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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

#221

Post by Jensson »

killerstorm wrote: post #61
VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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

AGI means it can replace basically all human white collar work, alpha evolve can't do that while average humans can. White collar work is mostly done by average humans after all, if average humans can learn that then so should an AGI.

An easier test is that the AGI must be able to beat most computer games without being trained on those games, average humans can beat most computer games without anyone telling them how to do it, they play and learn until they beat it 40 hours later.

AGI was always defined as an AI that could do what typical humans can do, like learn a new domain to become a professional or play and beat most video games etc. If the AI can't study to become a professional then its not as smart or general as an average human, so unless it can replace most professionals its not an AGI because you can train a human of average intelligence to become a professional in most domains.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#222

Post by tomwphillips »

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…

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!).

I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.

If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.

It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.

I really recommend the book.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#223

Post by ACCount37 »

red75prime wrote: post #153
lordleft wrote: post #59

The 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.

Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations? Those situations are close in other aspects too: we have a physical system (the sun, the brain), whose functionality we try to replicate technologically.

You don't even have to go as far as fusion reactors. Nuclear bombs are real, and we know they work.

But surely, anyone who's talking about atomic weapons must be invoking religious imagery and the old myths of divine retribution! They can't be talking about an actual technology capable of vaporizing cities and burning people into the walls as shadows - what a ridiculous, impossible notion would that be! "World War 3" is just a good old end-of-the-world myth, the kind of myth that exists in many religions, but given a new coat of paint.

And Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, now retold for the new age. You have to be a doomsday cultist to believe that something like this could actually happen!

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#224

Post by wat10000 »

rekrsiv wrote: post #166
IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure. Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achie…

Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as sophisticated as real ones."

I do think we probably need a new hardware approach to get to the human level, but it does seem like it will happen in a relative blink of an eye compared to how long the brain took.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#225

Post by belter »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #200
belter wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage... They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.

This is not a distinction that your second link (that has the 628M number) was making either > water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in their water use calculations

The factual soundness of my argument is independent of the report quality :-) the report influences comprehension, not correctness...

The fact data centers are already having a major impact on the public water supply systems is known, by the decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you care to investigate...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage

"...in some regions where data centers are concentrated—and especially in regions already facing shortages—the strain on local water systems can be significant. Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.

In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers have reportedly requested more water per day than the entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-efficient cooling systems, invest in costly infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing on residents...."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#226

Post by IncreasePosts »

abathur wrote: post #174
simonw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from that article: > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture. USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year. 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage p…

Agriculture feeds people, Simon. It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential. If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without. The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were us…

Agriculture is generally essential but that doesn't mean that any specific thing done in the name of agriculture is essential.

If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, we would use a lot less water in agriculture and probably also live longer in general

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#227

Post by hitarpetar »

mofeien wrote: post #28

> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). > LLMs-as-AGI fail on all three fronts. The computational profligacy of LLMs-as-AGI is dissatisfying, and the exploitation of data workers and the environment unacceptable. It's a bit unsatisfying how the last paragraph only argues…

do you find a 40-60% failure rate fits your definition of correctness? I don't think they really needed to spell this failure out...

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/why-generic-llm-agents-fall-...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#228

Post by tomwphillips »

geerlingguy wrote: post #8

I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor. Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done. There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved. And the thing that made Whi…

Author here. Indeed - it would be just as fantastical to deny there has been no value from deep learning, transformers, etc.

Yesterday I heard Cory Doctorow talk about a bunch of pro bono lawyers using LLMs to mine paperwork and help exonerate innocent people. Also a big win.

There's good stuff - engineering - that can be done with the underlying tech without the hyperscaling.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#229

Post by dripdry45 »

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…

Yeah, but their past history should be taken into account here. Altman and musk are just confidence men. what they’ve touched in the past has turned to crap, and it’s only been the people around them that have made anything work despite those people mucking it up.

trust past history as an indicator of future action. In this case, sure some neat stuff will come out of it. But it won’t be nearly what these people say it is. They are huffing each other’s farts.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#230

Post by LevGoldstein »

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?

People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

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