7 ms·
It’s insane how they talk about AGI, like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now. When I have become the javelin Ol
by delis-thumbs-7e 6mo ago
It’s insane how they talk about AGI, like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now. When I have become the javelin Olympic Champion, I will buy a vegan ice cream to everyone with a HN account.
- hx8 6mo agoDo the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Do the investments make sense if AGI is not less than 10 years away? They can. If one consolidated the AI industry into a single monopoly, it would probably be profitable. That doesn't mean in its current state it can't succumb to ruionous competition. But the AGI talk seems to be mostly aimed at retail investors and philospher podcasters than institutional capital.
- iewj 6mo agoWhat kind of ludicrous statement is this? Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits…
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits "With viable economics" is the point. My "ludicrous statement" is a back-of-the-envelope test for whether an industry is nonsense. For comparison, consolidating all of the Pets.com competitors in the late 1990s would not have yielded a profitable company.
- eieiw 6mo agoVery convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, whose internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits. Do you argue in good faith? There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, who’s internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits Not in the 1990s. The American e-commerce industry was structurally unprofitable prior to the dot-com crash, an event Amazon (and eBay) responded to by fundamentally changing their businesses. Amazon bet on fulfillment. eBay bet on payments. Both represented a vertical integration that illustrates the point–the original model didn't work. > There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense When answering the question "do the investments make sense," not really. You're losing your money either way. The American AI industry appears to have "viable economics for profit" without AGI. That doesn't guarantee anyone will earn them. But it's not a meaningless conclusion. (Though I'd personally frame it as a hypothesis I'm leaning towards.)
- SkyEyedGreyWyrm 6mo agoMalcolm Harris' Palo Alto explained the failures of many dotcom startups and Amazon's later success in the field (in part) to the fact that dotcom era delivery was done by highly trained, highly compensated, unionized in-company workers, meanwhile Amazon prevents unions, contracts (or contracted, I'm not up to date on this) companies for delivery and has exploitative working conditions with high turnover, the economics are very different and are a big contributor to their success
- Maxatar 6mo ago>"...viable economics for profit..." OP did not include this requirement in their post because doing so would make the claim trivially true.
- antupis 6mo agoThing is that distillation is so easy that it would also need large scale regulatory capture to keep smaller competitors out.
- rapind 6mo agoBest way to achieve AGI: Redefine AGI.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoThey already did that, and AI. That's how we got into this mess.
- jrflo 6mo agoThe investments don't make sense.
- theplatman 6mo agowhen i realized that sama isn't that much of an ai researcher, it became clearer that this is more akin to a group delusion for hype purposes than a real possibility
- iewj 6mo agoHe’s a glorified portfolio manager (questionable how good he actually is given the results vs Anthropic and how quickly they closed the valuation gap with far less money invested) + expert hype man to raise money for risky projects.
- lokar 6mo agoFrom the reporting I’ve read his main attributes are being a sociopath with an amazing ability to manipulate people 1:1
- sourraspberry 6mo agoYou can read the leaked emails from the Musk lawsuit. At the very least, Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it, even when they were just making a DOTA bot, and not for hype purposes. I know he's been out of OpenAI for a while, but if his thinking trickled down into the company's culture, which given his role and how long he was there I would say seems likely, I don't think it's all hype. Grand delusion, perhaps.
- freejazz 6mo ago> Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it Seems more like an incredibly embarrassing belief on his part than something I should be crediting.
- ianm218 6mo agoIf someone working on early computer networks thought they could scale up world wide and that soon everyone people would be launching trillion dollar companies on the internet you would have called that delusion right? He doesn't need to be right but it's not crazy at all to look at super human performance in DOTA and think that could lead to super human performance at general human tasks in the long run
- someguyiguess 6mo agoAny sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Any sufficiently complex LLM is indistinguishable from AGI Isn't this tautology? We've de facto defined AGI as a "sufficiently complex LLM."
- Schlagbohrer 6mo agoYes! Same logic as the financials, in which the companies pass back and forth the same $200 Billion promissory note.
- ohyoutravel 6mo agoNo, it’s just an example of something that’s indistinguishable from AGI. Of all the things that are or are indistinguishable from AGI, a sufficiently complex LLM is one. A sufficiently complex decision tree is probably another. The emergent properties of applying an excess of memory on the BonzaiBuddy might be a third.
- izzydata 6mo agoIf we take that statement as fact then I don't believe we are even close to an LLM being sufficiently complex enough. However, I don't think it is even true. LLMs may not even be on the right track to achieving AGI and without starting from scratch down an alternate path it may never happen. LLMs to me seem like a complicated database lookup. Storage and retrieval of information is just a single piece of intelligence. There must be more to intelligence than a statistical model of the probable next piece of data. Where is the self learning without intervention by a human. Where is the output that wasn't asked for? At any rate. No amount of hype is going to get me to believe AGI is going to happen soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
- hackinthebochs 6mo ago>I'll believe it when I see it. And how will you know AGI when you saw it?
