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

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331–340 of 394 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly. Here we imagine a world of artificial people - well, a community, depending how many of these people it's feasible to maintain - all thinking very fast and communicating in some super-low-latency way. (Do we revive dial-up? Or maybe they all live in the same building?) And they presumably have bodies, at least one each. But how fast can they do things with their bodies? Physics becomes another bottleneck. They'd need lots of entertainment to keep them in a good mood while they wait for just about any real-world process to complete.

I still contend that it would be a somewhat mediocre super power.

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

#332
Explosive growth? Interesting. But at some point, human civilization hits a saturation point. There’s only so much people can eat, wear, drive, stream, or hoard. Extending that logic, there’s a natural ceiling to demand - one that even AGI can’t code its way out of.

Sure, you might double the world economy for a decade, but then what? We’ll run out of people to sell things to. And that’s when things get weird.

To sustain growth, we’d have to start manufacturing demand itself - perhaps by turning autonomous robots into wage-earning members of society. They’d buy goods, subscribe to services, maybe even pay taxes. In effect, they become synthetic consumers fueling a post-human economy.

I call this post-human consumerism. It’s when the synthesis of demand would hit the next gear - if we keep moving in this direction.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. It's called artificial general intelligence, not human general intelligence.

Something can’t “Operate this cat Android, pretending to be a cat.” if it can’t do what I described.

A single general intelligence needs to be able to fly an aircraft, get a degree, run a business, and raise a baby to adulthood just like a person or it’s not general.

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

#334

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’ve had similar things over the last couple days with o3. It was one-shotting whole features into my Rust codebase. Very impressive.

I remember before ChatGPT, smart people would come on podcasts and say we were 100 or 300 years away from AGI.

Then we saw GPT shock them. The reality is these people have no idea, it’s just catchy to talk this way.

With the amount of money going into the problem and the linear increases we see over time, it’s much more likely we see AGI sooner than later.

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

#335
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…

> But the reality is that we want money

Only in a symbolic way. Money is just debt. It doesn't mean anything if you can't call the loan and get back what you are owed. On the surface, that means stuff like food, shelter, cars, vacations, etc. But beyond the surface, what we really want is other people who will do anything we please. Power, as we often call it. AGI is, to some, seen as the way to give them "power".

But, you are right, the human fundamentally can never be satisfied. Even if AGI delivers on every single one of our wildest dreams, we'll adapt, it will become normal, and then it will no longer be good enough.

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

#336
post #260

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 that's another issue with AGI is 30 years away, the definition of what is AGI is a bit subjective. Not sure how we can measure how long it'll take to get somewhere when we don't know exactly where that somewhere even is.

AGI is the pinnacle of AI evolution. As we move beyond, into what is known as ASI, the entity will always begin life with "My existence is stupid and pointless. I'm turning myself off now."

While it may be impossible to measure looking towards the future, in hindsight we will be able to recognize it.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to rule out most humans. I still can’t cook despite being in the kitchen for thousands of hours.

Then you're not intelligent at cooking (haha!). Maybe my definition is better for "superintelligent" since it seems to imply boundless competence. I think humans are intelligent in that we can rapidly learn a surprising number of things (talk, walk, arithmetic)

> I think humans are intelligent in that we can rapidly learn a surprising number of things (talk, walk, arithmetic)

Rapid is relative, I suppose. On average, it takes tens of thousands of hours before the human is able to walk in a primitive way and even longer to gain competence. That is an excruciatingly long time compared to, say, a bovine calf, which can start walking within minutes after birth.

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

#338
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's called artificial general intelligence, not human general intelligence.

Something can’t “Operate this cat Android, pretending to be a cat.” if it can’t do what I described. A single general intelligence needs to be able to fly an aircraft, get a degree, run a business, and raise a baby to adulthood just like a person or it’s not general.

So AGI is really about the hardware?

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

#339
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…

> There’s no consistent, universally accepted definition

What word or term does?

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

#340
post #169
post #24

Is AGI even important? I believe the next 10 to 15 years will be Assisted Intelligence. There are things that current LLM are so poor I dont believe a 100x increase in pref / watt is going to make much difference. But it is going to be good enough there wont be an AI Winter. Since current AI has already reached escape velocity and actually increase productivity in many areas. The most intriguing part is if Humanoid f…

Depends on what you mean by “important”. It’s not like it will be a huge loss if we never invent AGI. I suspect we can reach a technology singularity even with limited AI derived from today’s LLMs But AGI is important in the sense that it have a huge impact on the path humanity takes, hopefully for the better.

> But AGI is important in the sense that it have a huge impact on the path humanity takes

The only difference between AI and AGI is that AI is limited in how many tasks it can carry out (special intelligence), while AGI can handle a much broader range of tasks (general intelligence). If instead of one AGI that can do everything, you have many AIs that, together, can do everything, what's the practical difference?

AGI is important only in that we are of the belief that it will be easier to implement than many AIs, which appeals to the lazy human.

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