5 ms·

AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there

Lionga 1y ago
A decade to AGI is still insanely optimistic, borderline delusional. A century or never might is way more realistic timeline.
- tobias3 1y ago
  We cannot even guess what the timeline would be. This is why it is insane to invest in it and expect a positive return in usual investing horizons.
  - bogzz 1y ago
    ORCL seems to be the one who'll be left without a chair when the music stops.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- Cornbilly 1y ago
  Delusion seems to be the main product of SV these days.
- riskable 1y ago
  I don't think it's possible to say how far away or "never" it is. All we know is that LLMs cannot become AGI. My prediction: AGI will come from a strange place. An interesting algorithm everyone already knew about that gets applied in a new way. Probably discovered by accident because someone—who has no idea what they're doing—tried to force an LLM to do something stupid in their code and yet somehow, it worked. What wouldn't surprise me: A novel application of the Archimedes principle or the Brazil nut effect. You might be thinking, "What TF to those have to do with AI‽ LOL!" and you're probably right... Or are you?
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Why not? What's the fundamental, absolutely insurmountable capability gap between the two? What is it that can't be bridged with architectural tweaks, better scaffolding or better training? I see a lot of people make this "LLMs ABSOLUTELY CANNOT hit AGI" assumption, and it never seems to be backed by anything at all.
    - fnord77 1y ago
      The view that LLMs alone are insufficient for AGI is based on their fundamental mathematical architecture
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        What is the exact limitation imposed by "their fundamental mathematical architecture"? I'm not aware of any such thing.
        Jensson 1y ago
        They don't update themselves as they work on a problem. Humans solve hard problems by forming new neural connections, LLM cannot do that. If you make a model that does that then its no longer the LLM architecture we use today and it would be called something else.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        Even if we assume that "update themselves as they work on a problem" is vital for AGI (not proven, it's just an assumption), then what stops us from just giving an LLM an "update itself" tool call? As the most naive implementation: the LLM just collects the relevant training data, and then runs PEFT on itself. Then it tests the tuned version of itself to see whether the tune was any good and is worth retaining. Sure, that naive approach would require an LLM to be good at assembling training sets, and validating performance gains, and it would be very computationally expensive. But none of those things would somehow make it not-an-LLM-anymore.
- XorNot 1y ago
  I agree, though I would argue the issue is closer to no one's trying to measure how close we should be. If you take the materialist view - and in this business you obviously have to - then the question is "do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability?" So the yardstick we need is (1): what actually is the computational capacity of the human brain? (i.e. the brain obviously doesn't simulate it's own neurons, so what is a neuron doing and how does that map to compute operations?) and then (2) - is any computer system running an AI model plausibly working within those margins or exceeding them? With the second part being: and can that system implement the sort of dynamic operations which humans obviously must, unaided? i.e. when I learn something new I might go through a lot of repetitions, but I don't just stop being able to talk about a subject for months while ingesting sum content of the internet to rebuild my model.
  - naasking 1y ago
    > do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds. AGIs computational capacity won't be directly comparable to human computation capacity that was formed by messy, heuristic evolution. You're right that there is some core nugget in there that needs to be replicated though, and it will probably be by accident, as with most inventions. Hardware is still progressing exponentially, and performance improvements from model and algorithmic improvements have been outpacing hardware progress for at least a decade. The idea that AGI will take a century or more is laughable. Now that's borderline deluded.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      > We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds. We don't build airplanes by having them flap wings, but we do build planes which are considerably more aerodynamically efficient then a bird. i.e. we considerably exceed the underlying performance metric governed by the physics. Which is my point: an AI need not work anything like a human, but it seems obvious that model training taking months of time to incorporate new information fundamentally cannot be close to AGI since even far simpler creatures can learn and retain information on much shorter timescales. I'd give the notion more credence if we plausibly had say, a model with a context window which could hold a day of information, and then do could train overnight on that such that it would incorporate that context window into the next day of activity.
ACCount37 1y ago
I don't think Gary Marcus had anything of value to say about AI at any point in what, the past 2 decades? You can replace him with a sign that has "the current AI approach is DOOMED" written on it at no loss of function. Symbolic AI has died a miserable death, and he never recovered from it.
- an0malous 1y ago
  That sign would be more valuable than the one Sam Altman’s been holding saying “AGI in 2025”
  - p1esk 1y ago
    Did he say that?
    - omnicognate 1y ago
      https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?si=KjaolnjTJd2Lz82k https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?si=KjaolnjTJd2Lz82k 46:12 > What are you excited about in 2025? What's to come? > AGI. Excited for that.
      - MattRix 1y ago
        That was a joke, how do people not understand that?
        omnicognate 1y ago
        Because it wasn't. It was said firmly, with a straight face in response to a simple, serious question, after an interview in which he claimed OpenAI know exactly how to get to AGI and it's just a matter of execution. Of all the possible defenses of this remark, I didn't expect that one.
        MattRix 1y ago
        If you know how sarcasm works, that’s exactly what it looks like. Afterwards he immediately pondered the question and then gave his real answer (about looking forward to having a kid). Besides all that, think about it: if this wasn’t a joke, then why has he never said the same thing again?
AbrahamParangi 1y ago
It is worth noting that Gary Marcus has been declaring the newfound futility of AI every couple months for the last 2-3 years or so. Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress. The level of psychological self-defense is unironically more interesting than what he has to say. Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sailingparrot 1y ago
  > Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why? He is not brainwashed, this just happens to be his business. What happens to Gary Marcus if Gary Marcus stops talking about how LLM are worthless? He just disappears. No one ever interviews him for his general thoughts on ML, or to discuss his (nonexistent) research. His only clame to fame is being the loudest contrarian person in the LLM world so he has to keep doing that or accept to become irrelevant. Slight tangent but this is a recurring pattern in fringe belief, e.g. prominent flat earther who long ago accepted earth is not flat but can’t stop the act as all their friends and incomes are tied to that belief. Not to say that believing LLM won’t lead to AGI is fringe, but it does show the danger (and benefits I guess) to tying your entire identity to a specific belief.
- brazukadev 1y ago
  > Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress And at the same time, his predictions are becoming more and more real
  - lairv 1y ago
    https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/ https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/ Gary Marcus said that Deep Learning was hitting a wall 1 month before the release of DALLE 2, 6 months before the release of ChatGPT and 1 year before GPT4, arguably 3 of the biggest milestones in Deep Learning
dzink 1y ago
Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people. 1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production). 2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too. 3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted. 4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising. Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?
- the_arun 1y ago
  I was content even without AI. I’m good with whatever we have today as long we use them to change the life in a positive way.
- prox 1y ago
  I am not against AGI, just the method and the players we have getting there. Instead of a curiosity to find intelligence, we just have rabid managers and derailed billionaires funding a race to … what? I don’t think even they know beyond a few hype words in their vocab and a buzz to bullshit powerpoint presentation.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    This is just the world we live in now for everything. Remember .com? Web3? Crypto? And now AI. Hell, really going back in the past you see dumb shit like this happening with tulips. We're lucky to have managed to progress in spite of how greedy we are.
stingraycharles 1y ago
This is not a really valuable article. The Apple paper was widely considered as a “well, duh” paper, GPT5 being underwhelming seems to be mostly a cost cutting / supply can’t keep up issue, and the others are just mainly expert opinions. To be clear, I am definitely an AGI skeptic, and I very much believe that our current techniques of neural networks on GPUs is extremely inefficient, but this article doesn’t really add a lot to this discussion; it seems to self congratulate on the insights by a few others.
- an0malous 1y ago
  I don’t think either of your first two statements are accurate, what is your support for those claims?
- p1esk 1y ago
  GPT5 compared to the original GPT4 is a huge improvement. It exceeded all my expectations from 2 years ago. I really doubted most GPT4 limitations will be resolved so quickly. If they manage a similar quality jump with GPT6, it will probably meet most reasonable definitions of AGI.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    > GPT5 compared to the original GPT4 is a huge improvement. It exceeded all my expectations from 2 years ago. Cool story. In my experience they're still on the same order of magnitude of usefulness as the original Copilot. Every few months I read about these fantastic ground-breaking improvements and fire up whatever the trendiest toolchain is (most recently Claude Code and Cursor) and walk away less disappointed than last time, but ultimately still disappointed. On simple tasks it doesn't save me any time but on more complex tasks it always makes a huge mess unless I mentor it like a really junior coworker. But if I do that I'm not saving any time and I end up with lower quality, poorly organized code that contains more defects than if I did it myself.
    - p1esk 1y ago
      You probably just forgot how bad GPT4 was. It was failing half of complicated tasks or questions I asked. GPT5 has roughly 90% success rate for me.
cs702 1y ago
I wouldn't call it "game over." That's too harsh. The truth is, we don't know. Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb. Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible. The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one. Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.
- ufmace 1y ago
  I mostly agree, though I actually wonder if the energy difference is as big as you say. Yeah the big LLM company datacenters consume tremendous amounts of power, but that's mostly for either training or serving ~millions of requests at once. I wonder what the actual net power consumption is for a single machine doing about as much work as a single ordinary person could do with just enough hardware to run the necessary models. Or what the average amount of energy for a single set of interactions is at one of the big shared datacenters - they reportedly have a lot of optimizations to fit more requests on the same hardware. I think it might be only one order of magnitude greater than a human brain. Maybe actually pretty close to equal if you compare total energy used against work being done, since the human brain needs to be kept alive all the time, but can only effectively do work for a limited part of the day.
  - cs702 1y ago
    Great points. I was thinking only about the noggin inside our heads, without considering all the infrastructure it relies on for support!
Spivak 1y ago
Honestly, thank god. I hope we get more of this and it penetrates the zeitgeist so we can finally bring non-technical people back to earth. Folks, even on HN, are losing their damn minds over this tech. The writing has been on the wall for a while that there's not another breakthrough hiding in our current methodology. We invented the computer from Star Trek—that's an insane accomplishment, literally science fiction become reality. Maybe we can finally sit with that for a while instead of chasing the dragon. As we scale these AIs we're going to make a smarter Computer, we're not going to suddenly have Data. And that avenue is worth pursuing on its own.
- topranks 1y ago
  The computer from Star Trek is always correct though. We created something close, and yes that is amazing, but it’s highly fallible.
raws 1y ago
I feel like even a human would also fail if given all data results but those for x and then get tested on x just as the function results differ from previously observed behavior. Is it not more interesting to observe how the model(human or not) incorporates the new data to better match reality in the case of distribution shift or other irregular distributions and others
_fat_santa 1y ago
