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Why I don't think AGI is imminent

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Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#51

Post by 9x39 »

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired.

Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee.

Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'true AGI'. I kept reading about the limits of transformers around GPT-4 and Opus 3 time, and then those seem basic compared to today.

I gave up trying to guess when the diminishing returns will truly hit, if ever, but I do think some threshold has been passed where the frontier models are doing "white collar work as an API" and basic reasoning better than the humans in many cases, and once capital familiarizes themselves with this idea more, it's going to get interesting.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#52

Post by xutopia »

I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online.

The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#53

Post by pixl97 »

lysace wrote: post #12
ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

That "simple orchestration layer" (paraphrased) is what I consider the AGI. But yeah, I suspect LLM:s may actually get close enough. "Just" add more reasoning loops and corresponding compute. It is objectively grotesquely wasteful (a human brain operates on 12 to 25 watts and would vastly outperform something like that), but it would still be cataclysmic. /layperson, in case that wasn't obvious

If we can get AI down to this power requirement then it's over for humans. Just think of how many copies of itself thinking at the levels of the smartest humans it could run at once. Also where all the hardware could hide itself and keep itself powered around the world.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#54

Post by [deleted] »

9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

[deleted]

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#55

Post by esafak »

9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#56

Post by danenania »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #25
ryanSrich wrote: post #5

AGI is here. 90%+ of white collar work _can_ be done by an LLM. We are simply missing a tested orchestration layer. Speaking broadly about knowledge work here, there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Especially if you're a typical office worker whose job is done primarily on a computer, if that's all AGI is, then yeah, it's here.

> there is almost nothing that a human is better at than Opus 4.6. Lolwut. I keep having to correct Claude at trivial code organization tasks. The code it writes is correct; it’s just ham-fisted and violates DRY in unholy ways. And I’m not even a great coder…

I’m very pro AI coding and use it all day long, but I also wouldn’t say “the code it writes is correct”. It will produce all kinds of bugs, vulnerabilities, performance problems, memory leaks, etc unless carefully guided.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#57

Post by beej71 »

9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

I'd always imagined that AGI meant an AI was given other AIs to manage.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#58

Post by causal »

esafak wrote: post #55
9x39 wrote: post #51

There was a meme going around that said the fall of Rome was an unannounced anticlimactic event where one day someone went out and the bridge wasn't ever repaired. Maybe AGI's arrival is when one day someone is given an AI to supervise instead of a new employee. Just a user who's followed the whole mess, not a researcher. I wonder if the scaffolding and bolt-ons like reasoning will sufficiently be an asymptote to 'tr…

But it's already like that; models are better than many workers, and I'm supervising agents. I'd rather have the model than numerous juniors; esp. the kind that can't identify the model's mistakes.

This is my greatest cause for alarm regarding LLM adoption. I am not yet sure AI will ever be good enough to use without experts watching them carefully; but they are certainly good enough that non-experts cannot tell the difference.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#59

Post by causal »

xutopia wrote: post #52

I’m under the same impression. I don’t think LLMs are the path to AGI. The “intelligence” we see is mostly illusory. It’s statistical repetition of the mediocre minds who wrote content online. The intelligence we think we recognize is simply an electronic parrot finding the right words in its model to make itself useful.

I fear that AI will be intelligent enough to negate human general intelligence before it is itself generally intelligent.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#60

Post by beej71 »

hi_hi wrote: post #11

How will we know if its AGI/Not AGI? (I don't think a simple app is gonna cut it here haha) What is the benchmark now that the Turing test has been blown out of the water?

I like the line of thinking from an earlier commenter: when an AI company no longer has any humans working, we'll know we're there.
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