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I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this m
by jb1991 1y ago
I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now.
That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended.
Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet.
- colecut 1y agoIf you are right, you don't have to
- rokkamokka 1y agoWill you take a wager of my one dollar versus your life assets? :)
- plaidfuji 1y agoShould probably just short nvidia
- lbhdc 1y ago“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
- Thrymr 1y ago"just short nvidia" is not simple. Even if you believe it is overvalued, and you are correct, a short is a specific bet that the market will realize that fact in a precise amount of time. There are very significant risks in short selling, and famously, the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
- simonsarris 1y agoThere is a wide space where LLMs and their offshoots make enormous productivity gains, while looking nothing like actual artificial intelligence (which has been rebranded AGI), and Nvidia turns out to have a justified valuation etc.
- lm28469 1y agoIt's been three years now, where is it? Everyone on hn is now a 10x developers, where are all the new startups making $$$? Employees are 10x more productive, where are the 10x revenues? Or even 2x? Why is growth over the last 3 years completely flat once you remove the proverbial AI pickaxes sellers? What if all the slop generated by llms counterbalance any kind of productivity boost? 10x more bad code, 10x more spam emails, 10x more bots
- Etheryte 1y agoYou can generally buy options only a few years out. A few years is decidedly shorter than the lifetime of everyone reading this thread.
- guluarte 1y agothat's probably a good idea, either AI bubble explodes or competitors catch up
- asah 1y agoDepends on the definition, I might take that bet because under some definitions were already here. Example: better than average human across many thinking tasks is done.
- rootusrootus 1y agoI think that the definition needs to include something about performance on out-of-training tasks. Otherwise we're just talking about machine learning, not anything like AGI.
- balder1991 1y agoYes, like stated in this video: https://youtu.be/COOAssGkF6I https://youtu.be/COOAssGkF6I
- Yizahi 1y agoCalculator can do arithmetic better than a human. Does this mean we have so called AI for half a century now?
- xboxnolifes 1y agoA calculator does 1 thinking task.
- Yizahi 1y agoFirst of all, it's zero thinking tasks, calculators can't think. But let's call it that way for the sake of an argument. LLM can do less than a dozen thinking tasks, and I'm generous here. Generating text, generating still images, generating digital music, generating video, and generate computer code. That's about it. Is that a complete and exhaustive list of all what constitutes a human? Or at least a human mind? If some piece of silicon can do 5-6 tasks it is a human equivalent now? (AI aka AGI presumes human mind parity)
- KeplerBoy 1y agoThat's how the term was sometimes used before. Think of video games AIs, those weren't (and still aren't) especially clever, but they were called AIs and nobody batted an eye at that.
- louiereederson 1y agoshort oracle
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoIs anyone _not_ short Oracle? The downside risk for them is that they’ll lose a deal worth 10x their annual revenues. Their potential upside is that OpenAI (a company with lifetime revenues of ~$10bn) have committed to a $300bn lease, if Oracle manages build a fleet of datacenters faster than any company in history. If you’re not short, you definitely shouldn’t be long. They’re the only one of the big tech companies I could reasonably see going to $0 if the bubble pops.
- benregenspan 1y agoWith the executive branch now picking "national champion" companies (as in Intel deal), I feel like there's a big new short risk to consider. Would the current administration allow Oracle to go to zero?
- nextworddev 1y agoyou can do that by shorting Oracle here
- stock_toaster 1y ago“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes
- nextworddev 1y agoyeah, of course. just framing the OP's bravado
- guluarte 1y agomy bet is we will just slowly automate things more and more until one day someone will point out when we reached "AGI"
- lvl155 1y agoWe are pretty close. There are some insane cutting edge developments being done in private.
- jb1991 1y agoI doubt your use of "insane".
- vonneumannstan 1y agoYou can make this bet functional if you really believe it, which you of course really don't. If you actually do then I can introduce you to some people happy to take your money in perpetuity.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago>I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. By almost any definition available during the 90s GPT-5 Thinking/Pro would pretty much qualify. The idea that we are somehow not going to make any progress for the next century seems absurd. Do you have any actual justification for why you believe this? Every lab is saying they see a clear path to improving capabilities and theres been nothing shown by any research I'm aware of to justify doubting that.
- port3000 1y agoThey have to say that, or there'll be a loud sucking sound and hundreds of billions in capital will be withdrawn overnight
- vonneumannstan 1y agoOk that's great do you have evidence suggesting scaling is actually plateauing or that capabilities of GPT6 and Claude 4.5 Opus won't be better than models now?
- jb1991 1y agoYou are suggesting, in your reference to scaling, that this is a game of quantity. It is not.
- jb1991 1y agoThe fact is that no matter how "advanced" AI seems to get, it always falls short and does not satisfy what we think of as true AI. It's always a case of "it's going to get better", and it's been said like this for decades now. People have been predicting AGI for a lot longer than the time I predict we will not attain it. LLMs are cool and fun and impressive (and can be dangerous), but they are not any form of AGI -- they satisfy the "artificial", and that's about it. GPT by any definition of AGI is not AGI. You are ignoring the word "general" in AGI. GPT is extremely niche in what it does.
- scuppernong 1y agogenuinely curious to hear your reasoning for why this is the case. i'm always somewhere between bemused and annoyed opening the daily HN thread about AGI and seeing everyone's totally unfounded confidence in their predictions. my position is I have no idea what is going to happen.
