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Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

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Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#31
post #13

The other few things possible in next few years for past few years are: 1. Fusion 2. Self driving cars. 3. Ubiquitous, generally available and stable 8192 bit quantum computers. 4. High energy density grid scale batteries. Just few more "this maybe the... what could revolutionize..." articles away. What we forget is that it is in these people's business interest (executives making such statements) to state the exagge…

Fusion by 1990 with a bit of extra investment promised in 1972 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.175.4027.1194.b

I remember tons of articles from that time arguing the same. Then the attention shifted to "fifth-generation computers".

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#32
I am curious to do a poll of what AGI means to each person. It stands for "Artificial General Intelligence" but some have different definitions.

For some, it might mean any that is as capable as a normal human. For some, non-biological life axiomatically cannot become AGI. For some, it might require literal omniscience and omnipotence and accepting anything as AGI means, to them, that they are being told to worship it as a God. For some, it might mean something more like an AI that is more competent than the most competent human at literally every task. For some, acknowledging it means that we must acknowledge it has person-like rights. For some it cannot be AGI if it lies. For some it cannot be AGI if it makes any mistake. For some it cannot be AGI until it has more power than humans. These are several definitions and implications that are partially mutually conflicting but I have seen different people say that AGI is each different one of those.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#33

Is this like when the Google self driving car director Chris Urmson said in 2015 his 11 year old son would never need to take a drivers exam? I have a hunch when they decide who to hire for upper management, they select for whoever promises the moon. The person making the promises may not even believe it.

Forget self-driving cars, we still have radiologists.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#34
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we just see a cooling off of other endeavors as LLM becomes a known in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and it’s abilities reach a natural limit which is still general useful. This is my prediction If the training set is just the internet, it will be not much different than someone who spends all their lives in their room in front of their computer.

I don't think that's a limit. If you give me $10M and 5 years, I can tell you a half-dozen ways to train models better than GPT4, primarily by having them do richer tasks than text completion, by having them evaluate themselves in richer ways, by having workflows around them, and by having shared models perform multiple types of tasks (e.g. text, image, controls, etc.). It's not that I'm especially smart; many others…

This reminds me of reinforcement learning and the Bellman equations.

Let a neural network based agent act in an environment. Record its rewards. Update the neural network so that the best actions become a little more likely, and the worse actions become a little less likely. Thus, we have demonstrated a training step that improves the agent.

Now just run that training step in a loop forever and you'll improve each step and reach Godlike intelligence, right? Right? Well, no, there is instability in "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps", and while I expect to see more GTP improvements, I believe there may be limitations we don't know about yet.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#35
post #13

The other few things possible in next few years for past few years are: 1. Fusion 2. Self driving cars. 3. Ubiquitous, generally available and stable 8192 bit quantum computers. 4. High energy density grid scale batteries. Just few more "this maybe the... what could revolutionize..." articles away. What we forget is that it is in these people's business interest (executives making such statements) to state the exagge…

Fusion by 1990 with a bit of extra investment promised in 1972 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.175.4027.1194.b I remember tons of articles from that time arguing the same. Then the attention shifted to "fifth-generation computers".

[deleted]

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#36

Is this like when the Google self driving car director Chris Urmson said in 2015 his 11 year old son would never need to take a drivers exam? I have a hunch when they decide who to hire for upper management, they select for whoever promises the moon. The person making the promises may not even believe it.

It’s easier to call it AGI to “normies” rather than what it will probably be IRL which is many thousands of niche disruptions via the specific innovations of recent (LLM/deep learning/GPU+AI tooling+education investments)… that we will as usual have a difficult time predicting what it looks like even a decade from now.

Stuff like programming assistance, new markets driven by GPT style APIs, and the mountain of productivity gains will help subsidize and accelerate the next tranche of investment until we reach the next R&D milestone that will again totally “revolutionize” the world and lead to mass employment for the 10th time this century.

I look forward to having this conversation on HN again in 5-10yrs as the world slowly gets better at a slightly faster (yet less news worthy) rate.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#38
post #11

[flagged]

Always found it interesting that GPT4 sparks of AGI paper was written mid-2022 meaning they probably knew of everything Twitter AI is discussing 1.5 years ago. Explains why it feels like Microsoft is cranking out so much software these days

What are you talking about? That paper was released as v1 in March 2023.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#39
post #13

The other few things possible in next few years for past few years are: 1. Fusion 2. Self driving cars. 3. Ubiquitous, generally available and stable 8192 bit quantum computers. 4. High energy density grid scale batteries. Just few more "this maybe the... what could revolutionize..." articles away. What we forget is that it is in these people's business interest (executives making such statements) to state the exagge…

I think we'll have full-blown AGI before fusion and before world-changing levels of quantum computing. Which is to say, we won't be around to see fusion and world-changing quantum :( But there's still time for robo-taxis!

Or, more optimistically, AGI will accelerate scientific progress and we will have fusion, quantum computers, and self driving cars shortly after.

If AIs had the tendency to recursively devour worlds you would expect at least one alien AI to have conquered our galaxy by now. But the sky is quiet, so either we are the very first species to get this far, or there’s a natural ceiling to the pace of technological progress.

Re: Google DeepMind CEO says some form of AGI possible in a few years

#40
I don't think there's been any progress on AGI, actually. Even though there's a lot of powerful AI programs out there, they're really nothing more than complex tools created to solve problems. A few other commenters mentioned that there's no good definition for what AGI would actually mean, but a good starting point that I think we can all agree on is that an AGI would need to have some level of autonomy. That being said, even if you did make an AI that was autonomous, I still think that it's a leap to call it an AGI. The way I look at it, if you did all the math by hand, you wouldn't call it intelligent, so you shouldn't call it intelligent if the math was done by a computer.
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