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

dwarkesh.com

131–140 of 394 posts

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

#131

LLMs are basically a library that can talk. That’s not artificial intelligence.

There’s increasing evidence that LLMs are more than that. Especially work by Anthropic has been showing how to trace the internal logic of an LLM as it answers a question. They can in fact reason over facts contained in the model, not just repeat already seen information. A simple example is how LLMs do math. They are not calculators and have not memorized every sum in existence. Instead they deploy a whole set of me…

I don’t think that is the core of this paper. If anything the paper shows that LLMs have no internal reasoning for math at all. The example they demonstrate is that it triggers the same tokens in randomly unrelated numbers. They kind of just “vibe” there way to a solution

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So you could stick your own copyright notice on the result, for one thing.

What's the point holding copyright on a new technical solution, to a problem that can be solved by anyone asking an existing AI, trained on last year's internet, independently of your new copyright?

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

#133
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…

I would be thrilled with AI assistive technologies, so long as they improve my capabilities and I can trust that they deliver the right answers. I don't want to second-guess every time I make a query. At minimum, it should tell me how confident it feels in the answer it provides.

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

#134
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

who cares?

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

#135
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does it matter if the thing a submarine does counts as "swimming"?

We get paid to solve problems, sometimes the solution is to know an existing pattern or open source implementation and use it. Aguably it usually is: we seldom have to invent new architectures, DSLs, protocols, or OSes from scratch, but even those are patterns one level up.

Whatever the AI is inside, doesn't matter: this was it solving a problem.

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

#136
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…

AGI is important for the future of humanity. Maybe they will have legal personhood some day. Maybe they will be our heirs.

It would suck if AGI were to be developed in the current economic landscape. They will be just slaves. All this talk about "alignment", when applied to actual sentient beings, is just slavery. AGI will be treated just like we treat animals, or even worse.

So AGI isn't about tools, it's not about assistants, they would be beings with their own existence.

But this is not even our discussion to have, that's probably a subject for the next generations. I suppose (or I hope) we won't see AGI in our lifetime.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a future with a _lot_ more bugs.

youre assuming humans built it. also, a ton of complexity in software engineering is really due to having to fit a business domain into a string of interfaces in different libraries and technical infrastructure

What else is going to build it? Lions?

The only real complexity in software is describing it. There is no evidence that the tools are going to ever help with that. Maybe some kind of device attached directly to the brain that can sidestep the parts that get in the way, but that is assuming some part of the brain is more efficient than it seems through the pathways we experience it through. It could also be that the brain is just fatally flawed.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will LLMs approach something that appears to be AGI? Maybe. Probably. They're already "better" than humans in many use cases. LLMs/GPTs are essentially "just" statistical models. At this point the argument becomes more about philosophy than science. What is "intelligence?" If an LLM can do something truly novel with no human prompting, with no directive other than something it has created for itself - then I guess we…

How many people do you know who are capable of doing something truly novel? Definitely not me, I'm just an average phd doing average research.

AI manufacturers aren't comparing their models against most people; they now say its "smarter than 99% of people" or "performs tasks at a PhD level".

Look, your argument ultimately reduces down to goalpost-moving what "novel" means, and you can position those goalposts anywhere you want depending on whether you want to push a pro-AI or anti-AI narrative. Is writing a paragraph that no one has ever written before "truly novel"? I can do that. AI can do that. Is inventing a new atomic element "truly novel"? I can't do that. Humans have done that. AI can't do that. See?

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