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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#61

Post by killerstorm »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #39
killerstorm wrote: post #32

On 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’m not sure you understand what AGI is given the citations you’ve provided.

> "While AlphaEvolve is currently being applied across math and computing, its *general* nature means it can be applied to any problem whose solution can be described as an algorithm, and automatically verified. We believe AlphaEvolve could be transformative across many more areas such as material science, drug discovery, sustainability and wider technological and business applications."

Is that not general enough for you? or not intelligent?

Do you imagine AGI as a robot and not as datacenter solving all kinds of problems?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#62

Post by fmbb »

Aransentin wrote: post #50
lynndotpy wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Depends on what the datacenters are used for.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#63

Post by mellosouls »

While I agree that the current LLM-based approaches won't get us to (sentient) AGI, I think this article is missing a key point: the entire modern AI revolution (while founded on research work esp coming from Google) was fired up by the AGI dreamers at OpenAI with GPT3+ then ChatGPT etc. They were first in industry; they created the field.

Even if you don't expect them to get us over the final line, you should give them credit for that.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#64

Post by miltonlost »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #13

> And this is all fine, because they’re going to make AGI and the expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value). This is a strawman. The big AI n…

That's still Pascal's Wager but with different (better) probabilities.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#65

Post by LPisGood »

Aransentin wrote: post #50
lynndotpy wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

What does it mean to “use” water? In agriculture and in data centers my understanding is that water will go back to the sky and then rain down again. It’s not gone, so at most we’re losing the energy cost to process that water.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#66

Post by simonw »

idiotsecant wrote: post #56
simonw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Which is why the comparison in the amount of water usage matters.

Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture.

I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#67

Post by amarcheschi »

heymijo wrote: post #47
paulryanrogers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean datacenters should get a pass. Golf and datacenters should have to pay for their externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid parts of the country then that's better than bankrupting the public and the environment.

You're not wrong. My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss. And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading. Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the a…

Not only electricity, air pollution around some datacenters too

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#68

Post by kajika91 »

Aransentin wrote: post #50
lynndotpy wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

I'll take the almonds any day.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#69

Post by alyxya »

> Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value

I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding multiplier on productivity, and this trend seems likely to continue at least in the near future considering how much better coding models are at boosting productivity now compared to last year.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#70

Post by AndrewKemendo »

fny wrote: post #38
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip 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…

I'm personally excited for when the AGI-nauts start trotting out figures like... > An H100 on low-carbon grid is only about 1–2% of one US person’s total daily footprint! The real culprit is humans after all.

Humans have been measuring between human only vs augmented labor for literal centuries.

Frederick Taylor literally invented the process you describe in his “principles of scientific management”

This is the entire focus of the Toyota automation model.

The consistent empirical pattern is:

Machine-only systems outperform humans on narrow, formalizable tasks.

Human-machine hybrid systems outperform both on robustness, yieldjng higher success probability

Good enough?

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