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

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171–180 of 394 posts

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

#171
post #162

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components.

Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having.

From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.

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

#172
I do not like those who try to play God. The future of humanity will not be determined by some tech giant in their ivory tower, no matter how high it may be. This is a battle that goes deeper than ones and zeros. It's a battle for the soul of our society. It's a battle we must win, or face the consequences of a future we cannot even imagine... and that, I fear, is truly terrifying.

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

#173
The thing is, AGI is not needed to enable incredible business/societal value, and there is good reason to believe that actual AGI would damage both our society, our economy, and if many experts in the field are to be believed, humanity's survival as well.

So I feel happy that models keep improving, and not worried at all that they're reaching an asymptote.

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

#174
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it was two weeks tossing around ideas in my head

idk why people here are laser focusing on "wow 2 weeks", I totally understand lightly thinking about an idea, motivations, feasibility, implementation, for a week or two

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

#175

I just used o3 to design a distributed scheduler that scales to 1M+ sxchedules a day. It was perfect, and did better than two weeks of thought around the best way to build this.

I find now I quickly bucket people in to "have not/have barely used the latest AI models" or "trolls" when they express a belief current LLMs aren't intelligent.

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

#176
post #72

Would we even recognise it if it arrived? We'd recognise human level intelligence, probably, but that's specialised. What would general intelligence even look like.

There's a test for this: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi Basically a captcha. If there's something that humans can easily do that a machine cannot, full AGI has not been achieved.

[deleted]

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

#177

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…

Why does AGI necessitate having feelings or consciousness, or the ability to suffer? It seems a bit far to be giving future ultra-advanced calculators legal personhood?

>Why does AGI necessitate having feelings or consciousness

No one knows if it does or not. We don't know why we are conscious and we have no test whatsoever to measure consciousness.

In fact the only reason we know that current AI has no consciousness is because "obviously it's not conscious."

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

#178

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…

> 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 giv…

I agree. AI has made even mundane coding fun again, at least for a while. AI does a lot of the tedious work, but finding ways to make it maximally do it is challenging in a new way. New landscape of possibilities, innovation, tools, processes.

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

#179

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.

I wonder how many programmers have assembly code skill atrophy?

Few people will weep the death of the necessity to use abstract logical syntax to communicate with a computer. Just like few people weep the death of having to type out individual register manipulations.

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

#180
post #162

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components. Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having. From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absur…

note that those are kilocalories, and that is ignoring the calories needed for the circulatory and immune systems which are somewhat necessary for proper function. Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W
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