Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 557 posts

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#201

Post by imgabe »

michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist.

I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their own governments?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#202

Post by Nevermark »

rglover wrote: post #167
michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

> it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too. That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any positi…

> My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology).

Technology can scale up small conveniences into major economic and quality of life wins.

But when it's tolerated, technology also ramps up seemingly small conflicts of interest into economic and society-degrading monsters.

Our legal intolerance for conflicts of interest as business models needs to go up a lot. No amount of strongly worded letters, uncomfortable senate interviews, or unplug-the-system theater, are going to discourage billionaires farming people's behavior, attention and psychology from continuing to farm people's behavior, attention and psychology.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#204

Post by Briannaj »

ryandv wrote: post #87

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…

I could not take the article seriously after reading that.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#205

Post by decimalenough »

blabus wrote: post #161
woah wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.

The progress thus far has been very impressive but the ultimate product the average person imagines as a "self-driving car", one where you can literally devote zero attention and do something else entirely while being driven around (and that handles effectively any edge case), is still quite a ways off.

Waymo is that ultimate product. Obviously it's not everywhere and you can quibble about what "effectively any edge case" means, but it's close to human level at being able to handle whatever the streets of SF throw at it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#206

Post by bgwalter »

Avicebron wrote: post #140
Workaccount2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

And often you are still supervised by sometimes rude security guards who demand the receipts. So you have the worst of all worlds: You pay the supermarket, do the work and are treated like dirt.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#207

Post by crazylogger »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #150

Do you think we will get AI models capable of learning in real time, using a small number of examples similar to humans, in the next few years? This seems like a key barrier to AGI. More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions s…

What you described can be (and is being) achieved by agentic systems like Claude Code. When you give it a task, it knows to learn best practices on the web, find out what other devs are doing in your codebase, and it adapts. And it condenses + persists its learnings in CLAUDE.md files.

Which underlying LLM powers your agent system doesn't matter. In fact you can swap them for any state-of-the-art model you like, or even points Cursor to your self-hosted LLM API.

So in a sense every advanced model today is AGI. We were already past the AGI "singularity" back in 2023 with GPT4. What we're going through now is a maybe-decades-long process of integrating AGI into each corner of society.

It's purely an interface problem. Coding agent products hook the LLM to the real world with [web_search, exec_command, read_file, write_file, delegate_subtask, ...] tools. Other professions may require vastly more complicated interfaces (such as "attend_meeting",) it takes more engineering effort, sure, but 100% those interfaces will be built at some point in the coming years.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#208

Post by decimalenough »

> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.

Yeah dawg imma need a citation for that. Or maybe by "the world" he means "Silicon Valley oligarchs", who certainly have been "entertaining" all sorts of "new policy ideas" over the past half year.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#209

Post by danenania »

ab5tract wrote: post #185
danenania wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't just a "few" in the Bay Area—they've become totally ubiquitous in SF.

That hardly entails that self-driving cars have "arrived". Am I mistaken or is it true that you can't even own and operate one yourself? In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.

I didn’t say they’ve arrived—I was just pointing out the very misleading “few” in your earlier comment. Anyone who spends an hour or two in SF can tell you how wrong that is. They’re literally everywhere.

You’re right that they have a long way to go before being fully mainstream. But thousands of people are using them every day in multiple major cities. That’s a pretty big milestone.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#210

Post by disambiguation »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #128
minimaxir wrote: post #14

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the h…

>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…

>. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases.

>However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs

For programmers I predict a future of a million micro services.

Sprawling has always been an undesirable and unnecessary byproduct of growing code bases, but there's been no easy solution to that. I wonder if LLMs would perform better on a mono repo of many small services than one sprawling monolith.

Post reply on HN