Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately • Hacker News Board

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#121

Post by returnInfinity » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #12

rvz wrote: post #9

Are we finally realizing that the term "AGI" is not only hijacked to become meaningless, but achieving it has always been nothing but a complete scam as I was saying before? [0] If you were in a "pioneering" AI lab that claims to be in the lead in achieving "AGI", why move to another lab that is behind other than offering $10M a year. Snap out of the "AGI" BS. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438154

We know they hijacked AGI the same way they hijacked AI some years ago.

Soon they will hijack ASI, then we will need a new word again.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#122

Post by leptons » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #93

Findecanor wrote: post #40

AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one? So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.

The women of the world are creating millions of new intelligence beings every day. I'm really not sure what having one made of metal is going to get us. Right now the AGI tech bros seem to me to be subscribed to some new weird religion. They take it on faith that some super intelligence is going to solve the world problems. We already have some really high IQ people today, and I don't see them doing much better than…

Exactly.. even if we had an AGI superintelligence, and it came up with a solution to global warming, we'd still have right-wingnuts that stands in the way of any kind of progress. And the story is practically the same for every other problem it could solve - people are still the problem.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#123

Post by sdenton4 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #46

Game_Ender wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implicit take is that if your company hits AGI your equity package will do something like 10x-100x even if the company is already big. The only other way to do that is join a startup early enough to ride its growth wave. Another way to say it is that people think it’s much more likely for each decent LLM startup grow really strongly first several years then plateau vs. then for their current established p…

A catch here is that individual workers may have priorities which are altered due to the strong natural preference for assuring financial independence. Even if you were a hot AI researcher who felt (and this is just a hypothetical) that your company was the clear industry leader and had, say, a 75% chance of soon achieving something AGI-adjacent and enabling massive productivity gains, you might still (and quite reas…

Additionally, if you've already got vested stock in Company A from your time working there, jumping ship to Company B (with higher pay and a stock package) is actually a diversification. You can win whichever ship pulls in first.

The 'no one jumps ship if agi is close' assumption is really weak, and seemingly completely unsupported in TFA...

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#124

Post by sdenton4 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #118

leoc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A catch here is that individual workers may have priorities which are altered due to the strong natural preference for assuring financial independence. Even if you were a hot AI researcher who felt (and this is just a hypothetical) that your company was the clear industry leader and had, say, a 75% chance of soon achieving something AGI-adjacent and enabling massive productivity gains, you might still (and quite reas…

You're right, but the narrative out of these companies directly refutes this position. They're explicitly saying that 1. AGI changes everything, 2. It's just around the corner, 3. They're completely dedicated to achieving it; nothing is more important. Then they leave for more money.

Don't conflate labor's perspective with capital's started position... The companies aren't leaving the companies, the workers are leaving the companies.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#125

Post by akomtu » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

The primary use case for AI-in-the-box is a superhuman CEO that sees everything and makes no mistakes. As an investor you can be sure that your money are multiplying at the highest rate possible. However as a self-serving investor you also want your CEO to side-step any laws and ethics that stand in your way, unless ignoring those laws will bring more trouble than profit. All that while maintaining a facade of selfless philanthropist for the public. For a reasonable price, your AI CEO will be fine-tuned to serve your goals perfectly.

Remember that fine-tuning a well-behaved AI to do something as simple as writing malware in C++ makes widespread changes in the AI and turns it into a monstrosity. There was an HN post about this recently: fine-tuning an aligned model produces broadly misaligned results. So what do you think will happen when our AI CEO gets fine-tuned to prioritize shareholder interests over public interests?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#126

Post by convolvatron » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:26 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #90

matusp wrote: post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

The people who make the money in gold rushes sold shovels, not mined the gold. Sure some random people found gold and made a lot of money, but many others didn't strike it rich. As such even if there is a lot of money AI will make, it can still be the right decision to sell tools to others who will figure out how to use it. And of course if it turns out another pointless fad with no real value you still make money. (…

its so good that people seem to automatically exclude the middle. its either the arrival of the singularity or complete fakery. I think you've expressed the most likely outcome by far - that there will be some really interesting tools and use cases, and some things will be changed forever - but very unlikely that _everything_ will

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#127

Post by TrackerFF » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

My question is this - once you achieve AGI, what moat do you have, purely on the scientific part? Other than making the AGI even more intelligent.

I see a lot of talk that the first company that achieves AGI, will also achieve market dominance. All other players will crumble. But surely when someone achieves AGI, their competitors will in all likelihood be following closely after. And once those achieve AGI, academia will follow.

Point is, at some point AGI itself will become available the everyone. The only things that will be out of reach for most, is compute - and probably other expensive things on the infrastructure part.

Current AI funding seems to revolve around some sort of winner-take-all scenario. Just keep throwing incredible amounts of money at it, and hope that you've picked the winner. I'm just wondering what the outcome will be if this thesis turns out wrong.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#128

Post by timy2shoes » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #77

pu_pe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's as simple as that. Chatbots can be used to harvest data, and sales are still important before and after you achieve AGI.

Besides, there is Sutskever's SSI which is avoiding customers.

Of course they are. Why would you want revenue? If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#129

Post by never_inline » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

callc wrote: post #92

danielbln wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is AGI, not ASI though. General intelligence doesn't mean sapience, sentience or consciousness, it just means general capabilities across the board at the level of or surpassing human ability. ASI is a whole different beast.

This sounds very close to the “It’s ok to abuse and kill animals (for meat), they’re not sentient”

How many microorganisms and pests have you deprived of livelihood? Why stop at animals?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#130

Post by fragmede » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #127

My question is this - once you achieve AGI, what moat do you have, purely on the scientific part? Other than making the AGI even more intelligent. I see a lot of talk that the first company that achieves AGI, will also achieve market dominance. All other players will crumble. But surely when someone achieves AGI, their competitors will in all likelihood be following closely after. And once those achieve AGI, academia…

Same thing that happened to pets.com or webvan.com and the rest of the graveyard of failed companies. A bunch of investors lose money, a bunch of market consolidation, employees get dilluted to worthlessness, chapter 7, chapter 11. The free ride of today's equivalent of $1 Ubers will end. A glut of previously very expensive hardware for cheap on eBay (though I doubt this last point will happen since AGI is likely to be compute intensive).

It's not going to be fun or easy, but as far as the financials go, we were there in 2001.

The question is assuming we do get AGI, what the ramifications of that will be. Instead of hiring employees, a business can spin up employees (and down) like a tech company can spin up EC2 instances. Great for employers, terrible for employees.

That's a big "if" though.