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How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

technologyreview.com

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Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#91

Post by tim333 »

turtletontine wrote: post #56
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #21

> At the core of most definitions you’ll find the idea of a machine that can match humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks. I expect this definition will be proven incorrect eventually. This definition would best be described as a "human level AGI", rather than AGI. AGI is a system that matches a core set of properties, but it's not necessarily tied to capabilities. Theoretically one could create a very small resou…

What does this even mean? How can we say a definition of “AGI” is “correct” or “incorrect” when the only thing people can agree on, is we don’t have AGI yet?

Of course AGI is just an abbreviation for artificial general intelligence and stuff like GPT-5 is artificial, somewhat intelligent and somewhat general.

I think the goalposts for "AGI" will keep moving so current AI doesn't match it.

I've thought of it as human level but already people are saying beating the average human isn't enough and it has to beat the best and be nobel prize worthy.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#92

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

solumunus wrote: post #85
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started with GPT-2 - not sure if OpenAI really believed it, or were just hyping it up, but they initially withheld public release of GPT-2 because it was "too powerful and dangerous"...

Obvious marketing if you ask me.

Yeah.

At the time there was no obvious reason not to trust that OpenAI was trying to act for the benefit of society, per their charter, so it seemed like an abundance of caution, and this level of LLM capability was new to most of us, so it was hard to guess how dangerous it actually was...

However, in retrospect, seeing how OpenAI continues to behave, it may well have just been to get publicity.

This whole "Be warned, we're about to release something that will destroy society!" shtick seems to be a recurring thing with the AI CEOs, specifically Altman and Amodei (who switched into hardcore salesman mode about a year ago).

The latest Twitter "warning" from Altman is to claim that their AI will soon be at the level of their AI developers, and so we should be prepared (for the self-accelerating singularity I suppose). Maybe this inspired someone to write him another trillion dollar check?

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#93

Post by mateo411 »

tim333 wrote: post #63
mateo411 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Singularity came from Kurzweil.

Well, it predated Kurzweil. The term first came up with John von Neumann in the 50s. But Kurzweil has promoted it.

Interesting. Thanks for telling me that.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#94

Post by mateo411 »

uvaursi wrote: post #84
mateo411 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the AI winter was over by 2007. There was a lot of hype about machine learning and big data. The Netflix Prize for building a Recommender model launched in 2006. There was research on neural networks and deep belief networks, but they weren't as popular as they are today.

And then Netflix decided to churn out garbage that no AGI recommendation engine can redeem.

There were some interesting algorithms that came out of the contest. There was a matrix factorization algorithm that worked pretty well. Another "guy in a garage" tried to incorporate the anchoring effect into their models.

I don't think Netflix used any of the algorithms. I suspect they have more data on the user and movies than was presented in the contest.

I agree, if all of the content is garbage, then you don't need a model, you could simply pick something at random.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#95

Post by nitwit005 »

xanderlewis wrote: post #89
nitwit005 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did genuinely struggle to define "useful flying machine", which is why you see the description of the Wright Brother's flight come with so much detail: "first controlled, sustained flight of a powered airplane".

> or at least it's easily possible to come up with a good definition.

That's my point. It wasn't easy. There are still disputes over flight achievements because people don't agree what should count.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#96

Post by dr_dshiv »

mlyle wrote: post #88
dr_dshiv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, that AI is a “jagged frontier.” AI is already better than a 50th percentile human on many/most intellectual tasks. Chess, writing business plans, literature reviews, emails, motion graphics, coding… So, if we say “AI is not AGI” because 1. It can’t do physical tasks or 2. it can’t replace intellectual human labor yet in most domains (for various reasons) or 3. , then it stands to reason that by the time we…

> then it stands to reason that by the time we reach AGI, it will already be superintelligent (smarter than humans in most domains) > > Yes, that's more versatile than most of us , because most of us are not at or above the median practiced person in a wide range of tasks. But it's not what I think of when I hear "superintelligence," because its performance on any given task is likely still inferior to the best human…

> That's much less clear to me.

But you must see that, if this point falls away, so does the argument.

“With some practice” surely means less 100 hours of practice. Not extensive practice, or PhD level practice or master-level practice.

Will the average person, after 100 hours of practice, really be rated better than AI at music, writing, visual art, coding, research, etc?

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#97

Post by mlyle »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #96
mlyle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then it stands to reason that by the time we reach AGI, it will already be superintelligent (smarter than humans in most domains) > > Yes, that's more versatile than most of us , because most of us are not at or above the median practiced person in a wide range of tasks. But it's not what I think of when I hear "superintelligence," because its performance on any given task is likely still inferior to the best human…

> That's much less clear to me. But you must see that, if this point falls away, so does the argument. “With some practice” surely means less 100 hours of practice. Not extensive practice, or PhD level practice or master-level practice. Will the average person, after 100 hours of practice, really be rated better than AI at music, writing, visual art, coding, research, etc?

??? most of us have a lot more than 100 hours of practice at things like this. Probably "some practice" means roughly the secondary background most people have, then undergraduate plus a couple of years of industry work?

If we're thinking about what human activity it will or can displace, it's probably unfair to compare it a seasoned doctorate. But it's also probably unfair to compare it to a kid with a few months of music lessons, too.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#98

Post by teamonkey »

nitwit005 wrote: post #60
teamonkey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a person in 1900 wrote a novel about landing on the moon, they would be a sci-fi author. If they discussed what a future moon landing might be like or how it could work, they would be a futurist. If they were raising funds for a moon landing that they are currently working on, and success is surely imminent, despite not having any evidence that they can achieve it, or that they have beaten the technical hurdles ne…

The reason for bringing up that idea is clarified by the sentence right after. What is the point of ignoring everything past the first sentence?

I wasn't disagreeing with you.

Re: How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

#99

Post by dr_dshiv »

mlyle wrote: post #97
dr_dshiv wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's much less clear to me. But you must see that, if this point falls away, so does the argument. “With some practice” surely means less 100 hours of practice. Not extensive practice, or PhD level practice or master-level practice. Will the average person, after 100 hours of practice, really be rated better than AI at music, writing, visual art, coding, research, etc?

??? most of us have a lot more than 100 hours of practice at things like this. Probably "some practice" means roughly the secondary background most people have, then undergraduate plus a couple of years of industry work? If we're thinking about what human activity it will or can displace, it's probably unfair to compare it a seasoned doctorate. But it's also probably unfair to compare it to a kid with a few months of…

Fine: Will the average person, after 1000 hours of practice, really be rated better than AI at music, writing, visual art, coding, research, etc?
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