641–650 of 1001 posts
With all due respect, what does it say about us that „famous researcher voices his speculative opinion“ is an instant top 1 on hackernews?
I mean, HN is no stranger to cults of personality. Post a paulg essay that says something a teenager could write and it'll fly up to position 1.
It looks like Andrej's definition of "agent" here is an entity that can replace a human employee entirely - from the first few minutes of the conversation: When you’re talking about an agent, or what the labs have in mind and maybe what I have in mind as well, you should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you. For example, you work with some employees here. When would yo…
He’s not just talking about agents good enough to replace workers. He’s talking about whether agents are currently useful at all. >Overall, the models are not there. I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop. They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that. I’m not sure what’s going on,…
At least now we have a slight chance to prepare for the potential economic and social impacts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s. The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here…
I don’t have a deep understand of LLMs but don’t they fundamentally work on tokens and generate a multi-dimensional statistical relationship map between tokens? So it doesn’t have to be LLM. You could theoretically have image tokens (though I don’t know in practice, but the important part is the statistical map). And it’s not like my brain doesn’t work like that either. When I say a funny joke in response to people i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a blind human? Are they just like an LLM? What about a multimodal model trained on video? Is that like a human?
This is actually a great point but for the opposite reason - if you ask a blind person if the night sky is beautiful, they would say they don't know because they've never seen it (they might add that they've heard other people describe it as such). Meanwhile, I just asked ChatGPT "Do you think the night sky is beautiful?" And it responded "Yes, I do..." and went on to explain why while describing senses its incapable…
Am I dating myself by thinking Kurzweil is still relevant? 2029: Human-level AI 2045: The Singularity - machine intelligence 1 billion times more powerful than all human intelligence Based on exponential growth in computing. He predicts we'll merge with AI to transcend biological limits. His track record is mixed, but 2029 looks more credible post-GPT-5. The 2045 claim remains highly speculative.
I lost all respect for him after reading about his views on medical immortality. His argument is that over time human life expectancy has been constantly increasing * and he calculated that based on some arbitrary rate of acceleration, that science would be expanding human life expectancy by more than a year, per year - medical immortality in other words, and all expected to happen just prior to the time he's reachin…
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.
A decade is nothing. If issues will be worked through a decade from now, that means the best time to think about opportunities/coonsequences related to that is now.
The important thing is that this is not going to be perpetually 20 years in the future like fusion. This is something that will happen.
We will never achieve AGI, because we keep moving the goalposts. SOTA models are already capable of outperforming any human on earth in a dizzying array of ways, especially when you consider scale. Humans also produce nonsensical, useless output. Lots of it. Yes, LLMs have many limitations that humans easily transcend. But few if any humans on earth can demonstrate the breadth and depth of competence that a SOTA mode…
I think it's fair to do it to the idea of AGI.
Moving the goalpost is often seen as a bad thing (like, shifting arguments around). However, in a more general sense, it's our special human sauce. We get better at stuff, then raise the bar. I don't see a reason why we should give LLMs a break if we can be more demanding of them.
> SOTA models are already capable of outperforming any human on earth in a dizzying array of ways, especially when you consider scale.
Performance should include energy consumption. Humans are incredibly efficient at being smart while demanding very little energy.
> But few if any humans on earth can demonstrate the breadth and depth of competence that a SOTA model possesses.
What if we could? What if education mostly stopped improving in 1820 and we're still learning physics at school by doing exercises about train collisions and clock pendulums?
The next 2-3 years are going to be incredibly interesting.