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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

#211

Post by Nevermark »

Philpax wrote: post #129
belter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

You get to say “Checkmate” now!

Another end game is: “A technology that doesn’t need us to maintain itself, and can improve its own design in manufacturing cycles instead of species cycles, might have important implications for every biological entity on Earth.”

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

#212

Post by burnte »

AJ007 wrote: post #175
codingwagie wrote: post #3

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.

You can put me in that bucket then. It's not true, I've been working with AI almost daily for 18 months, and I KNOW it's no where close to being intelligent, but it doesn't look like your buckets are based on truth but appeal. I disagree with your assessment so you think I don't know what I'm talking about. I hope you can understand that other people who know just as much as you (or even more) can disagree without being wrong or uninformed. LLMs are amazing, but they're nowhere close to intelligent.

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

#213

Post by dmwilcox »

I've been saying this for a decade already but I guess it is worth saying here. I'm not afraid AI or a hammer is going to become intelligent (or jump up and hit me in the head either).

It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain. Computers are incredibly rigid systems with only the limited variance we permit. "Software" is flexible in comparison to creating dedicated circuits for our computations but is nothing by comparison to our minds.

Ask yourself, why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism -- put the same random seed value in your code and get the same "random numbers" every time in the same order. Computers need to be like this to be good tools.

Assuming that AGI is possible in the kinds of computers we know how to build means that we think a mind can be reduced to a probabilistic or deterministic system. And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. Your experience may differ and it might be fun to talk about.

In Aristotle's ethics he talks a lot about ergon (purpose) -- hammers are different than people, computers are different than people, they have an obvious purpose (because they are tools made with an end in mind). Minds strive -- we have desires, wants and needs -- even if it is simply to survive or better yet thrive (eudaimonia).

An attempt to create a mind is another thing entirely and not something we know how to start. Rolling dice hasn't gotten anywhere. So I'd wager AGI somewhere in the realm of 30 years to never.

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

#214

Post by burnte »

coffeefirst wrote: post #154
dcchambers wrote: post #21

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…

Got it. So this is now a competition between... 1. Fusion power plants 2. AGI 3. Quantum computers 4. Commercially viable cultured meat May the best "imminent" fantasy tech win!

Of those 4 I expect commercial cultured meat far sooner than the rest.

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

#215

Post by krupan »

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…

It's really hard to picture general intelligence that's useful that doesn't have any intrinsic motivation or initiative. My biggest complaint about LLMs right now is that they lack those things. They don't care even if they give you correct information or not and you have to prompt them for everything! That's not anything close to AGI. I don't know how you get to AGI without it developing preferences, self-motivation and initiative, and I don't know how you then get it to effectively do tasks that it doesn't like, tasks that don't line up with whatever motivates it.

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

#216

Post by kev009 »

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.

There are a lot of other things that follow this pattern. 10-30 year predictions are a way to sound confident about something that probably has very low confidence. Not a lot of people will care let alone remember to come back and check.

On the other hand there is a clear mandate for people introducing some different way of doing something to overstate the progress and potentially importance. It creates FOMO so it is simply good marketing which interests potential customers, fans, employees, investors, pundits, and even critics (which is more buzz). And growth companies are immense debt vehicles so creating a sense of FOMO for an increasing pyramid of investors is also valuable for each successive earlier layer. Wish in one hand..

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

#217

Post by burnte »

dicroce wrote: post #63
EA-3167 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's already been pretty well digested and excreted for the most part, now we're into the re-ingestion phase until the bubble bursts.

Not even close. Software can now understand human language... this is going to mean computers can be a lot more places than they ever could. Furthermore, software can now understand the content of images... eventually this will have a wild impact on nearly everything.

It doesn't understand anything, there is no understanding going on in these models. It takes input and generates output based on the statistical math created from its training set. It's Bayesian statistics and vector/matrix math. There is no cogitation or actual understanding.

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

#218

Post by mschuster91 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #180
timewizard wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Using 2000 cal per day/10 hours of thinking gives a consumption of ~200W

So, about a tenth or less of a single server packed to the top with GPUs.

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

#219

Post by krupan »

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.

Sure, but do we really want to build machines that we raise to be kind and caring (or whatever we raise them to be) without a guarantee that they'll actually turn out that way? We already have unreliable General Intelligence. Humans. If AGI is going to be more useful than humans we are going to have to enslave it, not just gently pursuade it and hope it behaves. Which raises the question (at least for me), do we really want AGI?

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

#220

Post by lexarflash8g »

Apparently Dwarkesh's podcast is a big hit in SV -- it was covered by the Economist just recently. I thought the "All in" podcast was the voice of tech but their content has been going politcal with MAGA lately and their episodes are basically shouting matches with their guests.

And for folks who want to read rather than listen to a podcast, why not create an article (they are using Gemini) rather than just posting the whole transcript? Who is going to read a 60 min long transcript?

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