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The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

metaculus.com

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#21

AGI by 2040 huh. I bet it won’t happen by 2100, and I’m young enough that I can look back on this at 2040 and see how wrong/ correct I was. Future me, don’t forget!

Depending on who you ask, we will never have it or we have it already. We never had a perfect definition of AGI, but I feel like now the definition has become so murky to be useless.

True, though clearing up some of the murkiness is part of what forecast questions like these are for, with their explicitly spelled out resolution criteria.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#22

AGI by 2040 huh. I bet it won’t happen by 2100, and I’m young enough that I can look back on this at 2040 and see how wrong/ correct I was. Future me, don’t forget!

Depending on who you ask, we will never have it or we have it already. We never had a perfect definition of AGI, but I feel like now the definition has become so murky to be useless.

My definition would AGI as an AI embodied in a human robot that can do all the physical and cognitive tasks a regular human can, for example I would assume 90% of humans can be an Uber driver, and so the AGI system should be capable of being an Uber Driver. While perhaps only 5% can be a theoretical physicist or a professional tennis player, so I wouldn’t expect my AGI to be capable of that

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#23

AGI by 2040 huh. I bet it won’t happen by 2100, and I’m young enough that I can look back on this at 2040 and see how wrong/ correct I was. Future me, don’t forget!

Depending on who you ask, we will never have it or we have it already. We never had a perfect definition of AGI, but I feel like now the definition has become so murky to be useless.

Yeah I feel like people have turned the definition of AGI into what we previously called omnipotence.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#25
How cool would it be if we could build stuff that directly builds the society we want? Call it utopia or whatever who cares.

But I wish there were other people in the game (none that I know personally at least, lots just act like accountants lol) who want to use their money to build and enable the kind of world at large, like we are playing a city builder irl. Making money is whatever but making a world is just _chefs kiss_.

To use the technology available today in ways that people don’t even have to think, but it leads to good outcomes.

AI seems to be one of those vectors and I hope it works out. I’m personally all in with even just LLM applications.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#27
post #4

Nowhere do they define "AGI". I guarantee that is a big reason why the predictions have so much variance. For many people, what GPT-4 does qualified as AGI -- up until GPT-4 came out and then everyone seemed to decide that AGI meant ASI. I am guessing for many people answering this poll it means "a full emulation of a person". Or maybe it had to be "alive". The thing that irritates me so much is that there is this la…

> Nowhere do they define "AGI" Ummm, maybe you should have looked? At the top of the very first prediction, here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can…

Yup, missed that, thanks. Has anyone scored GPT-4 on the APPs benchmark?

I believe that if you take GPT-4 multimodal integrated with Eleven Labs and Whisper then there is a shot at passing that extended Turing test, if designed fairly. The wording is still a bit ambiguous.

Also assembling that particular scale model is probably challenging but not really a general task and something that could be probably be achieved with simulated sensors and effectors given a 3-4 month engineering effort into utilizing advanced techniques (maybe training an existing multimodal LLM and integrating it with some kind of RL-based robot controller?) at interpreting and acting on those kinds of instructions. It would be possible to integrate it with the LLM such that it could report its projects and identify objects during assembly.

So my takeaway is that with some serious attempts and an honest assessment of this bar, an AI would be able to pass that this year or next. I mean I don't know how far GPT-4 is from the 75%/90% but I doubt it is that far and so expect if not GPT-4 then GPT-4.5 or 5 could pass given some engineering effort aimed at the test competencies.

If people really are thinking 2030 or 2040 when they read "AGI" and respond to that poll (I suspect some didn't read the definition) then that would indicate that people are just ignorant of the reality of how far along we are, or in denial. Or a little of both.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere do they define "AGI" Ummm, maybe you should have looked? At the top of the very first prediction, here: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can…

You do realize that many, if not most, humans would fail this test, right?

Yes you'll find that any testable definition of AGI that has not been passed yet would be unpassable for a big chunk of the human population.

In other words, General, Artificial and Intelligent have been passed. That's why a few papers/researchers opt to call these models "General Artificial Intelligence" instead

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/28064...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12003

Or some such variant like "General Purpose Technologies" as Open AI did.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

since "AGI" has so much baggage with posts shifting at the speed of light.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#29
post #24

Is there any already resolved question in which metaculus forecasters made a surprisingly accurate prediction about an AI advance?

Anyone can signup and vote, so I assume it tends towards the majority option tbh. Seems like obviously noisy data.

Re: The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters

#30
post #26

"Forecaster" here means any rando who signs up to their service and answers a question. Sometimes a large polling number does not equal a more accurate answer.

this isn't quite true -- on metaculus, accounts that have a history of forecasting things well are weighted more heavily
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