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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

#81

Post by ryanSrich »

dimitri-vs wrote: post #79
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.

API Opus 4.6 will tell you it's still 2025, admit it's wrong then revert back to being convinced it's 2025 as it nears it's context limit. I'll go so far as to say LLM agents are AGI-lite but saying we "just need the orchestration layer" is like saying ok we have a couple neurons, now we just need the rest of the human.

Giving opus a memory or real-time access to the current year is trivial. I don't see how that's an argument against it being AGI.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#82

Post by ryanSrich »

causal wrote: post #20
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.

Opus is the very best and I still throw away most of what it produces. If I did not carefully vet its work I would degrade my code bases so quickly. To accurately measure the value of AI you must include the negative in your sum.

I would and have done the same with Jr. devs. It's not an argument against it being AGI.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#83

Post by ryanSrich »

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…

This is entirely solvable with skills, memory, context, and further prompting. All of which can be done in a way that's reliable and repeatable.

You wouldn't expect a Jr. dev to be the best at keeping things dry either.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#84

Post by ryanSrich »

danenania wrote: post #56
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So it's even more human than we thought

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#85

Post by ryanSrich »

JSDave wrote: post #22
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.

AGI is when it can do all intellectual work that can be done by humans. It can improve its own intelligence and create a feedback loop because it is as smart as the humans who created it.

This has always been my personal definition of AGI. But the market and industry doesn't agree. So I've backed off on that and have more or less settled on "can do most of the knowledge work that a human can do"

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#86

Post by hi_hi »

esafak wrote: post #78
hi_hi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that was the intent of the comment, more that true AGI should be so useful and transformative that it unlocks enough value and efficiencies to boost GDP. Much like the Industrial Revolution or harnessing electricity, instead of a fancy chatbot.

Increased productivity is not equivalent to intelligence.

No one said it is. Sometimes correlation does equal causation.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#87

Post by kens »

Lerc wrote: post #73
hunterpayne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you don't understand Machine Learning in any real way. Literally the 3rd or 4th thing you learn about ML is that for any given problem, there is an ideal model size. Just making the model bigger doesn't work because of something called the curse of dimensionality. This is something we have discovered about every single problem and type of learning algorithm used in ML. For LLMs, we probably moved past the ideal…

Um, what? Are you interpreting scaling to mean adding parameters and nothing else? I'm not entirely sure where you get your confidence that we've past the ideal model size from, but at least that's a clear prediction so you should be able to tell if and when you are proven wrong. Just for the record, do you care to put an actual number on something we won't go past? [edit] Vibe check on user comes out as Contrarian 4…

Is there a tool or something that gives this vibe check? (Serious question)

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#88

Post by greedo »

Lerc wrote: post #73
hunterpayne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you don't understand Machine Learning in any real way. Literally the 3rd or 4th thing you learn about ML is that for any given problem, there is an ideal model size. Just making the model bigger doesn't work because of something called the curse of dimensionality. This is something we have discovered about every single problem and type of learning algorithm used in ML. For LLMs, we probably moved past the ideal…

Um, what? Are you interpreting scaling to mean adding parameters and nothing else? I'm not entirely sure where you get your confidence that we've past the ideal model size from, but at least that's a clear prediction so you should be able to tell if and when you are proven wrong. Just for the record, do you care to put an actual number on something we won't go past? [edit] Vibe check on user comes out as Contrarian 4…

How are you calculating that? Also, my 1000 foot view would see that "rating" as something most HN commenters would match.

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#89

Post by skybrian »

anonymid wrote: post #80
NiloCK wrote: post #61

> The transformer architectures powering current LLMs are strictly feed-forward. This is true in a specific contextual sense (each token that an LLM produces is from a feed-forward pass). But untrue for more than a year with reasoning models, who feed their produced tokens back as inputs, and whose tuning effectively rewards it for doing this skillfully. Heck, it was untrue before that as well, any time an LLM respon…

Thanks for reading, and I really appreciate your comments! > who feed their produced tokens back as inputs, and whose tuning effectively rewards it for doing this skillfully Ah, this is a great point, and not something that I considered. I agree that the token feedback does change the complexity, and it seems that there's even a paper by the same authors about this very thing! https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 I'll ha…

It's general-purpose enough to do web development. How far can you get from writing programs and seeing if you get the answers you intended? If English words are "grounded" by programming, system administration, and browsing websites, is that good enough?

Re: Why I don't think AGI is imminent

#90

Post by hackyhacky »

hi_hi wrote: post #63

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa. Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before? Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets…

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.

The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

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