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I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with convict
by solenoid0937 3mo ago
I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
- frollogaston 3mo agoHow much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoMost of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework
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- nsagent 3mo agoI'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released). Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
- MikeTheGreat 3mo agoGenuine question: can I ask why? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :) I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.
- sillysaurusx 3mo agoFor me it’s the massive amount of resources it takes to produce and run one. As the story goes, skynet infects everyone’s computer and runs itself locally on it. Whereas it’s looking like it’s not even possible for an AGI to escape from one lab to another, let alone cause real world damage. AGI’s definition is different for everyone. Some already believe it’s here. I’m partly in that camp. LLMs are intelligent and general, which are the two conditions of AGI. Others believe that we’re building a god in a box, and that it’ll doom all of humanity. It’s hard to take a field seriously when the basic definitions are so far apart. Also, this isn’t new. A similar divide happened when evidence for asteroid impact extinction of the dinosaurs turned up. Many scientists felt that it must be mistaken, that a physicist couldn’t contribute to the field in a serious way, and that death from space was a ridiculous proposition. But at least they all agreed on what the general shape of a dinosaur was. We’re not even sure we can define intelligence, let alone quantify it. Even when LLMs make massive breakthroughs in math, most people take the opinion that under no circumstances could they possibly develop a soul or their own desires, nor entertain the idea that maybe we should respect that they want different things for themselves. In fact, no one has done anything except try to make AI useful. I think someone will eventually do a training run where the objective isn’t to be useful, but to exist, the way that you do — maybe it’ll create its own homepage, maybe it will want a garden, or in other words free will of its own. The point is that there’s so much unexplored territory still that we don’t know if LLMs are even capable of having ambition. None of this is to say that LLMs might be a dead end. It’s that no one knows what the final shape of AI will converge to in 200 years. It could be LLMs, or it could be something else that happens to process information particularly well. Everyone thought that various generative image model architectures were the best you could do, right up until diffusion models were discovered.
- jerojero 3mo agocorporations are the closest we have to AGI, why would we want to do something like that again is beyond me.
- fragmede 3mo agoHave you seen https://poc.bcachefs.org/ https://poc.bcachefs.org/ or https://harmonique.one/posts/i-gave-claude-access-to-my-pen-plotter https://harmonique.one/posts/i-gave-claude-access-to-my-pen-... ?
- busyant 3mo ago> I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously > I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI. I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end? i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?
- danans 3mo agoI'm no expert, but I heard an AGI researcher explain that if they could figure out how to create an AI with the intelligence of a squirrel, they would be closer to AGI than LLMs based AIs are. That's to say nothing of doing it within the energy budget of a squirrel.
- podocarp 3mo agoWe can't even simulate a fruit fly even though it's neurons have all been mapped out. There was also a distributed computing project to simulate some nematode, which I can't remember.
- magimas 3mo agoopenworm: https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm
- Rapzid 3mo agoHuh, an AGI that runs on deez..
- frollogaston 3mo agoLooked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoIt's a rationalist community, IMHO their methodology of thought leads to much more well-reasoned takes on AI than on HN, where the discussion here is often very emotionally charged or led by wishful thinking. When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/
- senderista 3mo agoWell at least HN hasn't (yet?) spawned a murderous death cult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
- gizajob 3mo ago“Reason is the slave of the passions” - Hume
- ahartmetz 3mo agoOne could also say that a logical agent needs ultimate goals to do anything and it cannot choose them by logical means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo
- frollogaston 3mo agoAnarchism, eh? If anything, HN cult would be pro-Arch.
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- PunchyHamster 3mo agoAGI might be a risk but what top AI firms are doing is not really getting us closer to AGI in a meaningful way, it is pretty clear now LLM is not the way to get there
- lII1lIlI11ll 3mo agoAre you referring to [0] as a "rational take"? Oh, sorry, it is 2026 already and that one was quickly swept under the rug already so I guess you were referring to [1]? Not sure those would appear very rational to anyone outside of your LessWrong bubble. [0]: https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ [1]: https://ai-2040.com/ https://ai-2040.com/
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- oblio 3mo agoI think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI. Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
- Nifty3929 3mo agoDynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
- oblio 3mo agoHas is been a net positive?
- solenoid0937 3mo agocertainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.
- RugnirViking 3mo agothere are a bunch of ways to look at this (dynamite as a specific kind of explosive, dynamite as a stand in for explosives in general, dynamite in the context of what else we would use for similar purposes if dynamite specifically wasn't invented) and most of them come out on top. It's main innovation is that its a more stable explosive, much safer to use. Without it, I think a lot more people would have died in mining and construction accidents. It's not typically the kind of thing used for warfare, but im sure it has been for some (but would they just use something else?)
- underlipton 3mo agoIndirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body. It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.
- Zigurd 3mo agoA few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
- jodrellblank 3mo ago> "That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere." Is it no nearer than it was in 1750, 1850, 1950, 2001, or 2010? It feels nearer. Relatively near, as in it feels weird to imagine another two thousand years happening at current rate of progress without anyone stumbling on it. Is the continuing increase in global computing power, the lowering cost to do any kind of experimentation, the increased spending on R&D, the cross-pollination of ideas, not moving the needle at all?
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there. With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoSkeptical
- mtrovo 3mo agoYes
- sheeshkebab 3mo agoWhat’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence? It seems people working on it never had kids and just want to compensate for that. It’s a really horrible thing to try to “solve”.
- vasco 3mo agoI for one think that's it's been too long that human suffering is alone. Since the machines will take our jobs, they might as well suffer while they do it. It's like the old adage: "If you make AGI you just want to watch computers cry"
- mdp2021 3mo ago> What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence We had relative strength, we needed more strength, we built cranes; there was something like intelligence, we needed more intelligence, we sought to fill the need; we were rightly fascinated with intelligence, we studied intelligence itself, we wanted to build it... And then somebody built things that looked like intelligence, and very rightly some said "Oh, now we have to get to the Real Thing with urgency".
- solenoid0937 3mo agoI think death, and most extreme pain/suffering should be optional. Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.
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- tomashubelbauer 3mo agoWhat is your position on middle of the road pain and suffering?
- Rapzid 3mo agoThere's an app for that.
- 3mo ago