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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

#241

Post by achierius »

timewizard wrote: post #231
threatofrain wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> experiencing extreme social disruption I think this just displays an exceptionally low estimation of human beings. People tend to resist extremities. Violently. > experience socially momentous change The technology is owned and costs money to use. It has extremely limited availability to most of the world. It will be as "socially momentous" as every other first world exclusive invention has been over the past sever…

Re.: self driving cars -- vision systems have all sorts of problems sure, but on the other hand that _is_ what we use. The most successful platforms use Lidar + vision -- vision can handle the streetlights, lidar detects objects, etc.

And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.

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

#242

Post by missingrib »

ggreer wrote: post #237
dmwilcox wrote: post #213

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 ci…

Is there any specific mental task that an average human is capable of that you believe computers will not be able to do? Also does this also mean that you believe that brain emulations (uploads) are not possible, even given an arbitrary amount of compute power?

Yes, they can't have understanding or intentionality.

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

#243

Post by [deleted] »

dmwilcox wrote: post #213

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 ci…

[deleted]

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

#244

Post by qt31415926 »

margalabargala wrote: post #157
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

If you thought about it for two weeks beforehand and came up with nothing, I have trouble lending much credence to that.

the commenter never said they came up with nothing, they said o3 came up with something better.

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

#245

Post by biophysboy »

stared wrote: post #183

My pet peeve: talking about AGI without defining it. There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition. Without that, the discussion may be intellectually entertaining—but ultimately moot. And we run into the motte-and-bailey fallacy: at one moment, AGI refers to something known to be mathematically impossible (e.g., due to the No Free Lunch theorem); the next, it’s something we already have with GPT-4 (which, w…

I like chollet's definition: something that can quickly learn any skill without any innate prior knowledge or training.

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

#246

Post by preommr »

dmwilcox wrote: post #213

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 ci…

> why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism

Then you've missed the part of software.

Software isn't computer science, it's not always about code. It's about solving problems in a way we can control and manufacture.

If we needed random numbers, we could easily use a hardware that uses some physics property, or we could pull in an observation from an api like the weather. We don't do these things because pseudo-random is good enough, and other solutions have drawbacks (like requiring an internet for api calls). But that doesn't mean software can't solve these problems.

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

#247

Post by LouisSayers »

dmwilcox wrote: post #213

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 ci…

What you're mentioning is like the difference between digital vs analog music.

For generic stuff you probably can't tell the difference, but once you move to the edges you start to hear the steps in digital vs the smooth transition of analog.

In the same way, AI runs on bits and bytes, and there's only so much detail you can fit into that.

You can approximate reality, but it'll never quite be reality.

I'd be much more concerned with growing organic brains in a lab. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people are covertly working on that.

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

#248

Post by quonn »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #177
AstroBen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Excel and Powerpoint are not conscious and so there is not reason to expect any other computation inside a digital computer to be different.

You may say something similar for matter and human minds, but we have a very limited and incomplete understanding of the brain and possibly even of the universe. Furthermore we do have a subjective experience of consciousness.

On the other hand we have a complete understanding of how LLM inference ultimately maps to matrix multiplications which map to discrete instructions and how those execute on hardware.

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

#249

Post by arp242 »

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.

If you look back at predictions of the future in the past in general, then so many of them have just been wrong. Especially during a "hype phase". Perhaps the best example is what people were predicting in 1969 after we landed on the moon: this is just the first step in the colonisation of the moon, Mars, and beyond. etc. etc. We just have to have our tech a bit better.

It's all very easy to see how that can happen in principle. But turns out actually doing it is a lot harder, and we hit some real hard physical limits. So here we are, still stuck on good ol' earth. Maybe that will change at some point once someone invents an Epstein drive or Warp drive or whatever, but you can't really predict when inventions happen, if ever, so ... who knows.

Similarly, it's not my impression that AGI is simply a matter of "the current tech, but a bit better". But who knows what will happen or what new thing someone may or may not invent.

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

#250

Post by kibwen »

lolinder wrote: post #239
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…

Why do you believe AGI is important for the future of humanity? That's probably the most controversial part of your post but you don't even bother to defend it. Just because it features in some significant (but hardly universal) chunk of Sci Fi doesn't mean we need it in order to have a great future, nor do I see any evidence that it would be a net positive to create a whole different form of sentience.

The genre of sci-fi was a mistake. It appears to have had no other lasting effect than to stunt the imaginations of a generation into believing that the only possible futures for humanity are that which were written about by some dead guys in the 50s (if we discount the other lasting effect of giving totalitarians an inspirational manual for inescapable technoslavery).
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