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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

#151

Post by hunterpayne »

rndphs wrote: post #126
hunterpayne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 From my understanding this is now outdated.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 par…

That isn't what that research says at all. What that research says is that running the same training data through multiple times improves training. There is still an ideal model size though, it is just impacted by the total volume of training data.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#152

Post by fourthrigbt »

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…

Doesn’t sound like you paid all that much attention when learning ML. The curse of dimensionality doesn’t say that every problem has some ideal model size, it says that the amount of data needed to train scales with the size of the feature space. So if you take an LLM, you can make the network much larger but if you don’t increase the size of the input token vocabulary you aren’t even subject to the curse of dimensionality. Beyond that, there’s a principle in ML theory that says larger models are almost always better because the number of params in the model is the dimensionality of the space in which you’re running gradient descent and with every added dimension, local optima become rarer.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#153

Post by dainiusse »

reactordev wrote: post #124
skeptic_ai wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That tech debt will be cleaned up with a model in 2 years. Not that human don't make tech debt.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#154

Post by wavemode »

NiloCK wrote: post #61

> The transformer architectures powering current LLMs are strictly feed-forward. This is true in a specific contextual sense (each token that an LLM produces is from a feed-forward pass). But untrue for more than a year with reasoning models, who feed their produced tokens back as inputs, and whose tuning effectively rewards it for doing this skillfully. Heck, it was untrue before that as well, any time an LLM respon…

> expert opinions can be the slowest to update on the news that their specific domain may have, in hindsight, have been the wrong horse. It's the quote about it being difficult to believe something that your income requires to be false, but instead of income it can be your whole legacy or self concept

Not sure I follow. Are you saying that AI researchers would be out of a job if scaling up transformers leads to AGI? How? Or am I misunderstanding your point.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#155

Post by hackyhacky »

themafia wrote: post #125
hackyhacky wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It took one September.

It's the classic "slowly, then suddenly" paradigm. It took decades to get to that one September. Then years more before we all had internet in our pocket.

> The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct.

Can you explain how Moore's law is relevant to the rise of the internet? People didn't start buying couches online because their home computer lacked sufficient compute power.

> I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist.

LLMs have seen enormous growth in power over the last 3 years. Nothing else comes close. I think they'll continue to get better, but critically: even if LLMs stay exactly as powerful as they are today, it's enough to disrupt society. IMHO we're already at AGI.

> The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet

Some did, some didn't. As in any cultural shift, there were winners and losers. In this shift, too, there will be winner and losers. The panicked spending on data centers right now is a symptom of the desire to be on the right side of that.

> because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor.

Companies have never wanted to pay fair value for labor. That's a fundamental attribute of companies, arising as a consequence of the system of incentives provided in capitalism. In the past, there have been opportunities for labor to fight back: government regulation, unions. This time that won't help.

> If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.

Why would you think that anyone would want you to write prompts?

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#156

Post by hi_hi »

znnajdla wrote: post #131
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…

I've been writing code for 20 years. AI has completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business. Nothing is the same anymore, and I feel I will be saying that again by the end of 2026. My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x *compounding monthly*.

Going from punch cards to terminals also "completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business"

Firefox introducing their dev debugger many years ago "completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business"

You get the idea. Yes, the day to day job of software engineering has changed. The world at large cares not one jot.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#157

Post by alex43578 »

andsoitis wrote: post #74
alex43578 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in small ways and very recently, evolutionarily speaking, were those things rewarded by natural selection (and even that has stopped nowadays).

I'm not sure that's a good way to think about it. Evolution transcends hard lines in the temporal sand that "separate species". It also took billions of years of evolution to get to humans. so, humans, on the grander scale of life, is also just a very recent development.

So you're agreeing with me? I was pointing out how evolution certainly didn't push us purposefully to any of those inventions/discoveries.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#158

Post by hi_hi »

pennomi wrote: post #145
UncleMeat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. So software engineers are vastly more efficient. Good I guess. "Revolutionize the entire world such that we rethink society down to its very basics like money and ownership" doesn't follow from that.

Man you guys are impatient. It takes decades even for earth shattering technologies to mature and take root.

Damn right I'm impatient. My eye starts twitching when a web page takes more than 2 seconds to load :-)

In the meantime, I've had to continuously hear talk about AI, both in real life (like at the local pub) AND virtually (tv/radio/news/whatever) and how it's going to change the world in unimaginable ways for the last...2/3 years. Billions upon billions of dollars are being spent. The only tangible thing we have to show is software development, and some other fairly niche jobs, have changed _a bit_.

So yeah, excuse my impatience for the bubble to burst, I can stop having to hear about this shit every day, and I can go about my job using the new tools we have been gifted, while still doing all the other jobs that sadly do not benefit in any similar way.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#160

Post by charcircuit »

igor47 wrote: post #148
charcircuit wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get experience without an actual job.

Can I rephrase this as "you can get experience without any experience"? Certainly, there's stuff you can learn that's adjacent to doing the thing; that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees. But the lack of doing the thing is what makes them juniors.

>that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees

A CS degree is going to give you much less experience than building projects and businesses yourself.

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