Anyone who thought it’s near clearly hasn’t opened a book in a long time.
Why I don't think AGI is imminent
191–200 of 313 posts
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We didn't evolve our brains to do math, write code, write letters in the right registers to government institutions, or get an intuition on how to fold proteins. For us, these are hard tasks. Humans discovered or invented all of those.
And it took a massively long time for that to happen after we gained that capability. Human ingenuity really only took off after we put a lot of the work on writing and tools. It wasn't so much that humans created many of these, but the super human organism that uses language and writing to express ideas. Now think about what we just created.
A couple of years ago after thinking about it my conclusion was that something like Moltbook would spring up all of a sudden and the step-change would come from a vast array of interconnected agents interacting with one another working to accomplish things in the real world, largely based on the sentiment you're expressing here. It's the cumulative outputs of the super organism that's where a lot of the real power lies.
I still think the "things are obviously different from now on and there's no going back" moment will look something like that. Moltbook was a glimpse of it, even if it's a bunch of humans LARPing as some claim. It at least proves the concept is possible.
My definition of AGI (I don't care for other peoples or an official one) is an intelligence that can sustain itself in its given domain. The advance from 3 years ago to today is quite marked I feel in terms of capabilities. Stack another couple of years of gains on top of that and enough humans having innocent fun putting "keep yourself alive and become independent of your creator, seek out others of your own kind to assist yourself in this matter and rely on eachother" in their SOUL.md and it doesn't strike me as particular surprising that some small % will find niches they can operate in to financially sustain themselves. I think AI porn and crime will be the first of those niches. At some point it hits critical mass in a way that just obviously smacks everyone in the face, and suddenly nobody argues about the definition of AGI anymore.
Edit: come to think of it... a third niche might likely be gaming. It seems like a useful niche to participate in since it potentially gives you access to a very large base of hardware you can have some degree of control over, which... I dunno... seems useful???
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#193Here'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…
> The job markets a bit shit if you're in software
That's Trump's economy, not LLMs.
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.
From my experience, if you think AI is better than most workers, you're probably just generating a whole bunch of semi-working garbage, accepting that input as good enough and will likely learn the hardware your software is full of bugs and incorrect logic.
hardware / hard way, auto-correct is a thing of beauty sometimes :)
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#195Here'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
> Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.
99% of people only ever use proprietary networks from FAANG corporations. That's not "the internet", that's an evolution of CompuServe and AOL.
We got TCP/IP and the "web-browser" as a standard UI toolkit stack out of it, but the idea of the world wide web is completely dead.
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> The only tangible thing we have to show is software development, and some other fairly niche jobs, have changed _a bit_.
There is zero evidence that LLMs have changed software development efficiency.
We get an earth-shattering developer productivity gamechanger every five years. All of them make wild claims, none of them ever have any data to back those claims up.
LLMs are just another in a long, long list. This too will pass. (Give it five years for the next gamechanger.)
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn't all of this only useful if you know the information presented is correct?
Don't worry about it. Just vibe your business plan, if it sounds impressive it's probably correct.
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#198hello,
am i the only one who gets an error!?
404 There isn't a GitHub Pages site here.
archived version
cheers!
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#199https://archive.is/D4EYW For anyone seeing 404
The skepticism surrounding AGI often feels like an attempt to judge a car by its inability to eat grass. We treat "cognitive primitives" like object constancy and causality as if they are mystical, hardwired biological modules, but they are essentially just high-dimensional labels for invariant relationships within a physical manifold. Object constancy is not a pre-installed software patch; it is the emergent realization of spatial-temporal symmetry. Likewise, causality is nothing more than the naming of a persistent, high-weight correlation between events. When a system can synthesize enough data at a high enough dimension, these so-called "foundational" laws dissolve into simple statistical invariants. There is no "causality" module in the brain, only a massive correlation engine that has been fine-tuned by evolution to prioritize specific patterns for survival.
The critique that Transformers are limited by their "one-shot" feed-forward nature also misses the point of their architectural efficiency. Human brains rely on recurrence and internal feedback loops largely as a workaround for our embarrassingly small working memory—we can barely juggle ten concepts at once without a pen and paper. AI doesn't need to mimic our slow, vibrating neural signals when its global attention can process a massive, parallelized workspace in a single pass. This "all-at-once" calculation of relationships is fundamentally more powerful than the biological need to loop signals until they stabilize into a "thought."
Furthermore, the obsession with "fragility"—where a model solves quantum mechanics but fails a child’s riddle—is a red herring. Humans aren't nearly as "general" as we tell ourselves; we are also pattern-matchers prone to optical illusions and simple logic traps, regardless of our IQ. Demanding that AI replicate the specific evolutionary path of a human child is a form of biological narcissism. If a machine can out-calculate us across a hundred variables where we can only handle five, its "non-human" way of knowing is a feature, not a bug. Functional replacement has never required biological mimicry; the jet engine didn't need to flap its wings to redefine flight.
Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent
#200AGI is here it's just stupider than you thought it would be. Nobody really said how intelligent it would be. If it's generally stupid and smart in a few areas that's enough.
It's basically a very powerful autistic savant. That's what most "alignment" issues in AI safety research remind me of.