Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dwarkesh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 394 posts

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

#141

Post by an0malous »

karmakaze wrote: post #97
xnx wrote: post #65

I'll take the "under" on 30 years. Demis Hassabis (who has more credibility than whoever these 3 people are combined) says 5-10 years: https://time.com/7277608/demis-hassabis-interview-time100-20...

That's in line with Ray Kurzweil sticking to his long-held predictions: 2029 for AGI and 2045 for the singularity.

I’m sticking with Kurzweil’s predictions as well, his basic premise of extrapolating from compute scaling has been surprisingly robust.

~2030 is also roughly the Metaculus community consensus: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

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

#142

Post by gtirloni »

kmeisthax wrote: post #127
codingwagie wrote: post #99

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

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…

Here on HN you frequently see technologists using words like savant, genius, magical, etc, to describe the current generation of AI. Now we have vibe coding, etc. To me this is just a continuation of StackOverflow copy/paste where people barely know what they are doing and just hammer the keyboard/mouse until it works. Nothing has really changed at the fundamental level.

So I find your assessment pretty accurate, if only depressing.

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

#143

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

nextaccountic wrote: post #136
ksec wrote: 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…

> All this talk about "alignment", when applied to actual sentient beings, is just slavery.

I don't think that's true at all. We routinely talk about how to "align" human beings who aren't slaves. My parents didn't enslave me by raising me to be kind and sharing, nor is my company enslaving me when they try to get me aligned with their business objectives.

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

#144

Post by csto12 »

codingwagie wrote: post #99
csto12 wrote: 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

I was pointing out that if you spent 2 weeks trying to find the solution but AI solved it within a day (you don’t specify how long the final solution by AI took), it sounds like those two weeks were not spent very well.

I would be interested in knowing what in those two weeks you couldn’t figure out, but AI could.

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

#145

Post by margalabargala »

codingwagie wrote: post #99
csto12 wrote: 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 as far as you know, the "rough implementation" only works in the happy path and there are really bad edge cases that you won't catch until they bite you, and then you won't even know where to look.

An open source project wouldn't have those issues (someone at least understands all the code, and most edge cases have likely been ironed out) plus then you get maintenance updates for free.

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

#146

Post by tombert »

kmeisthax wrote: post #127
codingwagie wrote: post #99

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

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…

> Because that path lies skill atrophy.

Maybe, but I'm not completely convinced by this.

Prior to ChatGPT, there would be times where I would like to build a project (e.g. implement Raft or Paxos), I write a bit, find a point where I get stuck, decide that this project isn't that interesting and I give up and don't learn anything.

What ChatGPT gives me, if nothing else, is a slightly competent rubber duck. It can give me a hint to why something isn't working like it should, and it's the slight push I need to power through the project, and since I actually finish the project, I almost certain learn more than I would have before.

I've done this a bunch of times now, especially when I am trying to directly implement something directly from a paper, which I personally find can be pretty difficult.

It also makes these things more fun. Even when I know the correct way to do something, there can be lots of tedious stuff that I don't want to type, like really long if/else chains (when I can't easily avoid them).

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

#147

Post by nextaccountic »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #143
nextaccountic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> All this talk about "alignment", when applied to actual sentient beings, is just slavery. I don't think that's true at all. We routinely talk about how to "align" human beings who aren't slaves. My parents didn't enslave me by raising me to be kind and sharing, nor is my company enslaving me when they try to get me aligned with their business objectives.

Fair enough.

I of course don't know what's like to be an AGI but, the way you have LLMs censoring other LLMs to enforce that they always stay in line, if extrapolated to AGI, seems awful. Or it might not matter, we are self-censoring all the time too (and internally we are composed of many subsystems that interact with each other, it's not like we were an unified whole)

But the main point is that we have a heck of an incentive to not treat AGI very well, to the point we might avoid recognizing them as AGI if it meant they would not be treated like things anymore

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

#148

Post by blipvert »

glitchc wrote: post #133
ksec wrote: 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.

> At minimum, it should tell me how confident it feels in the answer it provides.

How’s that work out for Dave Bowman? ;-)

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

#149

Post by mirsadm »

gtirloni wrote: post #142
kmeisthax wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here on HN you frequently see technologists using words like savant, genius, magical, etc, to describe the current generation of AI. Now we have vibe coding, etc. To me this is just a continuation of StackOverflow copy/paste where people barely know what they are doing and just hammer the keyboard/mouse until it works. Nothing has really changed at the fundamental level. So I find your assessment pretty accurate, if…

It is depressing but equally this presents even more opportunities for people that don't take shortcuts. I use Claude/Gemini day to day and outside of the most average and boring stuff they're not very capable. I'm glad I started my career well before these things were created.

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

#150

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ksec wrote: 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…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN