Live data from Hacker News

AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

dwarkesh.com

121–130 of 394 posts

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something new != truly novel. ChatGPT creates something new every time I ask it a question.

adjective: novel definition: new or unusual in an interesting way. ChatGPT can create new things, sure, but it does so at your directive . It doesn't do that because it wants to which gets back to the other part of my answer. When an LLM can create something without human prompting or directive, then we can call that intelligence.

What does intelligence have to do with having desires or goals? An amoeba can do stuff on its own but it's not intelligent. I can imagine a god-like intelligence that is a billion times smarter and more capable than any human in every way, and it could just sit idle forever without any motivation to do anything.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#122
post #39

And in 30 years it will be another 30 years away. LLMs are so incredibly useful and powerful but they will NEVER be AGI. I actually wonder if the success of (and subsequent obsession with) LLMs is putting true AGI further out of reach. All that these AI companies see are the $$$. When the biggest "AI Research Labs" like OpenAI shifted to product-izing their LLM offerings I think the writing was on the wall that they…

People over-estimate the short term and under-estimate the long term.

Compound growth starting from 0 is... always 0. Current LLMs have 0 general reasoning ability

We haven't even taken the first step towards AGI

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will keep improving LLMs, and by the time they are AGI (less than 30 years), you will say, "Well, these are no longer LLMs."

What the hell is general intelligence anyway? People seem to think it means human-like intelligence, but I can't imagine we have any good reason to believe that our kinds of intelligence constitute all possible kinds of intelligence--which, from the words, must be what "general" intelligence means. It seems like even if it's possible to achieve GI, artificial or otherwise, you'd never be able to know for sure that th…

The way some people confidently assert that we will never create AGI, I am convinced the term essentially means "machine with a soul" to them. It reeks of religiosity.

I guess if we exclude those, then it just means the computer is really good at doing the kind of things which humans do by thinking. Or maybe it's when the computer is better at it than humans and merely being as good as the average human isn't enough (implying that average humans don't have natural general intelligence? Seems weird.)

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#124
post #49
post #24

Is AGI even important? I believe the next 10 to 15 years will be Assisted Intelligence. There are things that current LLM are so poor I dont believe a 100x increase in pref / watt is going to make much difference. But it is going to be good enough there wont be an AI Winter. Since current AI has already reached escape velocity and actually increase productivity in many areas. The most intriguing part is if Humanoid f…

AI winter is relative, and it's more about outlook and point of view than actual state of the field.

[deleted]

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a general consensus is AGI should be able to perform any task an average human is able to perform. Definitely nothing of Nobel prize level.

A bit poorly named; not really very general. AHI would be a better name.

AAI would be enough for me, although there are people who deny intelligence of non-human animals.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If/when we will have AGI, we will likely have something fundamentally superhuman very soon after, and that will be very recognizable. This is the idea of "hard takeoff" -- because the way we can scale computation, there will only ever be a very short time when the AI will be roughly human-level. Even if there are no fundamental breakthroughs, the very least silicon can be ran much faster than meat, and instead of com…

But that's not ten times the workdays. That's just taking a bunch of speed and sitting by yourself worrying about something. Results may be eccentric. Though I don't know what you mean by "width of a human brain".

It's ten times the time to work on a problem. Taking a bunch of speed does not make your brain work faster, it just messes with your attention system.

> Though I don't know what you mean by "width of a human brain".

A human brain contains ~86 billion neurons connected to each other through ~100 trillion synapses. All of these parts work genuinely in parallel, all working together at the same time to produce results.

When an AI model is being ran on a GPU, a single ALU can do the work analogous of a neuron activation much faster than a real neuron. But a GPU does not have 86 billion ALUs, it only has ~If/when we have a model that can actually do complex reasoning tasks such as programming and designing new computers as well as a human can, with no human helping to prompt it, we can just scale it out to give it more hours per day to work, all the way until every neuron has a real computing element to run it. The difference in experience for such a system for running "narrow" vs running "wide" is just that the wall clock runs slower when you are running wide. That is, you have more hours per day to work on things.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#127
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just asked it to design or implement? If o3 can design it, that means it’s using open source schedulers as reference. Did you think about opening up a few open source projects to see how they were doing things in those two weeks you were designing?

why would I do that kind of research if it can identify the problem I am trying to solve, and spit out the exact solution. also, it was a rough implementation adapted to my exact tech stack

Because that path lies skill atrophy.

AI research has a thing called "the bitter lesson" - which is that the only thing that works is search and learning. Domain-specific knowledge inserted by the researcher tends to look good in benchmarks but compromise the performance of the system[0].

The bitter-er lesson is that this also applies to humans. The reason why humans still outperform AI on lots of intelligence tasks is because humans are doing lots and lots of search and learning, repeatedly, across billions of people. And have been doing so for thousands of years. The only uses of AI that benefit humans are ones that allow you to do more search or more learning.

The human equivalent of "inserting domain-specific knowledge into an AI system" is cultural knowledge, cliches, cargo-cult science, and cheating. Copying other people's work only helps you, long-term, if you're able to build off of that into something new; and lots of discoveries have come about from someone just taking a second look at what had been considered to be generally "known". If you are just "taking shortcuts", then you learn nothing.

[0] I would also argue that the current LLM training regime is still domain-specific knowledge, we've just widened the domain to "the entire Internet".

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#128
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what is your point in context of AGI topic.

im a tenured engineer, spent a long time at faang. was casually beat this morning by a far superior design from an llm.

is this because the LLM actually reasoned on a better design or because it found a better design in its "database" scoured from another tenured engineer.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#129
post #115
post #24

Is AGI even important? I believe the next 10 to 15 years will be Assisted Intelligence. There are things that current LLM are so poor I dont believe a 100x increase in pref / watt is going to make much difference. But it is going to be good enough there wont be an AI Winter. Since current AI has already reached escape velocity and actually increase productivity in many areas. The most intriguing part is if Humanoid f…

> Is AGI even important? It's an important question for VCs not for Technologists ... :-)

A technology that can create new technology is quite important for technologists to keep abreast of, I'd say :p

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designing a distributed scheduler is a solved problem, of course an LLM was able to spit out a solution.

as noted elsewhere, all other frontier models failed miserably at this

That doesn't mean the one what manages to spit it out of its latent space is close to AGI. I wonder how consistently that specific model could. If you tried 10 LLMs maybe all 10 of them could have spit out the answer 1 out of 10 times. Correct problem retrieval by one LLM and failure by the others isn't a great argument for near-AGI. But LLMs will be useful in limited domains for a long time.
Post reply on HN