s at least generally intelligent and equal to a human. Although the bar could maybe be even less. It loses, however, if it never advances, gets stuck in a loop, or in some other sense can’t make progress. This is intelligence: to proceed from things everyone agrees on and ask questions and formulate assertions that depend on propositions holding true, and in the process demonstrate new things that were not already part of common belief. I don’t know how this experiment could be done in real life with an LLM for example but this is a story version of what I mean in my original comment.

politelemon 1y ago

What products are people building on not-AGI?

gls2ro 1y ago

Usually the burden of proof is on the one who is making a positive claim like: AGI is here or even AGI is coming. The default position that does not need any more justification is the one that is skeptic or even agnostic to the claim that is made until proof is shown. So when talking about evidence as a way to prove a claim: AGI is coming is the team that needs to provide this evidence. Someone saying AGI is not coming can add as many arguments or opinions as they like but it does not usually invite to such a high scrutiny as saying they need to provide evidence.

lostmsu 1y ago
Using the very basic definition of AGI where "general" is just cross-domain, as in e.g. chemistry and law, the very first ChatGPT was already it. Not very smart one though. "Modern" definitions that include non-intelligence related stuff like agency sound like goalpost moving, so it's unclear why would you want them.
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  Depends on definition of “cross-domain”. Can any of the current models be plugged in in an emulator of a human with equivalent senses (vision, hearing etc) and process those inputs in real time with the same speed of reaction, i.e. emulate human or animal intelligence in interactions with environment? That would be truly cross-domain.
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    I defined cross-domain with an example. ChatGPT is not trained to practice chemistry and law, yet it can do both. It is cross-domain. You can make it stronger at being cross domain, but it satisfies the minimum requirement.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      It cannot. It doesn’t reason. Gambling and winning (1-10^N)*100% times is not the same as reasoning and providing accurate answers the same amount of times. If you reason about something, your errors fall into certain categories of fallacies often related to incomplete information. LLM hallucinations are easy to spot with reasoning, they are of statistical nature.

nkrisc 1y ago

Faster than light travel is not coming. Given that AGI does not exist, “AGI is not coming” is the status quo until someone disproves it.

kbelder 1y ago
We have no reason to believe faster than light travel is possible. We know that AGI is possible, even if we don't know when or how. The comparison isn't apt.