The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines • Hacker News Board

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#161

Post by BoxFour » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #147

BoxFour wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government will come knocking anyway. Dario has even said something along these lines at one point: As the technology matures, it’s very possible the government either nationalizes or semi-nationalizes companies like Anthropic. That doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility if they can’t land on a relationship similar to existing defense contractors like Raytheon, where these kinds of discussions obviously d…

If the government wants a frontier LLM for military purposes then they can just put out a tender. Defense contractors like Anduril will bid on it. The end product might be slightly worse than what Anthropic sells but, as my dad used to say, "close enough for government work".

They don’t even need to do that. Elon is almost certainly pushing Grok as hard as possible right now to them, and it’s not like this administration is especially concerned with running a fair procurement process.

So it’s probably some mix of two things:

1) A punitive “bend the knee us or we’ll destroy you,” which fits their track record.

2) Skepticism that Grok is actually as strong as the benchmarks suggest, which is also a pretty reasonable possibility.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#162

Post by linkregister » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

stratos123 wrote: post #144

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. You cannot get real, actual AGI (the same ability to perform tasks as a human) without a continuous cycle of learning and deep memory, which LLMs cannot do. The best LLM "memory" is a search engine and document summari…

> AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. The statements of what "actual researchers" are you relying upon for your "next 30 years" estimate? How do you reconcile them with the sub-10- or even sub-5-years timelines of other AI researchers, like Daniel Kokota…

I think you are overindexing on the integer value given in the parent post, rather than seeing the essence that LLMs in their current form only excel on tasks they have been specifically trained for.

Karpathy himself has publicly stated that AGI itself is only possible with a new paradigm (that his group is working toward). He claims RHLF and attention models are near the end of their logarithmic curve. The concept of the "self-training AI" is likely impossible without a new kind of model.

We will likely see some classes of human skills completely taken over by LLMs this decade: call centers (already capable in 2026), SWE (the next couple years). Bear in mind the frontier labs have spend many billions on exhaustive training on every aspect of these domains. They are focusing training on the highest value occupations, but the long tail is huge.

It will be interesting to see if this investment will be obviated by a "real AGI" capable of learning without going through the capital-intensive training steps of current models.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#163

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #119

lucianbr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you respect someone who betrays a principle you care about for money? Not to mention that the principles are not being betrayed now for the first time.

You could believe it is not about money. Most importantly, this seems to rest more on if you believe the principle was being followed or not. It is possible to believe one thing, have another person believe another thing, and respect that their decision is sincerely held but subject to a different perspective, as is our own beliefs. You can stand up for what you believe and still respectfully disagree with someone wi…

[deleted]

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#164

Post by kovek » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #84

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. You cannot get real, actual AGI (the same ability to perform tasks as a human) without a continuous cycle of learning and deep memory, which LLMs cannot do. The best LLM "memory" is a search engine and document summari…

I disagree. There is some argument to be had that they're already generally intelligent. They're already certainly better than me in basically anything I can ask them to do. So that leads to the question of what qualifies as intelligent? And do we need sentience for intelligence? What about self-agency/-actuation? Is that needed for "generally intelligent"? I don't know. But I feel like we're not there yet, even for…

Models need pre-training and fine tuning. Humans can do online learning.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#165

Post by A_D_E_P_T » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

matricks wrote: post #59

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can argue that they have already achieved this. No, because they're hugely reliant on their training data and can't really move beyond their training data. This is why you haven't seen an explosion of new LLM-aided scientific discoveries, why Suno can't write a song in a new genre (even if you explain it to Suno in detail and give it actual examples,) etc. This should tell you something enormous about (1) their…

> can’t really move beyond their training data I don’t even think humans can “move beyond” their sensory data. They generalize using it, which is amazing, but they are still limited by it.* So why is this a reasonable standard for non-biological intelligence? We have compelling evidence that both can learn in unsupervised settings. (I grant one has to wrap a transformer model with a training harness, but how can anyo…

Human sensory data doesn't correspond -- not neatly, and probably not at all -- to LLM training data.

Human sensory data combines to give you a spatiotemporal sense, which is the overarching sense of being a bounded entity in time and space. From one's perceptions, one can then generalize and make predictions, etc. The stronger one's capacity for cognition, the more accurate and broader these generalizations and predictions become. Every invention, including or perhaps especially the invention of mathematics, is rooted in this.

