301–310 of 394 posts
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 remember talking to a very senior person who’s now at Anthropic, in 2017. And then he told various people that they shouldn’t do a PhD because by the time they completed it everyone will be automated.
Don’t tell young people things like this. Predicting the future is hard, and it is the height of hubris to think otherwise.
I remember as a teen, I had thought that I was a supposed to be a pilot for all my life. I was ready to enroll in a school with a two year program.
However, I was also into computers. One person who I looked up to in that world said to me “don’t be a pilot, it will all be automated soon and you will just be buss drivers, at best.” This entirely took the wind out of my piloting sails.
This was in the early 90’s, and 30 years later, it is still wrong.
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But that's not ten times the workdays. That's just taking a bunch of speed and sitting by yourself worrying about something. Results may be eccentric. Though I don't know what you mean by "width of a human brain".
It's ten times the time to work on a problem. Taking a bunch of speed does not make your brain work faster, it just messes with your attention system. > Though I don't know what you mean by "width of a human brain". A human brain contains ~86 billion neurons connected to each other through ~100 trillion synapses. All of these parts work genuinely in parallel, all working together at the same time to produce results.…
I exaggerate somewhat. You could interact with databases and computers (if you can bear the lag and compile times). You could produce a lot of work, and test it in any internal way that you can think of. But you can't do outside world stuff. You can't make reality run faster to keep up with your speedy brain.
Can someone throw some light on this Dwarkesh character? He landed a Zucc podcast pretty early on... how connected is he? Is he an industry plant?
He spends weeks reading everything by his guests prior to the interview, asks excellent questions, pushes back, etc.
He certainly has blind spots and biases just like anyone else. For example, he is very AI scale-pilled. However, he will have people like today’s guests on which contradict his biases. This is something a host like Lex could never do apparently.
Dwarkesh is up there with Sean Carrol’s podcast as the most interesting and most intellectually honest in my view.
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> Isn’t just the ability to preform a task. Right. In this case I'd say it's the ability to interpret data and use it to succeed at whatever goals it has Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal Ro…
> Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal If it’s limited to achieving goals it’s not AGI. Real time personal goal setting based on human equivalent emotions is an “intellectual task.” One of many…
I think this is the most likely first step of what would happen seeing as we're pushing for it to be created to solve real world problems
I could be wrong but AGI maybe a cold fusion or flying cars boondoggle: chasing a dream that no one needs, costs too much, or is best left unrealized.
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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…
for others following along: the comment history is mostly talking about how software engineering is dead because AI is real this time with a few diversions to fixate on how overpriced university pedigrees are.
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…
> And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. A lot of things that humans believed were true due to their brief experience on this planet ended up being false: earth is the center of the universe, heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, time ticked the same everywhere, species are fixed and unchanging. So what your brief experience on this planet makes you believe has no bearing o…
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> And from my brief experience on this planet I don't believe that premise. A lot of things that humans believed were true due to their brief experience on this planet ended up being false: earth is the center of the universe, heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, time ticked the same everywhere, species are fixed and unchanging. So what your brief experience on this planet makes you believe has no bearing o…
What is the distance from the Earth to the center of the universe?
The distance to that beginning in time is approx 13 billion years. There is no approximation of distance to the beginning because the space is created at that point and continues to be created.
Imagine the Earth being on the surface of a sphere and so asking what is the center of the surface of a sphere? The sphere has a center but on the surface there is no center.
At least this is my understanding of how to approach these kind of questions.
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…