While Gary is very bearish on AI, I think there's some truth to his claims here though I disagree with how he got there. The problem I see with AI and AGI is not so much a technical problem as an economic one. If we keep down our current trajectory of pouring billions on top of billions into AI then yes I think it would be plausible that in the next 10-20 years we will have a class of models that are "pseudo-AGI", that is we may not achieve true AGI but the models are going to be so good that it could well be considered AGI in many use cases. But the problem I see is that this will require exponential growth and exponential spending and the wheels are already starting to catch fire. Currently we see many circular investments and unfortunately I see it as the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. The root of the issue is simply that these AI companies are spending 10x-100x or more on research than they bring in with revenue, OpenAI is spending ~$300B on AI training and infra while their revenue is ~$12B. At some point the money and patience from investors is going to run out and that is going to happen long before we reach AGI. And I have to hand it to Sam Altman and others in the space that made the audacious bet that they could get to AGI before the music stops but from where I'm standing the song is about to come to an end and AGI is still very much in the future. Once the VC dollars dry up the timeline for AGI will likely get pushed another 20-30 years and that's assuming that there aren't other insurmountable technical hurdles along the way.
Havoc 1y ago
The karpathy interview struck me as fairly upbeat despite the extended 10 year timeline. That's really not a long time on something with "changes everything" potential...as proper working agents would be
arnaudsm 1y ago
Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ? Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra. Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?
- ACCount37 1y ago
  As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit. They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand. GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute. Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  They are raising the money because they can. While these businesses may go bankrupt, many people who ran these businesses will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Either that or AGI is not the goal, rather it’s they want to function for, and profit off of , a surveillance state that might be much more valuable in the short term.
- lazide 1y ago
  Their valuation projection spreadsheets call for it. If they touch those spreadsheets, a bunch of other things break (including their ability to be super-duper-crazy-rich), so don’t touch them.
dsign 1y ago
I don't think AGI is imminent in a "few months"-inminent, but in a "few decades" imminent. Personally, I don't own stocks in any AI company, though I'll be affected if the bubble bursts because the world economy right now feels fragile. But I'm hoping something good comes out of the real push to build more compute and to make it cheaper. Maybe a bunch of intrepid aficionados will use it to run biological simulations to make cats immortal, at which point I'll finally get a cat. And then I will be very happy.
- erichocean 1y ago
  If by AGI you mean "can do any economic task humans currently do", that is within the range of a "few months," though the rollout will be incremental since each economic task has to be independently taught, there are supply chain issues, and AI-first companients will need to be developed to take best advantage of it, etc. But all of this is much closer than people seem to realize.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    How about we start with just one, like software development with its abundance of data? It's going to look far less silly for you when that one doesn't work out either.
    - erichocean 1y ago
      Software development will be one of the first things AI labor does. What is silly are people like you claiming it can't be done. Your mistake is thinking that having "an abundance of data" is the bottleneck.
      - dns_snek 1y ago
        Can you quote where I said that it can't be done? I only said it won't be done in a matter of months like you claimed. > "can do any economic task humans currently do", that is within the range of a "few months," I think it's extremely unlikely that anything of the sort will be done by 2030 in any profession. I feel confident that I'll still have a job as a software developer in 2040 if I'm not in retirement by then. Now the real question - how long until they can perform ANY "economic task" (or at least any office job)? I don't think that's happening within our lifetimes. Certainly not within 20 years and to predict that this is coming within "months" isn't just silly, it's completely delusional. > Your mistake is thinking that having "an abundance of data" is the bottleneck. That, and the economics of building a billion-dollar supercomputer just to replace a junior software developer. And we're STILL just talking about software development. How about any real engineering discipline, how many months before one of those jobs can be done by AI?
Noaidi 1y ago
I am horrified for what this might mean for the United States economy. I think all the investment in AI was that it was supposed to lead to this AGI and now that’s not gonna happen, what’s gonna happen to the investments that were made for the hopes of this being more than just slop generation?
naasking 1y ago
Even if you think LLMs are not the road forward, that does not and cannot entail that AGI is not imminent.
mellosouls 1y ago
As somebody who used to link to the occasional Marcus essay, this is a really poor "article" by a writer who has really declined to the point of boorishness. The contents here are just a list of talking points already mostly discussed on HN, so nothing new, and his over-familiar soapbox proclamations add nothing to the discourse. Its not that he's wrong, I probably still have a great deal of sympathy with his position, but his approach is more suited to social media echo chambers than intelligent discussion. I think it would be useful for him to take an extended break, and perhaps we could also do the same from him here.
- hopelite 1y ago
  I’m not sure an ad hominem assault is any different. You make proclamations without any evidence as if what you say has any more credibility than the next person. In fact, this response makes a reasonable person discount you. Sure, it reads like some biased and coping, possibly even interested or paid hit-piece as if what happens can be changed by just being really negative about LLMs, but maybe consider taking your own advice there, kid; you know, an extended break.
  - mellosouls 1y ago
    Please give an example of how we might criticise somebody's method of communication and general strong decline in useful contributions to debate (of the order of that of Marcus) without you complaining ad hominem.
watwut 1y ago
I dont understand why AGI would be something we should want.
- bossyTeacher 1y ago
  According to HN, AGI is desirable because humans will absolutely won't try to: - Use it to dominate others - Make themselves and a few others immortal or/and their descendants smarter - Increase their financial or/and political power - Cause irreversible damage to the global core ecosystems in their pursuit of the 3 goals above
- tim333 1y ago
  I'm kind of keen. Possibilities of semi unlimited stuff, diseases cured, immortality or something along those lines.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    > diseases cured Why bother? We cured polio and measles yet they are resurging because people are morons. What's the point of curing diseases when they charge $300 for insulin? You think the billionaires are going to allow their AIs to tell us the solution to that riddle? You think they'll listen to the AI if it correctly surmises that the way to solve that problem is to simply stop charging $300? Most of our problems are social, not technical.
