AGI will happen, but we need to start reverse engineering the brain. IMHO LeCun and Hawkins have it right, even though the results are still pretty non-existent.
In the meantime, 100% agree, it's complete fantastical nonsense.
AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#52What is funny is that when asked, the current LLMs/AIs, do not believe in an AGI. Here are the some of readings you can do about the AGI fantasy:
- Gödel-style incompleteness and the “stability paradox”
- Wolfram's principle - Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE)
One of the red flags is human intelligence/brain itself. We have way more neurons than we are currently using. The limit to intelligence might very possibly be mathematical and adding neurons/transistors will not result in incremental intelligence.
The current LLMs will prove useful but since the models are out there, if this is a maxima, the ROI will be exactly 0.
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of farming for survival, but not for golf...
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#54Go read Kurzweil or Bostrom or Shannon or von neumman or minsky or etc… and you’ll realize how little you have thought of any of these problems/issues and there are literally millions of words spilled already decades before your “new concerns.” The alignment problem book predates GPT2 so give me a break.
People have been shitting on AGI since the term was invented by Ben Goertzel.
Anyone (like me) who has been around AGI longer than a few years is going to continue to keep our heads down and keep working. The fact that it’s in the zeitgeist tells me it’s finally working, and these arguments have all been argued to death in other places.
Yet we’re making regular progress towards it no matter what you want to think or believe
The measurable reality of machine dominance in actuation of physical labor is accelerating unabated.
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at…
Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.
For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility?
And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people - than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
I mean... Food is pretty important ...
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#57Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…
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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#58On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering: * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864 * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of scientific software So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results or a sob story abou…
I believe AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve etc are _not_ looking to get to AGI. The whole article is a case against AGI chasing, not ML or LLM overall.
AlphaEvolve is a general system which works in many domains. How is that not a step towards general intelligence?
And it is effectively a loop around LLM.
But my point is that we have evidence that Demis Hassabis knows his shit. Just doubting him on a general vibe is not smart
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#59The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.
Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
#60We should do things because they are hard, not because they are cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this stuff on a phone and it isn't terrible.
I think the climate impact of data centers is way overstated relative to the ginormous amounts of emissions from other sources. Yes it's not pretty but it's a fairly minor problem compared to people buying SUVs and burning their way through millions of tons of fuel per day to get their asses to work and back. Just a simple example. There are plenty.
Data centers running on cheap clean power is entirely possible; and probably a lot cheaper long term. Kind of an obvious cost optimization to do. I'd prefer that to be sooner rather than later but it's nowhere near the highest priority thing to focus on when it comes to doing stuff about emissions.