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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#121

Post by bulbar »

hackyhacky wrote: post #117
webdoodle wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also took years for the Internet to be usable by most folks. It was hard, expensive and unpractical for decades. Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.

Allow me to clarify: I'm not wishing for change. I am an AI pessimist. I think our society is not prepared to deal with what's about to happen. You're right: AI is the key to the enshitification of everything , most of all trust.

Governments and companies have been pushing for identity management that connects your real life identity with your digital one for quite some time. With AI I believe that's not only a bad thing, maybe unavoidable now.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#122

Post by skeptic_ai »

hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Many devs don’t write code anymore. Can really deliver a lot more per dev.

Many people slowly losing jobs and can’t find new ones. You’ll see effects in a few years

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#123

Post by fritzo »

causal wrote: post #59
xutopia wrote: post #52

I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online. The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.

I fear that AI will be intelligent enough to negate human general intelligence before it is itself generally intelligent.

It's so attention needy, and it's transforming our culture

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#124

Post by reactordev »

skeptic_ai wrote: post #122
hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Many devs don’t write code anymore. Can really deliver a lot more per dev. Many people slowly losing jobs and can’t find new ones. You’ll see effects in a few years

Deliver a lot more tech debt

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#125

Post by themafia »

hackyhacky wrote: post #90
hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life. The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

> It took decades

It took one September. Then as soon as you could take payments on the internet the rest was inevitable and in _clear_ demand. People got on long waiting lists just to get the technology in their homes.

> no new advances in technology

The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct. There was two corresponding exponential processes that vastly changed the available rate of adoption. This wasn't at all like cars being introduced into society. This was a monumental shift.

I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist. In fact the inverse is true. They're not reducing power budgets fast enough to even imagine that they're anywhere near AGI, and even if they were, that they'd ever be able to sustainably power it.

> the current state is upending jobs

The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet because it was so disruptive to their business model. This is quite the opposite. We don't have a labor crisis, we have a retention crisis, because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor. We can wax on and off about technology, and perceptrons, and training techniques, or power budgets, but this fundamental fact seems the hardest to ignore.

If they're wrong this all collapses. If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#126

Post by rndphs »

hunterpayne wrote: post #66
Lerc wrote: post #34

I don't really understand the argument that AGI cannot be achieved just by scaling current methods. I too believe that (for any sane level of scaling anyway), but this-year's LLMs are not using entirely last-year's methods. And they, in turn, are using methods that weren't used the year before. It seems like a prediction like "Bob won't become a formula one driver in a minivan". It's true, but not very interesting. I…

Then you don't understand Machine Learning in any real way. Literally the 3rd or 4th thing you learn about ML is that for any given problem, there is an ideal model size. Just making the model bigger doesn't work because of something called the curse of dimensionality. This is something we have discovered about every single problem and type of learning algorithm used in ML. For LLMs, we probably moved past the ideal…

> Literally the 3rd or 4th thing you learn about ML is that for any given problem, there is an ideal model size.

From my understanding this is now outdated. The deep double descent research showed that although past a certain point performance drops as you increase model size, if you keep increasing it there is another threshold where it paradoxically starts improving again. From that point onwards increasing the parameter count only further improves performance.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#127

Post by fritzo »

nickjj wrote: post #13

I'm certainly not holding my breath. In a handful of prompts I got the paid version of ChatGPT to say it's possible for dogs to lay eggs under the right circumstances.

I've long been terrified of the existence of adversarial prompts that can get me to say anything, that dogs can lay eggs, that there are five lights, that here's my bank info

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#128

Post by mikestew »

randallsquared wrote: post #119

> Consider the sentence "Mary held a ball." It's weird that this sentence has two distinct meanings and the author never considers the second or points it out. Maybe Mary is holding a ball for her society friends.

“We’ve got the biggest balls of them all.”

https://genius.com/Ac-dc-big-balls-lyrics

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#129

Post by BatteryMountain »

helterskelter wrote: post #109

I don't know about AGI but I got bored and ran my plans for a new garage by Opus 4.6 and it was giving me some really surprising responses that have changed my plans a little. At the same time, it was also making some nonsense suggestions that no person would realistically make. When I prompted it for something in another chat which required genuine creativity, it fell flat on its face. I dunno, mixed bag. Value is p…

I've used it recently to flesh out a fully fledged business plan, pricing models, capacity planning & logistics for a 10 year period for a transport company (daily bus route). I already had most of it in my mind and on spreadsheets already (was an old plan that I wanted to revive), but seeing it figure out all the smaller details that would make or break it was amazing! I think MBA's should be worried as it did some things more comprehensive than an MBA would have done. It was like a had an MBA + Actuarial Scientist + Statistics + Domain Expert + HR/Accounting all in one. And the plan was put into a .md file that has enough structure to flesh out a backend and an app.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#130

Post by mjevans »

lysace wrote: post #28
jonas21 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a human brain operates on 12 to 25 watts Yeah, but a human brain without the human attached to it is pretty useless. In the US, it averages out to around 2 kW per person for residential energy usage, or 9 kW if you include transportation and other primary energy usage too.

Fair. Maybe the Matrix (1999) with the human battery farms were on to something. :)

I suspected it wasn't just battery farms, but more like what you see in less mass market scifi where the humans are used for more than just batteries... they'd also be some storage and processing for the system (and no longer humans).

However at that point I don't see the value of retaining the human form. It's for a story obviously, but a not-human computational device can still be made out of carbon processing units rather than silicon or semiconductors generally.

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