Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

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The other few things possible in next few years for past few years are:

1. Fusion 2. Self driving cars. 3. Ubiquitous, generally available and stable 8192 bit quantum computers. 4. High energy density grid scale batteries.

Just few more "this maybe the... what could revolutionize..." articles away.

What we forget is that it is in these people's business interest (executives making such statements) to state the exaggerated version of a future which drives the investors of all levels to allocate funds under FOMO which pumps up share price which is the end goal anyway, through a breakthrough or without.

EDIT: Merged another comment to keep all in one place.

>we just see a cooling off of other endeavors as LLM becomes a known in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and it’s abilities reach a natural limit which is still general useful.

This is my prediction

If the training set is just the internet, it will be not much different than someone who spends all their lives in their room in front of their computer.

I don't know. Having interacted with LLMs at different levels, they resemble a very sophisticated, alien intelligence trying to pretend to be human. It's like me pretending to be a dog; even if I were to emulate a dog perfectly, I wouldn't have the same emotions; I'd be pretending.

We have no idea what emotions, motivations, behaviors, or goals AIs have, will have, or if they'll have something as of yet unconvinced that's not emotions or motivations, but just alien.

We evolved to self-preserve and breed. Modern AIs evolve to pretend to write human text. It's not clear there is any intention to survive, reproduce, or turn the surface of the earth into a computing substrate.

There's a million different dangers -- and I suspect the real ones are ones we haven't conceived of. Whether they'll materialize or how depends on on how we evolve them, and I expect we can't predict it.

To me, much more likely than earth-as-a-computing-substrate is humans-as-brainwashed-consumers. Market forces will push for AIs to write text which draws eyeballs. Those models won't care about truth, ethics, or much of anything other than getting you addicted to reading what they write (or watching what they create). At that point, we can destroy ourselves just fine.

But even more likely is something no one has thought of.

Just a point with #4.

Grid scale batteries don’t need to be “high energy density” like EVs. I would argue that cost is probably the biggest factor, and it’s already across the cost/benefit barrier in many markets.