LLMs have no apparent spatiotemporal sense, are not physically bounded, and don't know how to model the physical world. They're trained on static communications -- though, of course, they can model those, they can predict things like word sequences, and they can produce output that mirrors previously communicated ideas. There's something huge about the fact, staring us right in the face, that they're clearly not capable of producing anything genuinely new of any significance.

This is why AGI is probably in world models.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#166

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #84

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. You cannot get real, actual AGI (the same ability to perform tasks as a human) without a continuous cycle of learning and deep memory, which LLMs cannot do. The best LLM "memory" is a search engine and document summari…

I disagree. There is some argument to be had that they're already generally intelligent. They're already certainly better than me in basically anything I can ask them to do. So that leads to the question of what qualifies as intelligent? And do we need sentience for intelligence? What about self-agency/-actuation? Is that needed for "generally intelligent"? I don't know. But I feel like we're not there yet, even for…

[deleted]

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#167

Post by stratos123 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

MadxX79 wrote: post #153

stratos123 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI isn't going to happen within the next 30 years so this is moot. The actual researchers have said so many times. It's only the business people and laypeople whooping about AGI always being imminent. The statements of what "actual researchers" are you relying upon for your "next 30 years" estimate? How do you reconcile them with the sub-10- or even sub-5-years timelines of other AI researchers, like Daniel Kokota…

I'm guessing they have a lot of shares in the AI companies they work(ed) for, and they would like to pump their value so they can buy an even nicer carribean island than they can already afford?

Kokotajlo in particular is notable for being the guy who quit OpenAI in 2024 in protest of their policy of requiring researchers to abide by a non-disparagement agreement to retain their equity. In the end OpenAI caved and changed their policy, but if he was lying all along to inflate the value of his shares, it would have been quite a 4d chess move of him to gamble the shares themselves on doing so.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#168

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #105

coliveira wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was never idealism, it was much more about gaslighting. Billionaire investors have a playbook where they say something to gaslight people into agreeing with them, and then go to the opposite direction. It is already a pattern. For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers. They say some technology is just for t…

For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers. This doesn't seem contradictory if you consider that success at AGI will solve the problem of carbon emissions, one way or another. If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...

> If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...

Then we find out how long it takes for a medium sized city of commuters to start killing each other, elites and burning down data centers. Once they're hungry enough it'll happen for sure

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#169

Post by ufmace » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

sebastos wrote: post #156

logicchains wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully." There are lots of meaningful definitions, the people saying we haven't reached AGI just don't use them. For most of the last half-century people would have agreed that machines that can pass the Turing test and win Math Olympiad gold are AGI.

Firstly, the models that pass the Math Olympiad aren’t the same models as the ones you’re saying “pass the Turing test”. Secondly, nothing actually passes the Turing test. They pass a vibes check of “hey that’s pretty good!” but if your life depended on it, you could easily find ways to sniff out an LLM agent. Thirdly, none of these models learn in real time, which is an obviously essential feature. We’ll know AGI wh…

> nothing actually passes the Turing test

Says who? I had already found this study, published almost a year ago, saying that they do: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

There doesn't seem to be a super-rigorous definition of the Turing Test, but I don't think it's reasonable to require it to fool an expert whose life depends on the correct choice. It already seems to be decently able to fool a person of average intelligence who has a basic knowledge of LLMs.

I agree that we don't really have AGI yet, but I'd hope we can come up with a better definition of what it is than "we'll know it when we see it". I think it is a legitimate point that we've moved the goalposts some.

Re: The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

#170

Post by Ekaros » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #168

CamperBob2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, most companies would swear they were decided on cutting carbon emissions, just to forget everything when it comes to build data centers. This doesn't seem contradictory if you consider that success at AGI will solve the problem of carbon emissions, one way or another. If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters...

> If one data center ultimately replaces a whole medium-sized city of commuters... Then we find out how long it takes for a medium sized city of commuters to start killing each other, elites and burning down data centers. Once they're hungry enough it'll happen for sure

Data centres should have plenty of good loot. Raw materials like copper or at least aluminium. Maybe even steel, but value proposition there is less likely. I suppose someone will be interested in example fuel too if there is fuel based backup generation.