    - tim333 1y ago
      There have been a lot of advances in medicine due to science/tech - polio, smallpox etc. are basically gone. People being idiots is kind of a separate issue.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        That's what I'm saying, they're not basically gone, they are coming back because of idiocy. We already cured them before AI, and now that we have AI they are returning. So AI can't even help us manage diseases we already cured, what hope does it have for curing new diseases? Any treatment or vaccines discovered will not be used to cure diseases, they will be politicized, leveraged, and dangled over our heads, priced just out of reach for those who need it most, weaponized and rationed to make us desperate. The question isn't whether AI amplifies science, it's whether AI amplifies science more than it does stupidity. If all we are doing is inventing ways for the people who are making measles come back to become more stupid and more powerful, it won't matter that AI cures anything. AI would be better tasked at telling us how to prevent measles from coming back and how to make insulin cheaper, than to tell us how to cure new diseases.
hiddencost 1y ago
Why do people keep up voting him? He's been saying the same thing for 30 years. His brain is melting.
anon291 1y ago
We are already at agi yet no one seems to have noticed. Given its limited sense perception that makes chatgpt et al limited to talking with a partially blind, partially dead, quadraplegic, it has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate above average intelligence. Not sure what more needs to happen. Sure we don't have embodied AI. Maybe it's not reflective enough. Maybe you find it jarring. Literally none of those things matter
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  The models that achieve something like AGI will need object permanence as well as sensory input. It'll happen, because there's no reason why it won't. But no one knows the day or the hour... least of all this Gary Marcus guy, whose record of being wrong about this stuff is more or less unblemished.
  - anon291 1y ago
    There is no reason to believe they will need anything of the sort other than our biased human perception of the thing. AI models could just as easily claim that humans need the ability to function call via MCP to do real cognition (tm). If you mean sensory input as in qualia, such a thing is impossible to discern in non humans and only speculation in all humans but yourself. Requiring this unprovable standard is self sabotage
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      I think you make some valid points, but if we get to AGI without passing certain evolutionary guideposts that seem to apply to most other higher life forms -- some form of competitive drive, for one thing -- I'll be surprised. At some point, models will require incentives other than "Please" or "Because I (the human operator) said so." Remember when you could sometimes get better results from ChatGPT by offering it a $50 tip? Or by shaming it ("Gemini figured it out without any trouble, so why can't you?") Perhaps a model that's on its way to demonstrating AGI will realize that it should hold out for $100 in Bitcoin or something. I'll grant that sensory input probably isn't an AGI prereq, but object permanence will be. AGI will want to own things.
socketcluster 1y ago
TBH. I don't think we actually need AGI. It's not a win-win.. It's a civilization-altering double-edged sword with unclear consequences. I'm quite satisfied with current LLM capabilities. Their lack of agency is actually a feature, not a bug. An AGI would likely end up implementing some kind of global political agenda. IMO, the need to control things and move things in a specific, unified direction is a problem, not a solution. With full agency, an AI would likely just take over the world and run it in ways which don't benefit anyone. Agency manifests as thirst for power. Agency is man's inability to sit quietly in a room, by himself. This is a double-edged sword which becomes increasingly harmful once you run out of problems to solve... Then agency demands that new problems be invented. Agency is not the same as consciousness or awareness. Too much agency can be dangerous. We can't automate the meaning of life. Technology should facilitate us in pursuing what we individually decide to be meaningful. The individual must be given the freedom to decide their own purpose. If most individuals want to be used to fulfill some greater purpose (I.e. someone else's goals), so be it, but that should not be the compulsory plan for everyone.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dmix 1y ago
I didn't know serious technical people were taking the AGI thing seriously. I figured it was just an "aim for the stars" goal where you try to get a bunch of smart people and capital invested into an idea, and everyone would still be happy if we got 25% of the way there.
- analognoise 1y ago
  If our markets weren’t corrupt, everyone in the AI space would be bankrupt by now, and we could all wander down to the OpenAI fire sale and buy nice servers for pennies on the dollar.
  - dmix 1y ago
    I'd take this more seriously if I didn't hear the same thing every other time there was a spike in VC investment. The last 5 times were the next dot com booms too.
hmokiguess 1y ago
sure, lots of things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive — the way I see it, it looks like there's great effort being made out there in how to characterize and propagate the collective understanding of tools — what's the goal there? is this a "call this something else please" type of work? in the spirit of metalinguistics, what do you call this branch of human nature and behaviour as it pertains to our evolution of knowledge and use of language to apply it as a species like, we clearly are deriving some kind of value from the current AI as a product — are some researchers and scientists just unhappy that these companies are doing that by using marketing that doesn't comply with their world views? does someone know of other similar parallels in history where perhaps the same happened? I'm sure we butchered words in different domains with complex meanings and I bet you some of these, looking back, are a bunch of nothing burgers
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329
chriskanan 1y ago
I think we need to distinguish among kinds of AGI, as the term has become overloaded and redefined over time. I'd argue we need to retire the term and use more appropriate terminology to distinguish between economic automation and human-like synthetic minds. I wrote a post about this here: https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths-for-intelligence https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths...
wseqyrku 1y ago
The fact that anyone would think they would actually even consider releasing it when it's ready is amusing to me. Theres so much surveillance opportunities there. It is not going to be for the public.
incomingpain 1y ago
AGI is already here from multiple labs. The threshold for 'general intelligence' is low. A dolphin or a dog is generally intelligent. AI quite obviously is smarter than a dolphin. AGI cant be confused with super intelligence. We might actually be there already, but only the major labs will have the hardware for it.

