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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#361

Post by jimbokun »

killerstorm wrote: post #276
Jensson wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you imagine AGI as a robot and not as datacenter solving all kinds of problems? AGI means it can replace basically all human white collar work, alpha evolve can't do that while average humans can. White collar work is mostly done by average humans after all, if average humans can learn that then so should an AGI. An easier test is that the AGI must be able to beat most computer games without being trained on tho…

AlphaEvolve demonstrates that Google can build a system which can be trained to do very challenging intelligent tasks (e.g. research-level math). Isn't it just an optimization problem from this point? E.g. now training take a lot of hardware and time. If they make it so efficient that training can happen in matter of minutes and cost only few dollars, won't it satisfy your criterion? I'm not saying AlphaEvolve is "AG…

The "context window" seems to be a fundamental blocker preventing LLMs from replacing a white collar worker without some fundamental break through to solve it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#362

Post by dwohnitmok »

hamdingers wrote: post #234
dwohnitmok wrote: post #13

> And this is all fine, because they’re going to make AGI and the expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value). This is a strawman. The big AI n…

Do they believe that, or do they need to project confidence in that vision to hit investment targets? I can't tell. Probably a mix.

Money influences thinking so undoubtedly it's a mix, but I think a lot of HNers discount the former, when it plays a very large role. E.g. if you look at the emails that resulted from discovery in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, you'll see that from the very beginning of its inception OpenAI's founders have been trying to build AGI. This wasn't a marketing term that was made up years into OpenAI after it blew up and needed to dance in front of investors. This was an explicit goal of OpenAI from the very beginning.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#363

Post by tim333 »

lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

I've seen more religious language from AGI skeptics than believers. I kind of think AGI will happen on the basis of being able to think / process data like a human brain which I don't see as unlikely. The skeptics will say AGI is trying to build god and so not happening, but that's a strawman argument really.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#364

Post by simonw »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #325
simonw wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone who read my comment here misunderstood my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.

What you think it is and what it is are 2 different things. You are once more making assumptions.

What assumption did I make here?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#365

Post by jimbokun »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14
gizajob wrote: post #5

Elon thinking Demis is the evil supervillain is hilariously backward and a mirror image of the reality.

That one struck me as... weird people on both ends. But this is Musk, who is deep into the Roko's Basilisk idea [0] (in fact, supposedly he and Grimes bonded over that) where AGI is inevitable, AGI will dominate like the Matrix and Skynet, and anyone that didn't work hard to make AGI a reality will be yote in the Torment Nexus. That is, if you don't build the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create T…

It's never been explained to me why a god like AI would care one way or another whether people tried to bring it into being or not. I mean the AGI exists now, hurting the people that didn't work hard enough to bring it into existence won't benefit the AGI in any way.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#366

Post by noisy_boy »

Greedy managers are a blocker to actual engineering. It wasn't enough that they were trying to squeeze the last ounce of delivery via twisted implementations of Agile. Now they are shooting down every attempt to apply any amount of introspection and thought with blanket expectation of LLMs obviating any need to do so. That combined with random regurgitation of terms like "MCP" and "agentic" has made programming into a zombie-like experience of trying to coax the LLMs to produce something workable while fighting inflated expectations of the hallucinating bosses.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#367

Post by binoct »

reedf1 wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

Yes - and the water used is largely non-consumptive.

Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology.

There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#368

Post by beedeebeedee »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #49
IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

I remember reading about memristors when I was at University and the hope they could help simulate neurons. I don't remember hearing much about neuromorphic computing lately though so I guess it hasn't had much progress.

It’s not the level of computing we might hope for, but there has been some progress in developing memristors :)

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#369

Post by lsy »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion — should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? — has been hijacked by a (at this writing) 177-comment discussion on a small component of the author's argument. The author's argument is an important one that hardly hinges at all on water usage specifically, given the vast human and financial capital invested in LLM buildout so far.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#370

Post by knollimar »

ACCount37 wrote: post #235
zgk7iqea wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is an architecture problem, too. LLMs simply aren't capable of AGI

Why not? A lot of people say that, but no one, not a single person has ever pointed out a fundamental limitation that would prevent an LLM from going all the way. If LLMs have limits, we are yet to find them.

Real time learning that doesn't pollute limited context windows.
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