- BoorishBears 1y agowhat about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research? Even if you don't understand the technicals, surely you understand if any party was on the verge of AGI they wouldn't behave as these companies behave?
- Rudybega 1y ago> what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research? That's a bold claim, please cite your sources. It's hard to find super precise sources on this for 2025, but epochAI has a pretty good summary for 2024. (with core estimates drawn from the Information and NYT https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend The most relevant quote: "These reports indicate that OpenAI spent $3 billion on training compute, $1.8 billion on inference compute, and $1 billion on research compute amortized over “multiple years”. For the purpose of this visualization, we estimate that the amortization schedule for research compute was two years, for $2 billion in research compute expenses incurred in 2024." Unless you think that this rough breakdown has completely changed, I find it implausible that Sora and workplace usecases constitute ~42% of total training and inference spend (and I think you could probably argue a fair bit of that training spend is still "research" of a sort, which makes your statement even more implausible).
- BoorishBears 1y agoSorry I'm giving too much credit to the reader here I guess. "AI slop and workplace usecases" is a synecdoche for "anything that is not completing then deploying AGI". The cost of Sora 2 is not the compute to do inference on videos, it's the ablations that feed human preference vs general world model performance for that architecture for example. It's the cost of rigorous safety and alignment post-training. It's the legal noise and risk that using IP in that manner causes. And in that vein, the anti-signal is stuff like the product work that is verifying users to reduce content moderation. These consumer usecases could be viewed as furthering the mission if they were more deeply targeted at collecting tons of human feedback, but these applications overwhelmingly are not architected to primarily serve that benefit. There's no training on API usage, there's barely any prompts for DPO except when they want to test a release for human preference, etc. None of this noise and static has a place if you're serious about to hit AGI or even believe you can on any reasonable timeline. You're positing that you can turn grain of sand into thinking intelligent beings, ChatGPT erotica is not on the table.
- zurfer 1y agoWell you wouldn't bet all your assets because it would be an illiquid market that could only resolve in your favor in earliest 80 years. If you're really serious about it put the money into a prediction market. Poly market has multiple AGI bets.
- yodsanklai 1y agoI see only one with 4% chance in 2025 (obviously...). And AGI is defined as "OpenAI announces they reached AGI". https://polymarket.com/event/openai-announces-it-has-achieved-agi-in-2025?tid=1760741264751 https://polymarket.com/event/openai-announces-it-has-achieve...
- encroach 1y agoHere's 46% for 2030. It's had $350k in volume across the 4 markets. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxoaiagi/openai-achieves-agi/oaiagi https://kalshi.com/markets/kxoaiagi/openai-achieves-agi/oaia...
- echoangle 1y agoThat’s also about OpenAI claiming they have AGI. That doesn’t resolve based on actual AGI.
- tim333 1y agoI wonder if there is a test for AGI which is definite enough to bet on? My personal test idea is when you can send for a robot to come fix your plumbing rather than needing a human.
- akomtu 1y agoIt's about the same as betting all life savings on nuclear war not breaking out in our lifetime. If AI gets created, we are toast and those assets won't be worth anything.
- FL33TW00D 1y agoHow certain are you of this really? I'd take this bet with you. You're saying that we won't achieve AGI in ~80 years, or roughly 2100, equivalent to the time since the end WW2. To quote Shane Legg from 2009: "It looks like we’re heading towards 10^20 FLOPS before 2030, even if things slow down a bit from 2020 onwards. That’s just plain nuts. Let me try to explain just how nuts: 10^20 is about the number of neurons in all human brains combined. It is also about the estimated number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That’s a truly insane number of calculations in 1 second." Are humans really so incompetent that we can't replicate what nature produced through evolutionary optimization with more compute than in EVERY human brain?
- yodsanklai 1y agoHow does a neuron compare to a flop?
- yodsanklai 1y ago> how I can make good on this bet. I agree with you, and I think that's where Polymarket or similar could be used to see if these people would put your money where their mouth is (my guess is that most won't). But first we would need a precise definition of AGI. They may be able to come with a definition that makes the bet winnable for them.
- tymscar 1y agoEscrow
- tim333 1y agoI'd bet the other way because I think Moore's law like advances in compute will make things much easier for researchers. Like I was watching Hinton explain LLMs to Jon Stewart and they were saying they came up with the algorithm in 1986 but then it didn't really work for the decades until now because the hardware wasn't up to it (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=1899 https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=1899) If things were 1000x faster you could semi randomly try all sorts of arrangements of neural nets to see which think better.
- jb1991 1y agoYou’re making the common assumption that “the algorithm“ is everything we need to get to AGI and it’s just a question of scaling.
- tim333 1y agoI guess so. Is there reason to think an appropriate algorithm and scale can't do that?
- jb1991 1y agoYes, perhaps an "appropriate algorithm" could, but it is my opinion that we have not found that algorithm. LLMs are cool but I think they are very primitive compared to human intelligence and we aren't even close to getting AGI via that route.
- tim333 1y agoI agree with you that we are not there yet, algorithm wise.
- jaza 1y agoAgreed. But I'd also be willing to bet big, that the cycle of "new AI breakthrough is made, AI bubble ensues and hypesters claim AGI is just around the corner for several years, bubble bursts, all quiet on the AI front for a decade or two" continues beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now.
- giardini 1y agoI will tell my wife (who does our investing) of your bet: I've always felt a bit too invested in AI promises. jb1991 says >"Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet."< Have children...