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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

#591

Post by amypetrik8 »

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…

exactly, the brain - what a concept! over here you have broca's area, there, wernicke, then Bowman's crest, sector 19, and undiscovered country.

if you put the brain in the shape of a tube you'd have a really long err, well, let's say it's not a good idea to do that. the brain gives me goosepimples, my brain too

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#592

Post by themafia »

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…

Humans grow over years with plenty of self guided study. It's far more than a hardware problem.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#593

Post by aeve890 »

rzerowan wrote: post #584
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.” I’ve always thought about nature didn’t evolve to use electricity as its primary means of energy. Instead it uses chemistry. It’s quite curious, really. Like a tiny insect is chemistry powered. It doesn’t need to recharge batteries, it needs to eat and breathe oxygen. What i…

"Wetware" as it were , i remeber some research article some time back where they grew some kind of 'brainlets' and had them functional as far as memory was concerned[1]. Would be a interesting to see how that tech would progress while incororatd in the current silicon/photonic devices for input/output. Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement. [1] https://sciencesensei.com/scientists-cre…

>Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement.

thinking about the consequences of consumer grade "organic computing" gets weird really fast. How do you interface biological matter with peripherals? What about toxicity? What about pathogens? Not only as targets, but as vectors too. What about senescence? Would my computer catch a cold or get Alzheimer's? What about energy? Would I have to buy proteins/sugar for my PC? Would a "beefy PC master race" kind of machine big enough to gain sentience? Would my PC need to literally sleep?!

Funny to think about it

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#594

Post by themafia »

samuelknight wrote: post #169
friendzis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We would need a new hardware paradigm. It's not even that. The architecture(s) behind LLMs are nowhere near close that of a brain. The brain has multiple entry-points for different signals and uses different signaling across different parts. A brain of a rodent is much more complex than LLMs are.

LLM 'neurons' are not single input/single output functions. Most 'neurons' are Mat-Vec computations that combine the products of dozens or hundreds of prior weights. In our lane the only important question to ask is, "Of what value are the tokens these models output?" not "How closely can we emulate an organic bran?" Regarding the article, I disagree with the thesis that AGI research is a waste. AGI is the moonshot g…

> "Of what value are the tokens these models output?" not "How closely can we emulate an organic bran?"

Then you build something that is static and does not learn. This is as far from AI as you can get. You're just building a goofy search engine.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#595

Post by nawgz »

nitwit005 wrote: post #563
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…

A bee is an autonomous walking, climbing, and flying drone that investigates its environment, collects resources, builds structures, and coordinates with other drones. We're totally incapable of building an AI that can do anything resembling that. We're still at the phase where robots walking on rough terrain without falling over remains a bit impressive. I doubt the limitation is that we can't produce enough raw com…

I’m in agreement with you in that raw compute isn’t really the only missing piece, but I’m not in agreement we have enough compute to fully simulate even simple insect brains

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#596

Post by didibus »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #545
didibus wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production? Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ? I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples. Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have clou…

> Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT You've misread it. It's not compared to AI datacenters, it's every type of datacenter, for all types of computing. In the future scenario you've laid out it wouldn't be cloud AI compute. You wouldn't be able to use HN or send email or pay with a credit card or play video games or stream video.

But the recent complaints are specific about cloud AI compute no? And how it's driving the build out of all these new data-centers?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#597

Post by jgord »

I feel the same frustration, seen from another angle : I think we can use current ML techniques to solve 3 or 4 hard problems in 3D reconstruction, and doing so would unlock a vast amount of value - we could turn lidar scans and photos of buildings and industrial plants into accurate 3D models automatically.

BUT I think the bottleneck is _funding_ of small early risky startups to do the needed engineering work.

My notes on this : https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/29/digital-twins-the...

LLMs, GPU datacenters attract all the big money, and the med and small VCs seem to be leaving their money in the bank earning high interest rates, unless there is a slam dunk opportunity with guaranteed traction and MRR growth.

We seem to be betting that only the large companies will innovate, when historically this has not been the case - Deepseek is a recent counterexample.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#598

Post by Terr_ »

wat10000 wrote: post #224
rekrsiv wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure. Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achie…

Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as sophisticated as real ones." I do think we probably need a ne…

> Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from

I dunno, whenever I leave the silicon technology alone with plenty of power and cooling, nothing changes. :p

If the effect requires the involvement of swarms of ancient nanobots, then maybe that's the hardware and software that really deserves the credit.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#599

Post by andai »

wilkommen wrote: post #177
travisgriggs wrote: post #161

> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Sud…

In the short term, it may be unrealistic (as you illustrate in your story) to try to successfully navigate the increasingly fragmented, fragile, and overly complex technological world we have created without genAI's assistance. But in the medium to long term, I have a hard time seeing how a world that's so complex that we can't navigate it without genAI can survive. Someday our cars will once again have to be simple…

>our systems cannot withstand shocks

We've seen a disturbing preview of this recently.

It's a natural law that what is not exercised dies away.

When we make our systems too stable and predictable, the ability to operate effectively in the absence of stability also dies away.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#600

Post by andymasley »

pastel8739 wrote: post #550
simonw wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake ) about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his initial take about it not being a big deal: https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce... Key quote: > If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more availab…

This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions: 1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone. 2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities 3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, tha…

Just as an example, Loudoun County has the most data center concentration in the world by a wide margin, and also has significantly lower water prices than the Virginia average. Seems like they've been able to build out huge new water capacity for data centers and that hasn't raised househould prices, or even kept them low. https://andymasley.substack.com/i/171855599/the-county-with-...
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