421–430 of 1001 posts
It's funny how there's such a pervasive cynicism about AI in the developer community, yet everyone is still excited about vibe coding. Strange times...
What developer is excited about "vibe coding"? The only people excited about "vibe coding" are people who can't code.
I've coded professionally for 40 years. I'm hugely excited about vibe coding. I use it every single day to create little tools and web apps to help me do my job.
I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. Which of course raises the interesting question of how I can make good on this bet.
You're saying that we won't achieve AGI in ~80 years, or roughly 2100, equivalent to the time since the end WW2.
To quote Shane Legg from 2009:
"It looks like we’re heading towards 10^20 FLOPS before 2030, even if things slow down a bit from 2020 onwards. That’s just plain nuts. Let me try to explain just how nuts: 10^20 is about the number of neurons in all human brains combined. It is also about the estimated number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That’s a truly insane number of calculations in 1 second."
Are humans really so incompetent that we can't replicate what nature produced through evolutionary optimization with more compute than in EVERY human brain?
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>I would bet all of my assets of my life that AGI will not be seen in the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now. That includes anyone reading this message long after the lives of those reading it on its post date have ended. By almost any definition available during the 90s GPT-5 Thinking/Pro would pretty much qualify. The idea that we are somehow not going to make any progress for the next century seems…
The fact is that no matter how "advanced" AI seems to get, it always falls short and does not satisfy what we think of as true AI. It's always a case of "it's going to get better", and it's been said like this for decades now. People have been predicting AGI for a lot longer than the time I predict we will not attain it. LLMs are cool and fun and impressive (and can be dangerous), but they are not any form of AGI --…
Definitions in the 90s basically required passing the Turing Test which was probably passed by GPT3.5. Current definitions are too broad but something like 'better than the average human at most tasks' seems to be basically passed by say GPT5, definitions like 'better than all humans at all tasks' or 'better than all humans at all economically useful tasks' are closer to Superintelligence.
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The fact is that no matter how "advanced" AI seems to get, it always falls short and does not satisfy what we think of as true AI. It's always a case of "it's going to get better", and it's been said like this for decades now. People have been predicting AGI for a lot longer than the time I predict we will not attain it. LLMs are cool and fun and impressive (and can be dangerous), but they are not any form of AGI --…
>GPT by any definition of AGI is not AGI. You are ignoring the word "general" in AGI. GPT is extremely niche in what it does. Definitions in the 90s basically required passing the Turing Test which was probably passed by GPT3.5. Current definitions are too broad but something like 'better than the average human at most tasks' seems to be basically passed by say GPT5, definitions like 'better than all humans at all ta…
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Nonsense. A QC operator may be able to carry out a test with as much accuracy (or perhaps better accuracy, with enough practice) than the PhD quality chemist who developed it. They could plausibly do so with a high school education and not be able to explain the test in any detail. They do not understand the test in the same way as the chemist. If 'understand' is a meaningless term to someone who's spent 30 years in…
> If 'understand' is a meaningless term to someone who's spent 30 years in AI research, I understand why LLMs are being sold and hyped in the way they are. I don't have quite as much time as robotresearcher, but I've heard their sentiment frequently. I've been to conferences, talked with people at the top of the field (I'm "junior", but published and have a PhD) where when asking deeper questions I'll get a frequent…
Having said that, can you name one functional difference between an AI that understands, and one that merely behaves correctly in its domain of expertise?
As an example, how would a chess program that understands chess differ from one that is merely better at it than any human who ever lived?
(Chess the formal game; not chess the cultural phenomenon)
Some people don’t find the example satisfying, because they feel like chess is not the kind of thing where understanding pertains.
I extend that feeling to more things.
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Something to think about (hah!) is there are people without an internal monologue i.e. no voice inside their head they use when working out a problem. So they're thinking and learning and doing what humans do just fine with no little voice no language inside their head.
It's so weird that people literally seem to have a voice in their head they cannot control. For me personally my "train of thought" is a series of concepts, sometimes going as far as images. I can talk to myself in my head with language if I make a conscious effort to do so, just as I can breathe manually if I want. But if I don't, it's not really there like some people seem to have. Probably there are at least two g…
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They have to say that, or there'll be a loud sucking sound and hundreds of billions in capital will be withdrawn overnight
Ok that's great do you have evidence suggesting scaling is actually plateauing or that capabilities of GPT6 and Claude 4.5 Opus won't be better than models now?
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> that to understand knowledge you have to have a model of the world. You have a small but important mistake. It's to recite (or even apply ) knowledge. To understand does actually require a world model. Think of it this way: can you pass a test without understanding the test material? Certainly we all saw people we thought were idiots do well in class while we've also seen people we thought were geniuses fail. The t…
> We always had the math to show that scale wasn't enough Math, to show that scale (presumably of LLMs) wasn't enough for AGI? This sounds like it would be quite a big deal, what math is that?
I would be ecstatic if it did though, so if anyone has any examples or rebuttal, I would very much appreciate it.
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> that to understand knowledge you have to have a model of the world. You have a small but important mistake. It's to recite (or even apply ) knowledge. To understand does actually require a world model. Think of it this way: can you pass a test without understanding the test material? Certainly we all saw people we thought were idiots do well in class while we've also seen people we thought were geniuses fail. The t…
I'm not sure. There's a view that, as I understand it, suggests that language is intelligence. That language is a requirement for understanding. An example might be kind of the contrary—that you might not be able to hold an idea in your head until it has been named. For myself, until I heard the word gestalt (maybe a fitting example?) I am not sure I could have understood the concept. But when it is described it star…
> There's a view that suggests that language is intelligence.
> That language is a requirement for understanding.
I think you must then revisit your definition of language and ensure that it matches to all the creatures that you consider intelligent. At least by doing this you'll make some falsifiable claims and can make progress. I think an ant is intelligent, but I also think ants do things far more sophisticated than the average person thinks. It's an easy trap, not knowing what you don't know. But if we do the above we get some path to aid in discovery, right?
> that you might not be able to hold an idea in your head until it has been named
It is the condition where a person does not have an internal monologue. They think without words. The definition of language is still flexible enough that you can probably still call that language, just like in your example, but it shows a lack of precision in the definition, even if it is accurate.
> Perhaps it is why other animals on this planet seem to us lacking intelligence
Perhaps language is a necessary condition for advanced intelligence, but not intelligence alone. Perhaps it is communication and societies, differentiating from an internalized language. Certainly the social group can play an influence here, as coalitions can do more than the sum of the individuals (by definition). But the big question is if these things are necessary. Getting the correct causal graph, removing the confounding variables, is no easy task. But I think we should still try and explore differing ideas. While I don't think you're right, I'll encourage you to pursue your path if you encourage me to pursue mine. We can compete, but it should be friendly, as our competition forces us to help see flaws in our models. Maybe the social element isn't a necessary condition, but I have no doubt that it is a beneficial tool. I'm more frustrated by those wanting to call the problem solved. It obviously isn't, as it's been so difficult to get generalization and consensus among experts (across fields).
You have one decade to clean up your power use problem. If you don't you will find yourself in the next AI winter.