Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

dwarkesh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 394 posts

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#341

Post by AstroBen »

Retric wrote: post #330
AstroBen wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we just fundamentally have different definitions of AGI. Mine's based on outcomes and what it can do, so purely goal based. Not the processes that mimic humans or animals I think this is the most likely first step of what would happen seeing as we're pushing for it to be created to solve real world problems

I’m not sure how you can argue something is a general intelligence if it can’t do those kinds of things? Comes out of the factory with a command: “Operate this android for a lifetime pretending to be human.” Seems like arguing something is a self driving car if it needs a backup human driver for safety. It’s simply not what people who initially came up with the term meant and not what a plain language understanding o…

Because I see intelligence as the ability to produce effective actions towards a goal. A more intelligent chess AI beats a less intelligent one by making better moves towards the goal of winning the game

The G in AGI is being able to generalize that intelligence across domains, including those its never seen before, as a human could

So I would fully expect an advanced AGI to be able to pretend to be a human. It has a model of the world, knows how humans act, and could move the android in a human like manner, speak like a human, and learn the skills a human could

Is it conscious or feeling though? Or following the same processes that a human does? That's not necessary. Birds and planes both fly, but they're clearly different things. We (probably) don't need to simulate the brain to create this kind of intelligence

Lets pinch this AGI to test if it 'feels pain'

Okay, I see that I have received a sharp pinch at 55,77,3 - the elbow region

My goal is to act like a human. In this situation a human would likely exhibit a pain response

A pain response for humans usually involves a facial expression and often a verbal acknowledgement

Humans normally respond quite slow, so I should wait 50ms to react

"Hey! Why did you do that? That hurt!"

...Is that thing human? I bet it'll convince most of the world it is.. and that's terrifying

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#342

Post by HDThoreaun »

timewizard wrote: post #171
yibg wrote: post #162

Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because: 1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components. Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having. From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absur…

We are very good at generating energy. Even if AI is an order of magnitude less energy efficient an AI person equivalent would use ~ 4 kilowatt hours/day. At current rates thats like $1. Hardly the limiting factor here I think

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#343

Post by bbohyeha »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #143
nextaccountic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is important for the future of humanity. Maybe they will have legal personhood some day. Maybe they will be our heirs. It would suck if AGI were to be developed in the current economic landscape. They will be just slaves. All this talk about "alignment", when applied to actual sentient beings, is just slavery. AGI will be treated just like we treat animals, or even worse. So AGI isn't about tools, it's not about…

> All this talk about "alignment", when applied to actual sentient beings, is just slavery. I don't think that's true at all. We routinely talk about how to "align" human beings who aren't slaves. My parents didn't enslave me by raising me to be kind and sharing, nor is my company enslaving me when they try to get me aligned with their business objectives.

Society is inherently a prisoners dilemma, and you are biased to prefer your captors.

We’ve had the automation to provide the essentials since the 50s. Shrieking religious nut jobs demanded otherwise.

You’re intentionally distracted by a job program as a carrot-stick to avoid the rich losing power. They can print more money …carrots, I mean… and you like carrots right?

It’s the most basic Pavlovian conditioning.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#344

Post by Retric »

AstroBen wrote: post #341
Retric wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure how you can argue something is a general intelligence if it can’t do those kinds of things? Comes out of the factory with a command: “Operate this android for a lifetime pretending to be human.” Seems like arguing something is a self driving car if it needs a backup human driver for safety. It’s simply not what people who initially came up with the term meant and not what a plain language understanding o…

Because I see intelligence as the ability to produce effective actions towards a goal. A more intelligent chess AI beats a less intelligent one by making better moves towards the goal of winning the game The G in AGI is being able to generalize that intelligence across domains, including those its never seen before, as a human could So I would fully expect an advanced AGI to be able to pretend to be a human. It has a…

> Is it conscious or feeling though?

You’re falling into the “Ginger’s don’t have souls” trap I just spoke of.

We don’t define humans as individuals components so your toe isn’t you, but by that same token your car isn’t you either. If some sub component of a system is emulating a human consciousness then we don’t need to talk about the larger system here.

AGI must be able to do these things, but it doesn’t need to have human mental architecture. Something that can simulate physics well enough could emulate an all the atomic scale interactions in a human brain for example. That virtual human brain would then experience everything we did even if the system running the simulation didn’t.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#345

Post by Retric »

9rx wrote: post #338
Retric wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something can’t “Operate this cat Android, pretending to be a cat.” if it can’t do what I described. A single general intelligence needs to be able to fly an aircraft, get a degree, run a business, and raise a baby to adulthood just like a person or it’s not general.

So AGI is really about the hardware?

