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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#41

Post by sys_64738 »

rvz wrote: post #9

Are we finally realizing that the term "AGI" is not only hijacked to become meaningless, but achieving it has always been nothing but a complete scam as I was saying before? [0] If you were in a "pioneering" AI lab that claims to be in the lead in achieving "AGI", why move to another lab that is behind other than offering $10M a year. Snap out of the "AGI" BS. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438154

I don't pay too close attention to AI as it always felt like man behind the curtain syndrome. But where did this "AGI" term even come from? The original term AI is meant to be AGI so when did "AI" get bastardized into what abomination it is meant to refer to now.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#42

Post by krapp »

Findecanor wrote: post #40

AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one? So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.

AGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is something people have wanted ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed robots to exist as a concept.

I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#43

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

tenthirtyam wrote: post #31
bsenftner wrote: post #7

Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology th…

You'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test. If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended? Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of…

Was that the intention of the Chinese room concept, to ask "what else is there to be comprehended?" after producing a translation?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#44

Post by jltsiren »

Davidzheng wrote: post #23
bestouff wrote: post #3

Are there some people here in HN believing in AGI "soonish" ?

what's your definition? AGI original definition is median human across almost all fields which I believe is basically achieved. If superhuman (better than best expert) I expect <2030 for all nonrobotic tasks and <2035 for all tasks

Your "original definition" was always meaningless. A "Hello, World!" program is equally capable in most jobs as the median human. On the other hand, if the benchmark is what the median human can reasonably become (a professional with decades of experience), we are still far from there.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#45

Post by blululu »

levanten wrote: post #15
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #4

> "This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI." The central claim here is illogical. The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in th…

Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money. Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.

Kind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#46

Post by leoc »

Game_Ender wrote: post #35
zaphirplane wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not commenting on the whole just the rhetorical question of why would people leave. They are leaving for more money, more seniority or because they don’t like their boss. 0 about AGI

I think the implicit take is that if your company hits AGI your equity package will do something like 10x-100x even if the company is already big. The only other way to do that is join a startup early enough to ride its growth wave. Another way to say it is that people think it’s much more likely for each decent LLM startup grow really strongly first several years then plateau vs. then for their current established p…

A catch here is that individual workers may have priorities which are altered due to the strong natural preference for assuring financial independence. Even if you were a hot AI researcher who felt (and this is just a hypothetical) that your company was the clear industry leader and had, say, a 75% chance of soon achieving something AGI-adjacent and enabling massive productivity gains, you might still (and quite reasonably) prefer to leave if that was what it took to make absolutely sure of getting of your private-income screw-you money (and/or private-investor seed capital). Again this is just a hypothetical: I have no special insight, and FWIW my gut instinct is that the job-hoppers are in fact mostly quite cynical about the near-term prospects for "AGI".

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#47

Post by lherron »

Honestly this article sounds like someone is unhappy that AI isn’t being deployed/developed “the way I feel it should be done”.

Talent changing companies is bad. Companies making money to pay for the next training run is bad. Consumers getting products they want is bad.

In the author’s view, AI should be advanced in a research lab by altruistic researchers and given directly to other altruistic researchers to advance humanity. It definitely shouldn’t be used by us common folk for fun and personal productivity.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#48

Post by Davidzheng »

jltsiren wrote: post #44
Davidzheng wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's your definition? AGI original definition is median human across almost all fields which I believe is basically achieved. If superhuman (better than best expert) I expect <2030 for all nonrobotic tasks and <2035 for all tasks

Your "original definition" was always meaningless. A "Hello, World!" program is equally capable in most jobs as the median human. On the other hand, if the benchmark is what the median human can reasonably become (a professional with decades of experience), we are still far from there.

I agree with second part but not the first (far in capability not in timeline). I think you underestimate the distance of median wihout training and "hello world" in many economically meaningful jobs.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#49

Post by danielbln »

krapp wrote: post #42
Findecanor wrote: post #40

AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one? So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.

AGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is…

AGI is AGI, not ASI though. General intelligence doesn't mean sapience, sentience or consciousness, it just means general capabilities across the board at the level of or surpassing human ability. ASI is a whole different beast.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#50

Post by redhale »

matusp wrote: post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

> Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years?

To fund yourself while building AGI? To hedge risk that AGI takes longer? Not saying you're wrong, just saying that even if they did believe it, this behavior could be justified.

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