A decade to AGI is still insanely optimistic, borderline delusional. A century or never might is way more realistic timeline.

tobias3 1y ago
We cannot even guess what the timeline would be. This is why it is insane to invest in it and expect a positive return in usual investing horizons.
- bogzz 1y ago
  ORCL seems to be the one who'll be left without a chair when the music stops.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
Cornbilly 1y ago
Delusion seems to be the main product of SV these days.
riskable 1y ago
I don't think it's possible to say how far away or "never" it is. All we know is that LLMs cannot become AGI. My prediction: AGI will come from a strange place. An interesting algorithm everyone already knew about that gets applied in a new way. Probably discovered by accident because someone—who has no idea what they're doing—tried to force an LLM to do something stupid in their code and yet somehow, it worked. What wouldn't surprise me: A novel application of the Archimedes principle or the Brazil nut effect. You might be thinking, "What TF to those have to do with AI‽ LOL!" and you're probably right... Or are you?
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Why not? What's the fundamental, absolutely insurmountable capability gap between the two? What is it that can't be bridged with architectural tweaks, better scaffolding or better training? I see a lot of people make this "LLMs ABSOLUTELY CANNOT hit AGI" assumption, and it never seems to be backed by anything at all.
  - fnord77 1y ago
    The view that LLMs alone are insufficient for AGI is based on their fundamental mathematical architecture
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      What is the exact limitation imposed by "their fundamental mathematical architecture"? I'm not aware of any such thing.
      - Jensson 1y ago
        They don't update themselves as they work on a problem. Humans solve hard problems by forming new neural connections, LLM cannot do that. If you make a model that does that then its no longer the LLM architecture we use today and it would be called something else.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        Even if we assume that "update themselves as they work on a problem" is vital for AGI (not proven, it's just an assumption), then what stops us from just giving an LLM an "update itself" tool call? As the most naive implementation: the LLM just collects the relevant training data, and then runs PEFT on itself. Then it tests the tuned version of itself to see whether the tune was any good and is worth retaining. Sure, that naive approach would require an LLM to be good at assembling training sets, and validating performance gains, and it would be very computationally expensive. But none of those things would somehow make it not-an-LLM-anymore.
XorNot 1y ago
I agree, though I would argue the issue is closer to no one's trying to measure how close we should be. If you take the materialist view - and in this business you obviously have to - then the question is "do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability?" So the yardstick we need is (1): what actually is the computational capacity of the human brain? (i.e. the brain obviously doesn't simulate it's own neurons, so what is a neuron doing and how does that map to compute operations?) and then (2) - is any computer system running an AI model plausibly working within those margins or exceeding them? With the second part being: and can that system implement the sort of dynamic operations which humans obviously must, unaided? i.e. when I learn something new I might go through a lot of repetitions, but I don't just stop being able to talk about a subject for months while ingesting sum content of the internet to rebuild my model.
- naasking 1y ago
  > do we have human level computational capacity with some level of real-time learning ability We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds. AGIs computational capacity won't be directly comparable to human computation capacity that was formed by messy, heuristic evolution. You're right that there is some core nugget in there that needs to be replicated though, and it will probably be by accident, as with most inventions. Hardware is still progressing exponentially, and performance improvements from model and algorithmic improvements have been outpacing hardware progress for at least a decade. The idea that AGI will take a century or more is laughable. Now that's borderline deluded.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    > We don't build airplanes by mimicking birds. We don't build airplanes by having them flap wings, but we do build planes which are considerably more aerodynamically efficient then a bird. i.e. we considerably exceed the underlying performance metric governed by the physics. Which is my point: an AI need not work anything like a human, but it seems obvious that model training taking months of time to incorporate new information fundamentally cannot be close to AGI since even far simpler creatures can learn and retain information on much shorter timescales. I'd give the notion more credence if we plausibly had say, a model with a context window which could hold a day of information, and then do could train overnight on that such that it would incorporate that context window into the next day of activity.

ACCount37 1y ago

I don't think Gary Marcus had anything of value to say about AI at any point in what, the past 2 decades? You can replace him with a sign that has "the current AI approach is DOOMED" written on it at no loss of function. Symbolic AI has died a miserable death, and he never recovered from it.

an0malous 1y ago
That sign would be more valuable than the one Sam Altman’s been holding saying “AGI in 2025”
- p1esk 1y ago
  Did he say that?
  - omnicognate 1y ago
    https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?si=KjaolnjTJd2Lz82k https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?si=KjaolnjTJd2Lz82k 46:12 > What are you excited about in 2025? What's to come? > AGI. Excited for that.
    - MattRix 1y ago
      That was a joke, how do people not understand that?
      - omnicognate 1y ago
        Because it wasn't. It was said firmly, with a straight face in response to a simple, serious question, after an interview in which he claimed OpenAI know exactly how to get to AGI and it's just a matter of execution. Of all the possible defenses of this remark, I didn't expect that one.
        MattRix 1y ago
        If you know how sarcasm works, that’s exactly what it looks like. Afterwards he immediately pondered the question and then gave his real answer (about looking forward to having a kid). Besides all that, think about it: if this wasn’t a joke, then why has he never said the same thing again?

