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> Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. There is...chanting in team meetings in the US? Has this been going for long now or is this some new trend picked up in Asia or something like that?
> Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. There is...chanting in team meetings in the US? Has this been going for long now or is this some new trend picked up in Asia or something like that?
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/theranos-founder-holm...
They have, including multiple times in this very article, but the author's not willing to listen. As he says later:
> But set aside the technical objections—what if it doesn't continue to get better?—and you’re left with the claim that intelligence is a commodity you can get more of if you have the right data or compute or neural network. And it’s not.
Modern AI researchers have proven that this is not true. They routinely increase the intelligence of systems by training on different data, using different compute, or applying different network architectures. But the author is absolutely convinced that this can't be so, so when researchers straightforwardly explain that they have done this, he's stuck trying to puzzle out what they could possibly mean. He references "Situational Awareness", an essay that includes detailed analyses of how researchers do this and why we should expect similar progress to continue, but he interprets it as a claim that "you don’t need cold, hard facts" because he presumes that the facts it presents can't possibly be true.
So, if you assume that AGI is fake and impossible, it's... A conspiracy. Sure.
Though, if you just finished quoting Turing (and folks like von Neumann), who thought it is possible, it would be good form for you to offer some reasoning that it's impossible, without alluding to the ineffable human soul or things like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who raw-dogs the internet without an adblocker? Have some standards.
Rumor has it that some people saw the "ads pay for it all" business model and accepted the deal because they wanted the Internet to be sustainable.
In fact generating ad views and not purchasing things from them reduces the value of ads to the website.
> It’s this myth that’s the root of the AGI conspiracy. A smarter-than-human machine that can do it all is not a technology. It’s a dream, unmoored from reality. So, if you assume that AGI is fake and impossible, it's... A conspiracy. Sure. Though, if you just finished quoting Turing (and folks like von Neumann), who thought it is possible, it would be good form for you to offer some reasoning that it's impossible, w…
That seems like a bad straw-man for "AI boosterism has the following hallmarks of conspiratorial thinking".
> offer some reasoning that it's impossible
Further on, the author has anticipated your objection:
> And there it is: You can’t prove it’s not true. [...] Conspiracy thinking looms again. Predictions about when AGI will arrive are made with the precision of numerologists counting down to the end of days. With no real stakes in the game, deadlines come and go with a shrug. Excuses are made and timelines are adjusted yet again.
One thing that struck me recently is that LLMs are necessarily limited by what's expressible with existing language. How can this ever result in AGI? A lot of human progress required inventing new language to represent new ideas and concepts. An LLM only experience of the world is what can be expressed with words. Meanwhile, even a squirrel has an intuitive understanding of the laws of gravity that are beyond the abi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rumor has it that some people saw the "ads pay for it all" business model and accepted the deal because they wanted the Internet to be sustainable.
If you don't actually buy anything then you're not sponsoring anything. In fact generating ad views and not purchasing things from them reduces the value of ads to the website.
> It’s this myth that’s the root of the AGI conspiracy. A smarter-than-human machine that can do it all is not a technology. It’s a dream, unmoored from reality. So, if you assume that AGI is fake and impossible, it's... A conspiracy. Sure. Though, if you just finished quoting Turing (and folks like von Neumann), who thought it is possible, it would be good form for you to offer some reasoning that it's impossible, w…
> if you assume that AGI is fake and impossible That seems like a bad straw-man for "AI boosterism has the following hallmarks of conspiratorial thinking". > offer some reasoning that it's impossible Further on, the author has anticipated your objection: > And there it is: You can’t prove it’s not true. [...] Conspiracy thinking looms again. Predictions about when AGI will arrive are made with the precision of numero…
No more than yelling "electricity is conspiracy thinking/Satan's plaything!" repeatedly would have stopped engineers in the 19th century from studying and building with it.