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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

#281

Post by charcircuit »

al_borland wrote: post #274
charcircuit wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job? Typically parents subsidize the living of their children while they are still learning. >Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch That's already true today. Most developers are react developers. If hired for something else they will have to pick that up on the job. W…

Parents can only subsidize children if they are doing well themselves, most aren’t. That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still…

>Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills

Let's say someone started building products since 10. By the time they were 27 they would have 17 years of experience. By 40 they would have 30 years of experience. That is more than enough time for one to gain a marketable skill that people are looking for.

>they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case the AI won’t help at all.

I think you are underestimating at AI's ability to sus out such unknown unknowns.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#282

Post by Lerc »

lelanthran wrote: post #176
greedo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you calculating that? Also, my 1000 foot view would see that "rating" as something most HN commenters would match.

> How are you calculating that? He's using a tool that was shared on HN some time back that takes a username and generates those states from the posts made. When I last checked, of over 10k posts, it only uses a few dozen to calculate that score, so it is about as reliable as dowsing. > Also, my 1000 foot view would see that "rating" as something most HN commenters would match. Probably. Why else join a discussion if…

>When I last checked, of over 10k posts, it only uses a few dozen to calculate that score, so it is about as reliable as dowsing.

A few samples are sufficient when the signal is strong enough. The time spent pie chart is definitely more what the user has been doing recently.

Overall, not everybody comes out the same, Pedantry is strong which I'm not really surprised about for a forum like this, but there are definitely personality traits of some users of sufficient magnitude that you can guess what the result will be.

Looking at the last 10 users who posted comments on HN are

Contrarian45%, Didactic25%, Skeptical15%, Analytical10%, Adversarial5%

Skeptical45%, Analytical30%, Contrarian15%, Helpful10%

Heretical45%, Low-Level Pedantic25%, Chaotic Helpful15%, Hardware-Jaded15%

Contrarian45%, Pedantic30%, Skeptical15%, Helpful10%

Helpful75%, Nostalgic15%, Appreciative5%, Skeptical5%

Defensive45%, Intellectual Flexing25%, Techno-Optimist20%, Exasperated10%

Skeptical45%, Pragmatic25%, Nostalgic20%, Helpful10%

Pedantic45%, Helpful25%, Techno-skeptic20%, Nostalgic10%

Pragmatic40%, Nostalgic25%, Opinionated20%, Visionary15%

Technically Precise45%, Disillusioned25%, Deeply Empathetic15%, Anti-AI Crusader15%

Contrarian45%, Didactic25%, Skeptical15%, Analytical10%, Adversarial5%

Skeptical45%, Analytical30%, Contrarian15%, Helpful10%

Heretical45%, Low-Level Pedantic25%, Chaotic Helpful15%, Hardware-Jaded15%

Contrarian45%, Pedantic30%, Skeptical15%, Helpful10%

Helpful75%, Nostalgic15%, Appreciative5%, Skeptical5%

Defensive45%, Intellectual Flexing25%, Techno-Optimist20%, Exasperated10%

Skeptical45%, Pragmatic25%, Nostalgic20%, Helpful10%

Pedantic45%, Helpful25%, Techno-skeptic20%, Nostalgic10%

Pragmatic40%, Nostalgic25%, Opinionated20%, Visionary15%

Technically Precise45%, Disillusioned25%, Deeply Empathetic15%, Anti-AI Crusader15%

Obviously this won't be a representative sample of HN because it will vary by time of day and topics under discussion. It's sufficient to show that the community is not entirely homogeneous.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#283

Post by al_borland »

charcircuit wrote: post #281
al_borland wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents can only subsidize children if they are doing well themselves, most aren’t. That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still…

>Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills Let's say someone started building products since 10. By the time they were 27 they would have 17 years of experience. By 40 they would have 30 years of experience. That is more than enough time for one to gain a marketable skill that people are looking for. >they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case th…

You’re expecting kids in 5th grade to pick a career and start building focused projects on par with the experience one would get in a full time position at a company?

This can’t be serious?

How does AI solve the unknown unknowns problem?

Even if someone may hear about potential problems or good ideas from AI, without experience very few of those things are incorporated into how a person operates. They have never felt the pain of missing those steps.

There are plenty of signs at the pool that say not to run, but kids still try to run… until they fall and hurt themselves. That’s how they learn to respect the sign.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#284

Post by m463 »

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…

people are taking actions based on its advice.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#285

Post by ottah »

Until we can do reinforcement in a reasonable approximate model of the real world, I don't see AI getting substantially better. We're seeing a lot of refinement of capabilities, but everything is still mostly supervised or limited semi-supervised learning.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#286

Post by krethh »

joquarky wrote: post #257
krethh wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you accept the premise that the code generated by LLMs is identical to the developer's output in quality, just higher in volume. In my lived professional experience, that's not the case. It seems to me that prompting agents and reviewing the output just doesn't.... trigger the same neural pathways for people? I constantly see people submit agent generated code with mistakes they would have never made themselv…

> In my lived professional experience, that's not the case. In mine it is the case. Anecdata. But for me, this was over two decades in an underpaid job at an S&P500 writing government software, so maybe you had better peers.

I stated plainly: "we have no data about this". Vibes is all we have.

It's not just me though. Loads of people subjectively perceiving a decrease in quality of engineering when relying on agents. You'll find thousands of examples on this site alone.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#287

Post by rstuart4133 »

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…

> Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is.

There is a definition of AGI the AI companies are using to justify their valuation. It's not what most people would call AGI but it does that job well enough, and you will care when it arrives.

They define it as an AI that can develop other AI's faster than the best team of human engineers. Once they build one of those in house they outpace the competition and become the winner that takes all. Personally I think it's more likely they will all achieve it at a similar time. That would mean the the race will continues, accelerating as fast as they can build data centres and power plants to feed them.

It will impact everyone, because the already dizzying pace of the current advances will accelerate. I don't know about you, but I'm having trouble figuring out what my job will be next year as it is.

An AI that just develops other AI's could hardly be called "general" in my book, but my opinion doesn't count for much.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#288

Post by qingcharles »

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

My LLMs do create non-zero amounts of tech debt, but they are also massively decreasing human-made tech debt by finding mountains of code that can be removed or refactored when using the newest frameworks.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#289

Post by nubg »

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…

what September?

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#290

Post by rfv6723 »

anonymid wrote: post #271
rfv6723 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 realiza…

Hey, thanks for responding. You're a very evocative writer! I do want to push back on some things: > We treat "cognitive primitives" like object constancy and causality as if they are mystical, hardwired biological modules, but they are essentially just I don't feel like I treated them as mystical - I cite several studies that define what they are and correlate them to certain structures in the brain that have develo…

> The argument I cite is from complexity theory. It's proof that feed-forward networks are mathematically incapable of representing certain kinds of algorithms.

Claiming FFNs are mathematically incapable of certain algorithms misses the fact that an LLM in production isn't a static circuit, but a dynamic system. Once you factor in autoregression and a scratchpad (CoT), the context window effectively functions as a Turing tape, which sidesteps the TC0 complexity limits of a single forward pass.

> AGI can solve quantum mechanics problems, but verifying that those solutions are correct still (currently) falls to humans. For the time being, we are the only ones who possess the robustness of reasoning we can rely on, and it is exactly because of this that fragility matters!

We haven't "sensed" or directly verified things like quantum mechanics or deep space for over a century; we rely entirely on a chain of cognitive tools and instruments to bridge that gap. LLMs are just the next layer of epistemic mediation. If a solution is logically consistent and converges with experimental data, the "robustness" comes from the system's internal logic.

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