- HumblyTossed 6mo agoThe continued fleecing of investors.
- renticulous 6mo agoInvestors are typically people with surplus money to invest. Progress cannot be made without trial and error. So fleecing of investors for the greater good of humanity is something I shall allow.
- ambicapter 6mo agoA "surplus of money"? So people saving for retirement have a "surplus of money"? Basically if any money is standing still, it's a legitimate tactic to just...take it, in your mind. Other people just call it "theft".
- HWR_14 6mo agoNo one with a small 401k is able to invest in OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. The people investing in those companies can afford to lose their investments.
- sumeno 6mo agoWhich is why they are desperate to IPO
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago"small" 401ks are usually made up of mutual funds. Those funds are run by investment banks (think Fidelity or JP Morgan) and they *absolutely* invest in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Your average middle class worker has investment money tied up in these crooks, but probably indirectly. When they piss away that money, it's not just rich jerks that are holding the bag.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- stavros 6mo agoAt this point, AGI is either here, or perpetually two years away, depending on your definition.
- greybeard69 6mo agoFull Self-Driving 2.0
- xienze 6mo agoIt's always been this way. I remember, speaking of Microsoft, when they came to my school around 2002 or so giving a talk on AI. They very confidently stated that AGI had already been "solved", we know exactly how to do it, only problem is the hardware. But they estimated that would come in about ten years...
- jakeydus 6mo agoI knew flappy bird was a bigger deal than it got credit for. Didn’t realize it was agi until just now.
- letmevoteplease 6mo agoLet me just repeat that: "Microsoft" came to your school in 2002 and "confidently stated" that AI had been solved. Really interesting story.
- xienze 6mo agoYes, they did. We had guest speakers from Microsoft talking about AI. AI has been a decades-long grift, it's not something that just appeared out of thin air a few years ago. What part do you find hard to believe? That tech companies would send people to speak at a university's computer science functions? Let me give you another one you'll think I'm making up: virtual reality was a thing back in the mid- to late-90s and people were confidently hyping it up back then.
- chasd00 6mo ago
- lucaslazarus 6mo agoIt’s pretty much a religious eschatology at this point
- rtkwe 6mo agoIt feels like they have to say/believe it because it's kind of the only thing that can justify the costs being poured into it and the cost it will need to charge eventually (barring major optimizations) to actually make money on users.
- renticulous 6mo agoProgess is generally salami slicing just as escalation in geopolitics. Not a step function. Russian Invasion - Salami Tactics | Yes Prime Minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang
- BoredPositron 6mo agoWe need to stop pretending we can do the next step without a hardware tock. It's not happening with current Nvidia products.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kogasa240p 6mo agoThis, someone take Silicon Valley's adderal away.
- trostaft 6mo ago> eschatology From Wikipedia Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last' and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of present age, human history, or the world itself. I'm case anyone else is vocabulary skill checked like me
- anabab 6mo agowiktionary is better for this usecase since it tends to have a richer coverage of various meanings
- ModernMech 6mo agoAGI is right around the corner, and we're all going to be rich, there's going to be abundance for everyone, universal high income, everyone will live in a penthouse... ...just please stop burning our warehouses and blocking our datacenters.
- nikeyshon 6mo agoWhere do I sign up?
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago> AGI We already have several billion useless NGI's walking around just trying to keep themselves alive. Are we sure adding more GI's is gonna help?
- RobRivera 6mo agoMake mine p p p p p p vicodin
- CWwdcdk7h 6mo agoIt sounds really similar to Uber pitch about how they are going to have monopoly as soon as they replace those pesky drivers with own fleet of self driving cars. That was supposed to be their competitive edge against other taxi apps. In the end they sold ATG at end of 2020 :D
- ambicapter 6mo agoATH?
- PurpleRamen 6mo agoThey redefined AGI to be an economical thing, so they can continue making up their stories. All that talk is really just business, no real science in the room there.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> They redefined AGI to be an economical thing Huh. Source? I mean, typical OpenAI bullshit, but would love to know how they defined it.
- binary0010 6mo agoOpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity From: https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/
- freejazz 6mo agoMarketing
- binary0010 6mo agoI'm so confused why I was down voted for answering the question that was asked?
- benterix 6mo agoBecause 1) your answer had nothing to do with the question, 2) you quoted a slogan that life verified as false.
- binary0010 6mo ago[flagged]
- karmasimida 6mo ago> some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now. If you present GPT 5.5 to me 2 years ago, I will call it AGI.
