AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 6:48 AM UTC

throwaway150 wrote: post #227

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by potamic » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 6:52 AM UTC

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…

The universe we know is fundamentally probabilistic, so by extension everything including stars, planets and computers are inherently non-deterministic. But confining our discussion outside of quantum effects and absolute determinism, we do not have a reason to believe that the mind should be anything but deterministic, scientifically at least.

We understand the building blocks of the brain pretty well. We know the structure and composition of neurons, we know how they are connected, what chemicals flow through them and how all these chemicals interact, and how that interaction translates to signal propagation. In fact, the neural networks we use in computing are loosely modelled on biological neurons. Both models are essentially comprised of interconnected units where each unit has weights to convert its incoming signals to outgoing signals. The predominant difference is in how these units adjust their weights, where computational models use back propagation and gradient descent, biological models use timing information from voltage changes.

But just because we understand the science of something perfectly well, doesn't mean we can precisely predict how something will work. Biological networks are very, very complex systems comprising of billions of neurons with trillions of connections acting on input that can vary in immeasurable number of ways. It's like predicting earthquakes. Even though we understand the science behind plate tectonics, to precisely predict an earthquake we need to map the properties of every inch of continental plates which is an impossible task. But doesn't mean we can't use the same scientific building blocks to build simulations of earthquakes which behave like any real earthquake would behave. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then what is a duck?

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

#313

Post by uh_uh » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote: post #310

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…

I guarantee computers are better at generating random numbers than humans lol

Not only that but LLMs unsurprisingly make similar distributional mistakes as humans do when asked to generate random numbers.

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

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Post by gloosx » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

AstroBen wrote: post #284

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…

> It is science fiction to think that a system like a computer can behave at all like a brain It is science fiction to think that a plane could act at all like a bird. Although... it doesn't need to in order to fly Intelligence doesn't mean we need to recreate the brain in a computer system. Sentience, maybe. General intelligence no

BTW Planes are fully inspired by birds and they mimic the core principles of the bird flight.

Mechanically it's different since humans are not such advanced mechanics as nature, but of course comparing the whole brain function to a simple flight is a bit silly

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

#315

Post by gloosx » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

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?

1. Computers cannot self-rewire like neurons, which means human can pretty much adapt for doing any specific mental task (an "unknown", new task) without explicit retraining, which current computers need to learn something new

2. Computers can't do continuous and unsupervised learning, which means computers require structured input, labeled data, and predefined objectives to learn anything. Humans learn passively all the time just by existing in the environment

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

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Post by pyfon » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:28 AM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #272

Balgair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic . They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for…

A mirage is not an oasis no matter even if someone knows someone who thinks it is.

Card tricks seem magical too.

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

#317

Post by pyfon » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:33 AM UTC

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote: post #310

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…

I guarantee computers are better at generating random numbers than humans lol

Computers are better at hashing entropy.

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

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Post by YetAnotherNick » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

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 would even go 1 order of magnitude further in both direction. 1-10000 years.

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

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Post by Tuna-Fish » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 8:26 AM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #303

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That's what I was trying to express, though: if "the wall clock runs slower", that's less useful than it sounds, because all you have to interact with is yourself. 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…

You can interact with yourself, and everyone else like you.

There is a lot of important work where humans thinking about things is the bottleneck.

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

#320

Post by imtringued » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #287

Balgair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think AGI has to do more than pass a Turning test by someone who wants to be fooled.

AGI includes continual learning and recombination of knowledge to derive novel insights. LLMs aren't there yet.

They are pretty good at muscle memory style intelligence though.