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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

#291

Post by hackyhacky »

nubg wrote: post #289
themafia wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This is an allusion to the old days, before the internet became a popular phenomenon. It used to be, that every September a bunch of "newbies" (college student who just access to an internet connection for the first time) would log in and make a mess of things. Then, in the late nineties when it really took off, everybody logged in and made a mess of things. This is this the "eternal september." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#292

Post by charcircuit »

al_borland wrote: post #283
charcircuit wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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?

Yes, I am. Do not underestimate how smart 5th graders are and what they can do with all of the free time they have.

>How does AI solve the unknown unknowns problem?

You can ask it what it thinks you should know. You can ask it for what pitfalls to look out for. You can ask it to roleplay to play out scenarios and get practice with them. I think such practice is enough to get them to a state of being hirable.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#293

Post by NiloCK »

wavemode wrote: post #154
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?…

People have entire careers promoting incorrect ideas. Oxycontin, phrenology, the windows operating system.

Reconciling your self-concept with the negative (or fruitless) impacts of your life's work is difficult. It can be easier to deny or minimize those impacts.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#294

Post by hi_hi »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #287
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…

May I ask, what experiences are you personally having with LLMs right now that is leading you to the conclusion that they will become "intelligent" enough to identify, organise, and build advancing improvements to themselves, without any human interaction in the near future (1 - 2 years lets say)?

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#295

Post by al_borland »

charcircuit wrote: post #292
al_borland wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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? Yes, I am. Do not underestimate how smart 5th graders are and what they can do with all of the free time they have. >How does AI solve the unknown unknowns problem? You can ask it what it thinks you should know. You can ask it for what pitfalls to look…

I’m sure there are some exceptional 5th graders doing amazing things. The number that will keep that same interest into adulthood is exceptionally low. Kids also need a chance to be kids. Expecting them to be heads down working on their career ambitions at 10 is dystopian.

It’s not about just getting hired. It’s about being effective once hired. I expect a senior to have preferences and opinions, informed by experience, on how things can and should run… while also being able to adapt to the local culture. We should be able to debate ideas in real time without having to run to the LLM to read the next reply. If that’s all someone is bringing to the table, just tell the team to use an LLM during brainstorming sessions.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#296

Post by BatteryMountain »

bamboozled wrote: post #169
BatteryMountain wrote: post #129

Earlier 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?

It is indeed correct. (else I wouldn't have posted it here)

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#297

Post by entech »

bamboozled wrote: post #169
BatteryMountain wrote: post #129

Earlier 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?

It seems that it’s useful if it’s better than what you would have done yourself.

Although the poster had a bus company business plan that includes actuarial analysis in his head and some spreadsheets so that bar appears to be sufficiently high.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#298

Post by entech »

al_borland wrote: post #239
causal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my greatest cause for alarm regarding LLM adoption. I am not yet sure AI will ever be good enough to use without experts watching them carefully; but they are certainly good enough that non-experts cannot tell the difference.

My dad is retired and enamored with ChatGPT. He’s been teaching classes to seniors and evangelizing the use to all his friends. Every time he calls he gives me an update on who he’s converted into a ChatGPT user. He seems disappointed with anyone who doesn’t use it for everything after he tells them about it. A couple days ago he was telling me one lady he was trying to sell on it wouldn’t use it. She took the positi…

How do you know that it’s a source worth trusting?

I think the expectation of AI being perfect all the time is probably driven by the hype and marketing of “1 million PhDs in your pocket”.

If you compare AI to an average person or a random website you’d come across google I would wager that AI is more likely to be accurate in almost every scenario.

Hyper specific areas, niche domains and rapidly evolving data that is not being published - a lot less so.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#299

Post by bamboozled »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #296
bamboozled wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't all of this only useful if you know the information presented is correct?

It is indeed correct. (else I wouldn't have posted it here)

I wasn't arguing whether or not it's correct, I was pointing out that it's useful only because you know it's given you correct information.

Maybe we'll get to a point where we just trust everything we receive from these systems but I'm yet to meet a person who would fund a business solely on an LLMs generated business plans without being able to crosscheck them by someone trusted.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#300

Post by reactordev »

krethh wrote: post #286
joquarky wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have yet to find an agent that writes as succinctly as I do. That said, I have found agents more than capable of doing something.
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