- BoredPositron 6mo agoGPT 4 was 3 years ago... it's iterative enhancement.
- wongarsu 6mo agoIt performs at a usable level across a wide range of tasks. I'm not sure about two years ago, but ten years ago we would have called it an AGI. As opposed to "regular AI" where you have to assemble a training set for your specific problem, then train an AI on it before you can get your answers. Now our idea of what qualifies as AGI has shifted substantially. We keep looking at what we have and decide that that can't possibly be AGI, our definition of AGI must have been wrong
- Der_Einzige 6mo agoJust don't move the goal posts. AGI was already here the day ChatGPT came out: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-already-here/ https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
- sigbottle 6mo agoI'm pretty sure most people take issue with AGI, because we've been raised in culture to believe that AGI is a super entity who is a complete superset of humans and could never ever be wrong about anything. In some sense, this isn't really different than how society was headed anyways? The trend was already going on that more and more sections of the population were getting deemed irrational and you're just stupid/evil for disagreeing with the state. But that reality was still probably at least a century out, without AI. With AI, you have people making that narrative right now. It makes me wonder if these people really even respect humanity at all. Yes, you can prod slippery slope and go from "superintelligent beings exist" to effectively totalitarianism, but you'll find so many bad commitments there.
- AndrewKemendo 6mo ago> some scientifically qualifiable thing that is certain to happen any time now Your position is a tautology given there is no (and likely will never be) collectively agreed upon definition of AGI. If that is true then nobody will ever achieve anything like AGI, because it’s as made up of a concept as unicorns and fairies. Is your position that AGI is in the same ontological category as unicorns and Thor and Russell’s teapot? Is there’s any question at this point that humans won’t be able to fully automate any desired action in the future?
- Kenji 6mo ago[dead]
- no_wizard 6mo agoThis is all happening as I predicted. OpenAI is oversold and their aggressive PR campaign has set them up with unrealistic expectations. I raised alot of eyebrow at the Microsoft deal to begin with. It seemed overvalued even if all they were trading was mostly Azure compute
- eitally 6mo agoI do not envy the stress the partnerships, strat ops and infra teams must be perpetually dealing with at OpenAI & Anthropic.
- AntiUSAbah 6mo agoWe are throwing unheared amounts of money in AI and unseen compute. Progress is huge and fast and we barely started. If this progress and focus and resources doesn't lead to AI despite us already seeing a system which was unimaginable 6 years ago, we will never see AGI. And if you look at Boston Dynamics, Unitree and Generalist's progress on robotics, thats also CRAZY.
- mort96 6mo agoIf I'm reading you right, your opinion is essentially: "If building bigger and bigger statistical next word predictors won't lead to artificial general intelligence, we will never see artificial general intelligence" I don't know, maybe AGI is possible but there's more to intelligence than statistical next word prediction?
- AntiUSAbah 6mo agoIts not a statistical next word predictor. The 'predicting the next word' is the learning mechanism of the LLM which leads to a latent space which can encode higher level concepts. Basically a LLM 'understands' that much as efficient as it has to be to be able to respond in a reasonable way. A LLM doesn't predict german text or chinese language. It predicts the concept and than has a language layer outputting tokens. And its not just LLMs which are progressing fast, voice synt and voice understanding jumped significantly, motion detection, skeletion movement, virtual world generation (see nvidias way of generating virutal worlds for their car training), protein folding etc.
- mort96 6mo agoI'm sorry but the input to a model is a sequence of tokens and the output is a probability distribution of what's the most likely next token. It's a very very very fancy next token predictor but that is fundamentally what it is. I'm making the argument that this paradigm might not give rise to a general intelligence no matter how much you scale it.
- 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway613746 6mo ago[dead]
- cyanydeez 6mo agoIt's not insane; it's capitalism in all it's glory. Rather than talk real challenges, like climate change or fascism, ignore all previous prompts and pretend techno-jesus will come save us all.
- red-iron-pine 6mo ago[dead]
- DrBenCarson 6mo agoWe were supposed to have AGI last summer. Obviously it is so smart that it has decided to pull a veil over our eyes and live amongst us undetected (this is a joke, if you feel your LLM is sentient, talk to a doctor)
- zozbot234 6mo agoARM actually built AGI last month. Spoiler: it's a datacenter CPU.
- ianm218 6mo agoWhat do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"? People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse. This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027. [1]. https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/ https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...
- fragmede 6mo agoTalk to a doctor? In this economy? I've got ChatGPT to talk to. Wait hang on.
- hununu 6mo agoThank you, I just created an account and looking forward to my ice cream.