We’ve built hardware capable of those things if remotely controlled. It’s the thinking bits that are hard.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#346

Post by codingwagie »

thelambentonion wrote: post #307
HAL3000 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows but have you read what OP wrote? "I just used o3 to design a distributed scheduler that scales to 1M+ sxchedules a day. It was perfect, and did better than two weeks of thought around the best way to build this." Anyone with 10 years in distributed systems at FAANG doesn’t need two weeks to design a distributed scheduler handling 1M+ schedules per day, that’s a solved problem in 2025 and basically a joke at…

> and his comment history only adds to the doubt for others following along: the comment history is mostly talking about how software engineering is dead because AI is real this time with a few diversions to fixate on how overpriced university pedigrees are.

its not dead, its democratized

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#347

Post by 9rx »

Retric wrote: post #345
9rx wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So AGI is really about the hardware?

We’ve built hardware capable of those things if remotely controlled. It’s the thinking bits that are hard.

Only to the extent of having specialized bespoke solutions. We have hardware to fly a plane, but that same hardware isn't able to throw a mortarboard in the air after receiving its degree, and the hardware that can do that isn't able to lactate for a young child.

General intelligence is easy compared to general physicality. And, of course, if you keep the hardware specialized to make its creation more tractable, what do you need general intelligence for? Special intelligence that matches the special hardware will work just as well.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#348

Post by burnte »

abletonlive wrote: post #275
burnte wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't understand anything, there is no understanding going on in these models. It takes input and generates output based on the statistical math created from its training set. It's Bayesian statistics and vector/matrix math. There is no cogitation or actual understanding.

This is insanely reductionist and mindless regurgitation of what we already know about how the models work. Understanding is a spectrum, it's not binary. We can measurably show that that there is in fact, some kind of understanding. If you explain a concept to a child you check for understanding by seeing if the output they produce checks out with your understanding of the concept. You don't peer into their brain and…

The method of verification has no bearing on the validity of the conclusion. I don't open a child's head because there are side effects on the functioning of the child post brain-opening. However I can look into the brain of an AI with no such side effects.

This is an example I saw 2 days ago without even searching. Here ChatGPT is telling someone that it independently ran a benchmark on it's MacBook: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Goq-D9macAApuHy?format=jpg

I'm reasonably sure ChatGPT doesn't have a Macbook, and didn't really run the benchmarks. But It DID produce exactly what you would expect a human to say, which is what it is programmed to do. No understanding, just rote repetition.

I won't post more because there are a billion of them. LLMs are great, but they're not intelligent, they don't understand, and the output still needs validated before use. We have a long way to go, and that's ok.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#349

Post by pdimitar »

stego-tech wrote: post #272
Balgair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you. To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI. No really. You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today. But, really, what else do you want out of the…

> You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. He's_Outta_Line_But_He's_Right.gif Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic . They can converse with them, "learn" new things, talk to a computer like they'd talk to a person and get a response back. Then again, these are also people who rely on me for…

> Seriously, AGI to the HN crowd is not the same as AGI to the average human. To my parents, these bots must look like fucking magic.

So does a drone show to an uncontacted tribe. So does a card trick to a chimpanzee (there are videos of them freaking out when a card disappears).

That's not an argument for or against anything.

I propose this:

"AGI is a self-optimizing artificial organism that can solve 99% of all the humanity's problems."

See, it's not a bad definition IMO. Find me one NS-5 from the "I, Robot" movie that also has access to all science and all internet and all history and can network with the others and fix our cities, nature, manufacturing, social issues and a few others, just in a decade or two. Then we have AGI.

Comparing to what was there 10 years ago and patting ourselves on the back about how far we have gotten is being complacent.

Let's never be complacent.

Re: AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

#350

Post by pdimitar »

9rx wrote: post #335
Balgair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the the old adage: You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the hiker next to you. To me, the Ashley Madison hack in 2015 was 'good enough' for AGI. No really. You somehow managed to get real people to chat with bots and pay to do so. Yes, caveats about cheaters apply here, and yes, those bots are incredibly primitive compared to today. But, really, what else do you want out of the…

> But the reality is that we want money Only in a symbolic way. Money is just debt. It doesn't mean anything if you can't call the loan and get back what you are owed. On the surface, that means stuff like food, shelter, cars, vacations, etc. But beyond the surface, what we really want is other people who will do anything we please. Power, as we often call it. AGI is, to some, seen as the way to give them "power". Bu…

> But, you are right, the human fundamentally can never be satisfied. Even if AGI delivers on every single one of our wildest dreams, we'll adapt, it will become normal, and then it will no longer be good enough.

Yes, and? A good Litmus test about which humans are, shall we say, not welcome in this new society.

There are plenty of us out there that have fixed our upper limits of wealth and we don't want more, and we have proven it during our lives.

F.ex. people get 5x more but it comes with 20x more responsibility, they burn out, get back to a job that's good enough and not stressful and pays everything they need from life, settle there, never change it.

Let's not judge humanity at large by a handful of psychopaths that would overdose and die at 22 years old if given the chance. Please.

And no, before you say it: no, I'll never get to the point where "it's never enough" and no, I am not deluding myself. Nope.

Post reply on HN