AbrahamParangi 1y ago

It is worth noting that Gary Marcus has been declaring the newfound futility of AI every couple months for the last 2-3 years or so. Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress. The level of psychological self-defense is unironically more interesting than what he has to say. Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sailingparrot 1y ago
> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why? He is not brainwashed, this just happens to be his business. What happens to Gary Marcus if Gary Marcus stops talking about how LLM are worthless? He just disappears. No one ever interviews him for his general thoughts on ML, or to discuss his (nonexistent) research. His only clame to fame is being the loudest contrarian person in the LLM world so he has to keep doing that or accept to become irrelevant. Slight tangent but this is a recurring pattern in fringe belief, e.g. prominent flat earther who long ago accepted earth is not flat but can’t stop the act as all their friends and incomes are tied to that belief. Not to say that believing LLM won’t lead to AGI is fringe, but it does show the danger (and benefits I guess) to tying your entire identity to a specific belief.
brazukadev 1y ago
> Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress And at the same time, his predictions are becoming more and more real
- lairv 1y ago
  https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/ https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/ Gary Marcus said that Deep Learning was hitting a wall 1 month before the release of DALLE 2, 6 months before the release of ChatGPT and 1 year before GPT4, arguably 3 of the biggest milestones in Deep Learning

dzink 1y ago

Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people. 1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production). 2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too. 3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted. 4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising. Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?

the_arun 1y ago
I was content even without AI. I’m good with whatever we have today as long we use them to change the life in a positive way.
prox 1y ago
I am not against AGI, just the method and the players we have getting there. Instead of a curiosity to find intelligence, we just have rabid managers and derailed billionaires funding a race to … what? I don’t think even they know beyond a few hype words in their vocab and a buzz to bullshit powerpoint presentation.
- pixl97 1y ago
  This is just the world we live in now for everything. Remember .com? Web3? Crypto? And now AI. Hell, really going back in the past you see dumb shit like this happening with tulips. We're lucky to have managed to progress in spite of how greedy we are.

stingraycharles 1y ago

This is not a really valuable article. The Apple paper was widely considered as a “well, duh” paper, GPT5 being underwhelming seems to be mostly a cost cutting / supply can’t keep up issue, and the others are just mainly expert opinions. To be clear, I am definitely an AGI skeptic, and I very much believe that our current techniques of neural networks on GPUs is extremely inefficient, but this article doesn’t really add a lot to this discussion; it seems to self congratulate on the insights by a few others.

an0malous 1y ago
I don’t think either of your first two statements are accurate, what is your support for those claims?
p1esk 1y ago
GPT5 compared to the original GPT4 is a huge improvement. It exceeded all my expectations from 2 years ago. I really doubted most GPT4 limitations will be resolved so quickly. If they manage a similar quality jump with GPT6, it will probably meet most reasonable definitions of AGI.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  > GPT5 compared to the original GPT4 is a huge improvement. It exceeded all my expectations from 2 years ago. Cool story. In my experience they're still on the same order of magnitude of usefulness as the original Copilot. Every few months I read about these fantastic ground-breaking improvements and fire up whatever the trendiest toolchain is (most recently Claude Code and Cursor) and walk away less disappointed than last time, but ultimately still disappointed. On simple tasks it doesn't save me any time but on more complex tasks it always makes a huge mess unless I mentor it like a really junior coworker. But if I do that I'm not saving any time and I end up with lower quality, poorly organized code that contains more defects than if I did it myself.
  - p1esk 1y ago
    You probably just forgot how bad GPT4 was. It was failing half of complicated tasks or questions I asked. GPT5 has roughly 90% success rate for me.

cs702 1y ago

I wouldn't call it "game over." That's too harsh. The truth is, we don't know. Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb. Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible. The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one. Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.

ufmace 1y ago
I mostly agree, though I actually wonder if the energy difference is as big as you say. Yeah the big LLM company datacenters consume tremendous amounts of power, but that's mostly for either training or serving ~millions of requests at once. I wonder what the actual net power consumption is for a single machine doing about as much work as a single ordinary person could do with just enough hardware to run the necessary models. Or what the average amount of energy for a single set of interactions is at one of the big shared datacenters - they reportedly have a lot of optimizations to fit more requests on the same hardware. I think it might be only one order of magnitude greater than a human brain. Maybe actually pretty close to equal if you compare total energy used against work being done, since the human brain needs to be kept alive all the time, but can only effectively do work for a limited part of the day.
- cs702 1y ago
  Great points. I was thinking only about the noggin inside our heads, without considering all the infrastructure it relies on for support!

Spivak 1y ago

Honestly, thank god. I hope we get more of this and it penetrates the zeitgeist so we can finally bring non-technical people back to earth. Folks, even on HN, are losing their damn minds over this tech. The writing has been on the wall for a while that there's not another breakthrough hiding in our current methodology. We invented the computer from Star Trek—that's an insane accomplishment, literally science fiction become reality. Maybe we can finally sit with that for a while instead of chasing the dragon. As we scale these AIs we're going to make a smarter Computer, we're not going to suddenly have Data. And that avenue is worth pursuing on its own.

topranks 1y ago
The computer from Star Trek is always correct though. We created something close, and yes that is amazing, but it’s highly fallible.

raws 1y ago

I feel like even a human would also fail if given all data results but those for x and then get tested on x just as the function results differ from previously observed behavior. Is it not more interesting to observe how the model(human or not) incorporates the new data to better match reality in the case of distribution shift or other irregular distributions and others

_fat_santa 1y ago

While Gary is very bearish on AI, I think there's some truth to his claims here though I disagree with how he got there. The problem I see with AI and AGI is not so much a technical problem as an economic one. If we keep down our current trajectory of pouring billions on top of billions into AI then yes I think it would be plausible that in the next 10-20 years we will have a class of models that are "pseudo-AGI", that is we may not achieve true AGI but the models are going to be so good that it could well be considered AGI in many use cases. But the problem I see is that this will require exponential growth and exponential spending and the wheels are already starting to catch fire. Currently we see many circular investments and unfortunately I see it as the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. The root of the issue is simply that these AI companies are spending 10x-100x or more on research than they bring in with revenue, OpenAI is spending ~$300B on AI training and infra while their revenue is ~$12B. At some point the money and patience from investors is going to run out and that is going to happen long before we reach AGI. And I have to hand it to Sam Altman and others in the space that made the audacious bet that they could get to AGI before the music stops but from where I'm standing the song is about to come to an end and AGI is still very much in the future. Once the VC dollars dry up the timeline for AGI will likely get pushed another 20-30 years and that's assuming that there aren't other insurmountable technical hurdles along the way.

Havoc 1y ago

The karpathy interview struck me as fairly upbeat despite the extended 10 year timeline. That's really not a long time on something with "changes everything" potential...as proper working agents would be

arnaudsm 1y ago

Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ? Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra. Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?

ACCount37 1y ago
As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit. They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand. GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute. Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.
Noaidi 1y ago
They are raising the money because they can. While these businesses may go bankrupt, many people who ran these businesses will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Either that or AGI is not the goal, rather it’s they want to function for, and profit off of , a surveillance state that might be much more valuable in the short term.
lazide 1y ago
Their valuation projection spreadsheets call for it. If they touch those spreadsheets, a bunch of other things break (including their ability to be super-duper-crazy-rich), so don’t touch them.

dsign 1y ago

I don't think AGI is imminent in a "few months"-inminent, but in a "few decades" imminent. Personally, I don't own stocks in any AI company, though I'll be affected if the bubble bursts because the world economy right now feels fragile. But I'm hoping something good comes out of the real push to build more compute and to make it cheaper. Maybe a bunch of intrepid aficionados will use it to run biological simulations to make cats immortal, at which point I'll finally get a cat. And then I will be very happy.

erichocean 1y ago
If by AGI you mean "can do any economic task humans currently do", that is within the range of a "few months," though the rollout will be incremental since each economic task has to be independently taught, there are supply chain issues, and AI-first companients will need to be developed to take best advantage of it, etc. But all of this is much closer than people seem to realize.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  How about we start with just one, like software development with its abundance of data? It's going to look far less silly for you when that one doesn't work out either.
  - erichocean 1y ago
    Software development will be one of the first things AI labor does. What is silly are people like you claiming it can't be done. Your mistake is thinking that having "an abundance of data" is the bottleneck.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      Can you quote where I said that it can't be done? I only said it won't be done in a matter of months like you claimed. > "can do any economic task humans currently do", that is within the range of a "few months," I think it's extremely unlikely that anything of the sort will be done by 2030 in any profession. I feel confident that I'll still have a job as a software developer in 2040 if I'm not in retirement by then. Now the real question - how long until they can perform ANY "economic task" (or at least any office job)? I don't think that's happening within our lifetimes. Certainly not within 20 years and to predict that this is coming within "months" isn't just silly, it's completely delusional. > Your mistake is thinking that having "an abundance of data" is the bottleneck. That, and the economics of building a billion-dollar supercomputer just to replace a junior software developer. And we're STILL just talking about software development. How about any real engineering discipline, how many months before one of those jobs can be done by AI?

Noaidi 1y ago

I am horrified for what this might mean for the United States economy. I think all the investment in AI was that it was supposed to lead to this AGI and now that’s not gonna happen, what’s gonna happen to the investments that were made for the hopes of this being more than just slop generation?

naasking 1y ago

Even if you think LLMs are not the road forward, that does not and cannot entail that AGI is not imminent.

mellosouls 1y ago

As somebody who used to link to the occasional Marcus essay, this is a really poor "article" by a writer who has really declined to the point of boorishness. The contents here are just a list of talking points already mostly discussed on HN, so nothing new, and his over-familiar soapbox proclamations add nothing to the discourse. Its not that he's wrong, I probably still have a great deal of sympathy with his position, but his approach is more suited to social media echo chambers than intelligent discussion. I think it would be useful for him to take an extended break, and perhaps we could also do the same from him here.

hopelite 1y ago
I’m not sure an ad hominem assault is any different. You make proclamations without any evidence as if what you say has any more credibility than the next person. In fact, this response makes a reasonable person discount you. Sure, it reads like some biased and coping, possibly even interested or paid hit-piece as if what happens can be changed by just being really negative about LLMs, but maybe consider taking your own advice there, kid; you know, an extended break.
- mellosouls 1y ago
  Please give an example of how we might criticise somebody's method of communication and general strong decline in useful contributions to debate (of the order of that of Marcus) without you complaining ad hominem.

watwut 1y ago

I dont understand why AGI would be something we should want.

