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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

#141

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

killerstorm wrote: post #58
hagbarth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AlphaEvolve is a system for evolving symbolic computer programs.

Not everything that DeepMind works on (such as AlphaGo, AlphaFold) are directly, or even indirectly, part of a push towards AGI. They seem to genuinely want to accelerate scientific research, and for Hassabis personally this seems to be his primary goal, and might have remained his only goal if Google hadn't merged Google Brain with DeepMind and forced more of a product/profit focus.

DeepMind do appear to be defining, and approaching, "AGI" differently that the rest of the pack who are LLM-scaling true believers, but exactly what their vision is for an AGI architecture, at varying timescales, remains to be seen.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#142

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#143

Post by danaris »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14
gizajob wrote: post #5

Elon thinking Demis is the evil supervillain is hilariously backward and a mirror image of the reality.

That one struck me as... weird people on both ends. But this is Musk, who is deep into the Roko's Basilisk idea [0] (in fact, supposedly he and Grimes bonded over that) where AGI is inevitable, AGI will dominate like the Matrix and Skynet, and anyone that didn't work hard to make AGI a reality will be yote in the Torment Nexus. That is, if you don't build the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create T…

...or, depending on your particular version of Roko's Basilisk (in particular, versions that assume AGI will not be achieved in "your" lifetime), it will punish not you, yourself, but a myriad of simulations of you.

Won't someone think of the poor simulations??

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#144

Post by simonw »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #119
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here: > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...] > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added. > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge. That's not cr…

Yes, a 24 acre soybean field uses a lot of water.

And an average US soybean farm has 312 acres (13x larger than 24 acres): http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-and-oil-crops/...

Which means that in 2025 Microsoft's Querétaro sites used 1/13th of a typical US soybean farm's annual amount of water.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#145

Post by hoherd »

Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" and "never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced" in full effect.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#147

Post by red75prime »

Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

> Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end.

There should be papers on fundamental limitations of LLMs then. Any pointers? "A single forward LLM pass has TC0 circuit complexity" isn't exactly it. Modern LLMs use CoT. Anything that uses Gödel's incompleteness theorems proves too much (We don't know whether the brain is capable of hypercomputations. And, most likely, it isn't capable of that).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#148

Post by Lerc »

belter wrote: post #115
simonw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-dat... > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a differe…

> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..." "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption…

What counts as data center water consumption here? There are many ways to arguably come up with a number.

Does it count water use for cooling only, or does it include use for the infrastructure that keeps it running (power generation, maintenance, staff use, etc.)

Is this water evaporated? Or moved from A to B and raised a few degrees.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#149

Post by mikemarsh »

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing thought, how could anyone ever hope to to replicate such things via software in a way that "clicks" to add up to consciousness?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#150

Post by naasking »

danaris wrote: post #121
jtr1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

But if I say "I object to AI because and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona? Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide? This is nothing but whataboutism. People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the…

Because your argument is more persuasive to more people if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms IMO.
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