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

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

#201

Post by Thrymr »

thomasahle wrote: post #90
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What the hell is general intelligence anyway? OpenAI used to define it as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." Now they used a Level 1-5 scale: https://briansolis.com/2024/08/ainsights-openai-defines-five... So we can say AGI is "AI that can do the work of Organizations": > These “Organizations” can manage and execute all functions of a business, surpassing tradit…

Apparently OpenAI now just defines it monetarily as "when we can make $100 billion from it." [0]

[0] https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-...

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

#202

Post by themanmaran »

lossolo wrote: post #187
codingwagie wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive got ten years at faang in distributed systems, I know a good solution when i see one. and o3 is bang on

So 10 years at a FANG company, then it’s 15 years in backend at FANG, then 10 years in distributed systems, and then running interviews at some company for 5 years and rising capital as founder in NYC. Cool. Can you share that chat from o3?

How are those mutually exclusive statements? You can't imagine someone working on backend (focused on distributed systems) for 10-15 years at a FANG company. And also being in a position to interview new candidates?

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

#203

Post by Balgair »

yibg wrote: 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.

I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you.

To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI.

No really.

You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today.

But, really, what else do you want out of the bots? Flying cars, cancer cures, frozen irradiated Mars bunkers? We were mostly getting there already. It'll speed thing up a bit, sure, but mostly just because we can't be arsed to actually fund research anymore. The bots are just making things cheaper, maybe.

No, be real. We wanted cold hard cash out of them. And even those crummy catfish bots back in 2015 were doing the job well enough.

We can debate 'intelligence' until the sun dies out and will still never be satisfied.

But the reality is that we want money, and if you take that low, terrible, and venal standard as the passing bar, then we've been here for a decade.

(oh man, just read that back, I think I need to take a day off here, youch!)

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

#204

Post by tombert »

scellus wrote: post #178
tombert wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah that's the thing.

Personal projects are fun for the same reason that they're easy to abandon: there are no stakes to them. No one yells at you for doing something wrong, you're not trying to satisfy a stakeholder, you can develop into any direction you want. This is good, but that also means it's easy to stop the moment you get to a part that isn't fun.

Using ChatGPT to help unblock myself makes it easier for me to not abandon a project when I get frustrated. Even when ChatGPT's suggestions aren't helpful (which is often), it can still help me understand the problem by trying to describe it to the bot.

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

#205

Post by threatofrain »

timewizard wrote: post #171
yibg wrote: 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…

We'll be experiencing extreme social disruption well before we have to worry about the cost-efficiency of strong AI. We don't even need full "AGI" to experience socially momentous change. We might even be on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities.

We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.

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

#206

Post by olyjohn »

kadushka wrote: post #121
dcchambers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does the amoeba does make choices?

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

#207

Post by HAL3000 »

themanmaran wrote: post #202
lossolo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 10 years at a FANG company, then it’s 15 years in backend at FANG, then 10 years in distributed systems, and then running interviews at some company for 5 years and rising capital as founder in NYC. Cool. Can you share that chat from o3?

How are those mutually exclusive statements? You can't imagine someone working on backend (focused on distributed systems) for 10-15 years at a FANG company. And also being in a position to interview new candidates?

Who knows but have you read what OP wrote?

"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."

Anyone with 10 years in distributed systems at FAANG doesn’t need two weeks to design a distributed scheduler handling 1M+ schedules per day, that’s a solved problem in 2025 and basically a joke at that scale. That alone makes this person’s story questionable, and his comment history only adds to the doubt.

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

#208

Post by Retric »

AstroBen wrote: post #192
Retric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general part of general intelligence. If they don’t think in those terms there’s an inherent limitation. Now, something that’s arbitrarily close to AGI but doesn’t care about endlessly working on drudgery etc seems possible, but also a more difficult problem you’d need to be able to build AGI to create.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Generalization ability and Common Sense Knowledge [1] If we go by this definition then there's no caring, or a noticing of drudgery? It's simply defined by its ability to generalize solving problems across domains. The narrow AI that…

“ability to understand”

Isn’t just the ability to preform a task. One of the issues with current AI training is it’s really terrible at discovering which aspects of the training data are false and should be ignored. That requires all kinds of mental tasks to be constantly active including evaluating emotional context to figure out if someone is being deceptive etc.

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

#209

Post by kmeisthax »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #179
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…

>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.

Most programmers don't need to develop that skill unless they need more performance or are modifying other people's binaries[0]. You can still do plenty of search-and-learning using higher-level languages, and what you learn at one particular level can generalize to the other.

Even if LLMs make "plain English" programming viable, programmers still need to write, test, and debug lists of instructions. "Vibe coding" is different; you're telling the AI to write the instructions and acting more like a product manager, except without any of the actual communications skills that a good manager has to develop. And without any of the search and learning that I mentioned before.

For that matter, a lot of chatbots don't do learning either. Chatbots can sort of search a problem space, but they only remember the last 20-100k tokens. We don't have a way to encode tokens that fall out of that context window into some longer-term weights. Most of their knowledge comes from the information they learned from training data - again, cheated from humans, just like humans can now cheat off the AI. This is a recipe for intellectual stagnation.

[0] e.g. for malware analysis or videogame modding

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

#210

Post by olyjohn »

Thrymr wrote: post #201
thomasahle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell is general intelligence anyway? OpenAI used to define it as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." Now they used a Level 1-5 scale: https://briansolis.com/2024/08/ainsights-openai-defines-five... So we can say AGI is "AI that can do the work of Organizations": > These “Organizations” can manage and execute all functions of a business, surpassing tradit…

Apparently OpenAI now just defines it monetarily as "when we can make $100 billion from it." [0] [0] https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-...

That's what "economically valuable work" means.
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