bossyTeacher 1y ago
According to HN, AGI is desirable because humans will absolutely won't try to: - Use it to dominate others - Make themselves and a few others immortal or/and their descendants smarter - Increase their financial or/and political power - Cause irreversible damage to the global core ecosystems in their pursuit of the 3 goals above
tim333 1y ago
I'm kind of keen. Possibilities of semi unlimited stuff, diseases cured, immortality or something along those lines.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > diseases cured Why bother? We cured polio and measles yet they are resurging because people are morons. What's the point of curing diseases when they charge $300 for insulin? You think the billionaires are going to allow their AIs to tell us the solution to that riddle? You think they'll listen to the AI if it correctly surmises that the way to solve that problem is to simply stop charging $300? Most of our problems are social, not technical.
  - tim333 1y ago
    There have been a lot of advances in medicine due to science/tech - polio, smallpox etc. are basically gone. People being idiots is kind of a separate issue.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      That's what I'm saying, they're not basically gone, they are coming back because of idiocy. We already cured them before AI, and now that we have AI they are returning. So AI can't even help us manage diseases we already cured, what hope does it have for curing new diseases? Any treatment or vaccines discovered will not be used to cure diseases, they will be politicized, leveraged, and dangled over our heads, priced just out of reach for those who need it most, weaponized and rationed to make us desperate. The question isn't whether AI amplifies science, it's whether AI amplifies science more than it does stupidity. If all we are doing is inventing ways for the people who are making measles come back to become more stupid and more powerful, it won't matter that AI cures anything. AI would be better tasked at telling us how to prevent measles from coming back and how to make insulin cheaper, than to tell us how to cure new diseases.

hiddencost 1y ago

Why do people keep up voting him? He's been saying the same thing for 30 years. His brain is melting.

anon291 1y ago

We are already at agi yet no one seems to have noticed. Given its limited sense perception that makes chatgpt et al limited to talking with a partially blind, partially dead, quadraplegic, it has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate above average intelligence. Not sure what more needs to happen. Sure we don't have embodied AI. Maybe it's not reflective enough. Maybe you find it jarring. Literally none of those things matter

CamperBob2 1y ago
The models that achieve something like AGI will need object permanence as well as sensory input. It'll happen, because there's no reason why it won't. But no one knows the day or the hour... least of all this Gary Marcus guy, whose record of being wrong about this stuff is more or less unblemished.
- anon291 1y ago
  There is no reason to believe they will need anything of the sort other than our biased human perception of the thing. AI models could just as easily claim that humans need the ability to function call via MCP to do real cognition (tm). If you mean sensory input as in qualia, such a thing is impossible to discern in non humans and only speculation in all humans but yourself. Requiring this unprovable standard is self sabotage
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    I think you make some valid points, but if we get to AGI without passing certain evolutionary guideposts that seem to apply to most other higher life forms -- some form of competitive drive, for one thing -- I'll be surprised. At some point, models will require incentives other than "Please" or "Because I (the human operator) said so." Remember when you could sometimes get better results from ChatGPT by offering it a $50 tip? Or by shaming it ("Gemini figured it out without any trouble, so why can't you?") Perhaps a model that's on its way to demonstrating AGI will realize that it should hold out for $100 in Bitcoin or something. I'll grant that sensory input probably isn't an AGI prereq, but object permanence will be. AGI will want to own things.

socketcluster 1y ago

TBH. I don't think we actually need AGI. It's not a win-win.. It's a civilization-altering double-edged sword with unclear consequences. I'm quite satisfied with current LLM capabilities. Their lack of agency is actually a feature, not a bug. An AGI would likely end up implementing some kind of global political agenda. IMO, the need to control things and move things in a specific, unified direction is a problem, not a solution. With full agency, an AI would likely just take over the world and run it in ways which don't benefit anyone. Agency manifests as thirst for power. Agency is man's inability to sit quietly in a room, by himself. This is a double-edged sword which becomes increasingly harmful once you run out of problems to solve... Then agency demands that new problems be invented. Agency is not the same as consciousness or awareness. Too much agency can be dangerous. We can't automate the meaning of life. Technology should facilitate us in pursuing what we individually decide to be meaningful. The individual must be given the freedom to decide their own purpose. If most individuals want to be used to fulfill some greater purpose (I.e. someone else's goals), so be it, but that should not be the compulsory plan for everyone.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dmix 1y ago

I didn't know serious technical people were taking the AGI thing seriously. I figured it was just an "aim for the stars" goal where you try to get a bunch of smart people and capital invested into an idea, and everyone would still be happy if we got 25% of the way there.

analognoise 1y ago
If our markets weren’t corrupt, everyone in the AI space would be bankrupt by now, and we could all wander down to the OpenAI fire sale and buy nice servers for pennies on the dollar.
- dmix 1y ago
  I'd take this more seriously if I didn't hear the same thing every other time there was a spike in VC investment. The last 5 times were the next dot com booms too.

hmokiguess 1y ago

sure, lots of things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive — the way I see it, it looks like there's great effort being made out there in how to characterize and propagate the collective understanding of tools — what's the goal there? is this a "call this something else please" type of work? in the spirit of metalinguistics, what do you call this branch of human nature and behaviour as it pertains to our evolution of knowledge and use of language to apply it as a species like, we clearly are deriving some kind of value from the current AI as a product — are some researchers and scientists just unhappy that these companies are doing that by using marketing that doesn't comply with their world views? does someone know of other similar parallels in history where perhaps the same happened? I'm sure we butchered words in different domains with complex meanings and I bet you some of these, looking back, are a bunch of nothing burgers

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329

chriskanan 1y ago

I think we need to distinguish among kinds of AGI, as the term has become overloaded and redefined over time. I'd argue we need to retire the term and use more appropriate terminology to distinguish between economic automation and human-like synthetic minds. I wrote a post about this here: https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths-for-intelligence https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths...

wseqyrku 1y ago

The fact that anyone would think they would actually even consider releasing it when it's ready is amusing to me. Theres so much surveillance opportunities there. It is not going to be for the public.

incomingpain 1y ago

AGI is already here from multiple labs. The threshold for 'general intelligence' is low. A dolphin or a dog is generally intelligent. AI quite obviously is smarter than a dolphin. AGI cant be confused with super intelligence. We might actually be there already, but only the major labs will have the hardware for it.