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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

#571

Post by keeda »

dont__panic wrote: post #481
keeda wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the food industry continues churning billions in profits at the expense of our health, so statistically speaking, looks like "we" are OK with! Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where it's due. But what this thread is saying is that criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks…

Have you considered that there is a difference between: - food, a thing that literally every human needs every 24 hours (really 6-12) to continue to live - GenAI, a new product with dubious value that contributes significantly to the systemic enshittification of the US and global economy? FYI whataboutism is a well known (and honestly quite lazy) fallacy and propaganda strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatabou…

I should have been more precise with my terms, but there is a difference between "food" and the "food industry" indicated by the likes of Nestle. Yes, everybody needs food. No, nobody needs the ultraprocessed junk Nestle produces.

I didn't see the OP's point as whataboutism, but rather putting things into perspective. We are debating the water usage of a powerful new technology that a large fraction of the world is finding useful [1], which is a fraction of what other, much more frivolous (golf courses!) or even actively harmful (Nestle!) industries use.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907 -- Recent thread with very rough numbers which could well be wrong, but the productivity impact is becoming detectable at a national level.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#572

Post by killerstorm »

Apocryphon wrote: post #507
killerstorm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AlphaEvolve is a general system which works in many domains. How is that not a step towards general intelligence? And it is effectively a loop around LLM. But my point is that we have evidence that Demis Hassabis knows his shit. Just doubting him on a general vibe is not smart

Has he, his team, or DeepMind used any AGI rhetoric, even just as advertising?

This entire thread: people who are too lazy to read basic info about AI companies but have an opinion about "AGI rhetoric".

What do you think OpenAI was founded in a response to?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#573

Post by tbrownaw »

pweezy wrote: post #328
magicalist wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics" The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics. Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual con…

To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics". That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.

I read it more as a claim that people who advocate against AI are picking arguments as a means to an end rather than because they actually believe or care about what they're saying.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#574

Post by jiggawatts »

jcheng wrote: post #562
jiggawatts wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite example is the complaints about “e-waste” because AirPod batteries are not replaceable. Never mind that the batteries make up about half of the weight of the things ro begin with, the entire annual production of AirPods and their cases would barely fill a single shipping container. No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like that, just one container (1). Yet, it makes people lose their rationa…

Do you have a citation for that factoid?

Apologies, looks like I mis-remembered the numbers from the original debate, the actual number is about 110x 40-foot containers. It can be calculated easily enough from the # shipped, the volume of a charging case, and the volume of a shipping container.

It doesn’t alter the conclusion that much: in the grand scheme of human industrial activity, this is nothing.

I.e.: if AirPods were made by an independent company, that firm would be in the top 50 of the largest corporations in the world!

For example, a comparable sized company would be Coca Cola, which goes through 300,000 tons of aluminium annually for their cans, not to mention oil used for plastic bottles!

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#575

Post by Apocryphon »

killerstorm wrote: post #572
Apocryphon wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has he, his team, or DeepMind used any AGI rhetoric, even just as advertising?

This entire thread: people who are too lazy to read basic info about AI companies but have an opinion about "AGI rhetoric". What do you think OpenAI was founded in a response to?

Musk’s wild-eyed AGI visions and hysteria towards the sober-minded, research-focused efforts of DeepMind / Demis Hassabis?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#576

Post by kragen »

buu700 wrote: post #568
kragen wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/starting-to-build-the-... (undated) says Orion is intended to deliver 50 megawatts. If they could deliver that for under US$100 million they'd be competitive with fossil-fuel plants, assuming no fuel cost or other opex; if they could deliver it for under US$30 million they'd be competitive with solar, unless solar gets even cheaper. (It's fallen in cost by 45% over the last two y…

I'm not an expert on the subject, but is there an obvious bottleneck that would prevent Helion from manufacturing an arbitrarily large number of generators that scales with demand? 2000 generators doesn't seem like an overwhelmingly large number if they get paid enough to build out capacity for it, and they've already started on an assembly line manufacturing plant. I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on cop…

> I'm not an expert on the subject, but is there an obvious bottleneck that would prevent Helion from manufacturing an arbitrarily large number of generators that scales with demand?

No, nothing is obvious to anyone outside the company.

> I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly,

Hopefully their next model will come out before another billion dollars of investment goes down the drain.

> Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap,

Yes, that could happen, but what it really means is that we don't have any idea what the opex is.

> My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns,

I think the bigger concern there would be whether China would import it.

> But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion,

Well, the US hasn't been a highly lucrative market for power plants for 50 years. Maybe the advent of new, radically cheaper technology could change that, but I suspect it won't; the advent of new, radically cheaper energy in the late 18th century didn't turn China or Japan into a highly lucrative market for power plants, for essentially social or political rather than technical and economic reasons.

> We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.

Yes, I agree. But we weren't talking about the long run, but rather about currently existing companies that need to return money to their investors in the next ten or twenty years. Breakthroughs do happen, but rarely.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#577

Post by philipwhiuk »

fallingfrog wrote: post #442
ACCount37 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted for displaying the kind of overconfidence that people consider shameful. Everyone in ML has seen dozens to thousands of instances of "I have a radical new idea that will result in a total AI breakthrough" already. Ever wondered why the real breakthroughs are so few and far in between?

I know how it looks. I shouldn't have said anything- it was pointless. At any rate someone else will figure out what i know soon or already has.

Nostradamus 2.0

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#578

Post by XorNot »

bob1029 wrote: post #279
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…

To be fair to the raw capabilities of the semiconductor industry, a 100mm^2 die at 3nm can contain on the order of 1~10 trillion features. I don't know that we are actually that far off in terms of scale. How to arrange these features seems to be the difficult part. The EDA [0] problem is immune to the bitter lesson. There are certainly specific arrangements of matter that can solve this problem better than a GPU/TPU…

The bigger issue though is that we can't scale that die to the approximate volume of a human brain in any dimension.

Those feature sizes are tiny, yes, but we struggle to put them in a block the size of a human brain and keep it cool enough to be useful (or even make it affordable).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#579

Post by philipwhiuk »

killerstorm wrote: post #377
jimbokun wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's to early to declare something "fundamental blocker" while there's so much ongoing research.

There's been 'ongoing research' since the 60s

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#580

Post by XorNot »

daveguy wrote: post #241
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…

Minor correction here. You are correct about hardware being an issue, but the magnitude is much greater. You have a lot more than "thousands" of inputs. In the hand alone you have ~40,000+ tactile corpuscles (sensing regions). And that's just one mode. The eye has ~7 million cones and 80 million rods. There is processing and quantization performed by each of those cells and each of the additional cells those signal,…

I agree with this up till saying we must be very far from AGI. I don't think we're close, but the scale of human inputs doesn't tell us anything about it. A useful AGI need not be capable of human level cognition, and human level cognition need not require the entire human biological or nervous systems - we're a product of millions of years of undirected random evolution, optimized to run a fleshy body and survive African plains predators. This whole thing we do of thinking and science and engineering is a quirk that made us very adaptable, but how much of what we are is required to implement it isn't clear (i.e. a human minus a hand can still understand advanced mathematics, there are blind programmers etc.)
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