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AI 2027

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Re: AI 2027

#491

Post by Vegenoid »

benlivengood wrote: post #483
Vegenoid wrote: post #474

I think we've actually had capable AIs for long enough now to see that this kind of exponential advance to AGI in 2 years is extremely unlikely. The AI we have today isn't radically different from the AI we had in 2023. They are much better at the thing they are good at, and there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors. They still fail at larger scope longer ter…

METR [0] explicitly measures the progress on long term tasks; it's as steep a sigmoid as the other progress at the moment with no inflection yet. As others have pointed out in other threads RLHF has progressed beyond next-token prediction and modern models are modeling concepts [1]. [0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-mod...

At the risk of coming off like a dolt and being super incorrect: I don't put much stock into these metrics when it comes to predicting AGI. Even if the trend of "length of task an AI can reliably do doubles every 7 months" continues, as they say that means we're years away from AI that can complete tasks that take humans weeks or months. I'm skeptical that the doubling trend will continue into that timescale, I think there is a qualitative difference between tasks that take weeks or months and tasks that take minutes or hours, a difference that is not reflected by simple quantity. I think many people responsible for hiring engineers are keenly aware of this distinction, because of their experience attempting to choose good engineers based on how they perform in task-driven technical interviews that last only hours.

Intelligence as humans have it seems like a "know it when you see it" thing to me, and metrics that attempt to define and compare it will always be looking at only a narrow slice of the whole picture. To put it simply, the gut feeling I get based on my interactions with current AI, and how it is has developed over the past couple of years, is that AI is missing key elements of general intelligence at its core. While there's more lots more room for its current approaches to get better, I think there will be something different needed for AGI.

I'm not an expert, just a human.

Re: AI 2027

#492

Post by the8472 »

visarga wrote: post #431

The story is entertaining, but it has a big fallacy - progress is not a function of compute or model size alone. This kind of mistake is almost magical thinking. What matters most is the training set. During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic…

Many tasks are amenable to simulation training and synthetic data. Math proofs, virtual game environments, programming.

And we haven't run out of all data. High-quality text data may be exhausted, but we have many many life-years worth of video. Being able to predict visual imagery means building a physical world model. Combine this passive observation with active experimentation in simulated and real environments and you get millions of hours of navigating and steering a causal world. Deepmind has been hooking up their models to real robots to let them actively explore and generate interesting training data for a long time. There's more to DL than LLMs.

Re: AI 2027

#493

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

scryers_bloom wrote: post #362
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very real risk of societal collapse or species extinction No, there is no risk of species extinction in the near future due to climate change and repeating the line will just further the divide and make the people not care about other people's and even real climate scientist's words.

The risk is a quantifiable 0.0%? I find that hard to believe. I think the current trends suggest there is a risk that continued environmental destruction could annihilate society.

It's hard to produce a quantifiable chance of human extinction in the absence of any model by which climate change would lead to it. No climate organization I'm aware of evaluates the end of humanity as even a worst-case risk; the idea simply doesn't exist outside the realm of viral Internet misinformation.

Re: AI 2027

#495

Post by WXLCKNO »

bko wrote: post #459
boh wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for letting us know everything is fine, just in case we get confused and think the opposite.

You're welcome. I know too many upper middle class educated people that don't want to have kids because they believe the earth will cease to be inhabitable in the next 10 years. It's really bizarre to see and they'll almost certainly regret it when they wake up one day alone in a nursing home, look around and realize that the world still exists. And I think the neuroticism around this topic has led young people into…

I think you're discrediting yourself by talking about dark places and opening your parentheses with anti-depressants.

Not all brains function like they're supposed to, people getting help they need shouldn't be stigmatized.

You also make no argument about your take on things being the right one, you just oppose their worldview to yours and call theirs wrong like you know it is rather than just you thinking yours is right.

Re: AI 2027

#496

Post by jug »

Vegenoid wrote: post #474

I think we've actually had capable AIs for long enough now to see that this kind of exponential advance to AGI in 2 years is extremely unlikely. The AI we have today isn't radically different from the AI we had in 2023. They are much better at the thing they are good at, and there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors. They still fail at larger scope longer ter…

> there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors

Anthropic recently released research where they saw how when Claude attempted to compose poetry, it didn't simply predict token by token and "react" to when it thought it might need a rhyme and then looked at its context to think of something appropriate, but actually saw several tokens ahead and adjusted for where it'd likely end up, ahead of time.

Anthropic also says this adds to evidence seen elsewhere that language models seem to sometimes "plan ahead".

Please check out the section "Planning in poems" here; it's pretty interesting!

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

Re: AI 2027

#498

Post by pingou »

Considering that each year that passes, technology offer us new ways to destroy ourselves, and gives another chance for humanity to pick a black ball, it seems to me like the only way to save ourselves is to create a benevolent AI to supervise us and neutralize all threads.

There are obviously big risks with AI, as listed in the article, but the genie is out of the bottle anyway, even if all countries agreed to stop AI development, how long would that agreement last? 10 years? 20? 50? Eventually powerful AIs will be developed, if that is possible (which I believe it is, and I didn't think I'd see the current stunning development in my lifetime, I may not see AGI but I'm sure it'll get there eventually).

Re: AI 2027

#499

Post by Fraterkes »

Completely earnest question for people who believe we are on this exponential trajectory: what should I look out for at the end of 2025 to see if we're on track for that scenario? What benchmark that naysayers think is years away will we have met?

Re: AI 2027

#500

Post by WXLCKNO »

IshKebab wrote: post #89
ctoth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share your detailed projection of what you expect the future to look like so I can compare?

Sure 5 years: AI coding assistants are a lot better than they are now, but still can't actually replace junior engineers (at least ones that aren't shit). AI fraud is rampant, with faked audio commonplace. Some companies try replacing call centres with AI, but it doesn't really work and everyone hates it. Tesla's robotaxi won't be available, but Waymo will be in most major US cities. 10 years: AI assistants are now u…

So in the past 5 years we went from not having ChatGPT at all and it being released in 2022 (with non "chat" models before that) but in the next 5 now that the entire tech world is consumed with making better AI models, we'll just get slightly better AI coding assistants?

Reminds me of that comment about the first iPod being lame and having less space than a nomad. Worst take I've ever seen on here recently.

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