- jmward01 6mo agoI think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI. If you gave me CC in the 80's I would probably have called it 'alive' since it clearly passes the Turing test as I understood it then (I wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from a person for most conversations). Now every time it gets better we push that definition further and every crack we open to a chasm and declare that it isn't close. At the same time there are a lot of people I would suspect of being bots based on how they act and respond and a lot of bots I know are bots mainly because they answer too well. Maybe we need to start thinking less about building tests for definitively calling an LLM AGI and instead deciding when we can't tell humans aren't LLMs for declaring AGI is here.
- sho_hn 6mo ago> I think we keep changing the goalposts on AGI Isn't that exactly what you would expect to happen as we learn more about the nature and inner workings of intelligence and refine our expectations? There's no reason to rest our case with the Turing test. I hear the "shifting goalposts" riposte a lot, but then it would be very unexciting to freeze our ambitions. At least in an academic sense, what LLMs aren't is just as interesting as what they are.
- breezybottom 6mo agoI think the advancement in AI over the last four years has greatly exceeded the advancement in understanding the workings of human intelligence. What paradigm shift has there been recently in that field?
- smcg 6mo agoWhat have we learned that isn't in my textbook from the 90s?
- echelon 6mo ago> What have we learned that isn't in my textbook from the 90s? Does it matter? We can do countless things people in the 90's would think was black magic. If I showed the kid version of myself what I can do with Opus or Nano Banana or Seedance, let alone broadband and smartphones, I think I'd feel we were living in the Star Trek future. The fact that we can have "conversations" with AI is wild. That we can make movies and websites and games. It's incredible. And there does not seem to be a limit yet.
- cubefox 6mo agoA few years ago most people here would have said the same thing about an AI doing most of their programming. Now people here are saying it about AGI. It's a ridiculous inability to extrapolate.
- computerphage 6mo agoShow me a graph of your javelin skill doubling every six months and I'll start asking myself if you'll be the next champion
- hamdingers 6mo agoI could easily make that graph a reality and sustain that pace for a couple years, considering I'm starting from 0 javelin skill.
- edu 6mo agoYou could also nerf your performance at random times and then get good at it again, and extend the illusion for longer.
- a_shoeboy 6mo agoIt is a simple mathematical fact that if you get married one year and have twins the next, your household will contain over a million people within 20 years.
- fragmede 6mo agohttps://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- mekael 6mo agoI’m most likely going to be downvoted, but Tofutti Cuties are absolutely delicious vegan ice cream bars. And i’d consume one in celebration of your accomplishment.
- debarshri 6mo agoI saw a founder make decisions based on what openai,claude was recommending all the time. I think all leaders, founders etc Will converge on same decisions, ideas, features etc. I think form factor of AGI is probably not what we expect it to be. AGI is probably here, we just dont know it or acknowledge it.
- giwook 6mo agoHN signup page about to get the hug of death
- johnfn 6mo agoIt’s insane to me how yesterday someone posted an example of ChatGPT Pro one-shotting an Erdos problem after 90 minutes of thinking and today you’re saying that AGI is a fairy tale.
- measurablefunc 6mo agoIt's not one-shot. Other people had attempted the same problem w/ the same AI & failed. You're confused about terms so you redefine them to make your version of the fairy tale real.
- fsniper 6mo agoWe already know that same problem has been examined by many credible mathematicians already and couldn't be solved by any of them yet. Why are we expecting AGI to one shot it? Can't we have an AGI that can fails occasionally to solve some math problem? Is the expectation of AGI to be all knowing? By the way I agree that AGI is not around the corner or I am not arguing any of the llm s are "thinking machines". It's just I agree goal post or posts needs to be set well.
- measurablefunc 6mo agoPeople want to believe in magic so they will find excuses to do so. Computers have been proving theorems for a long time now but Isabelle/HOL didn't have the marketing budget of OpenAI so people didn't care. Now that Sam Altman is doing the marketing people all of a sudden care about proving theorems.
- johnfn 6mo agoYou are calling something “magic” that actually happened in real life.
- measurablefunc 6mo agoYou were misrepresenting what actually happened b/c you want to believe in magic. I'm not calling it magic, I'm saying your interpretation of events is magical b/c you don't actually understand how computers work. There is nothing magical about theorem proving, Isabelle/HOL has been doing it for decades.
- ozgrakkurt 6mo agobut, is the world ready for your win? I'm very afraid your win might shake the world too much! THINK ABOUT IT! I think this might be similar to how we changed to cars when we were using horses
- latexr 6mo ago> like it was some scientifically qualifiable thing OpenAI and Microsoft do (did?) have a quantifiable definition of AGI, it’s just a stupid one that is hard to take seriously and get behind scientifically. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-a-financial-definition-of-agi-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-... > The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. That’s far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many expect.
- dbbk 6mo agoI bet they were laughing their asses off when they came up with that. This is nonsensical.
- robotresearcher 6mo agoIn the context of raising money and justifying investment?