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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

> I've been following some of the more theoretical papers in the field, and we're barely even at the theory forming stage.

I read those papers too. And I write code and train models day in and day out. I could get very specific on what needs to be done, but that's what we do at our job. If you're curious, I'd say join the field.

I agree with you in that I don't think for a second anyone can make an accurate prediction of when we will AGI, but I have no doubt that it will be relatively soon, and that OpenAI will likely be one of the leaders, if not the leaders in creating it.

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I’ve been doing research in DL field for the last 6 years (just presented my last paper at IJCNN last week), and I can say with confidence we have no clue how to get to AGI. We don’t even know how DL works on the fundamental level. More importantly, we don’t know how the brain works. So I agree with pron that your “relatively soon” is just as likely to be 10 as 100 years from now.

I could explain it to you in an afternoon. But I’m not going to do it online, because then you have a thousand people call you “delusional”, because you simply are stating that exponential processes are going to continue. For some reason, many people who think themselves rational and scientific believe that things that have been going exponentially are suddenly going to go linear. To me, that is delusional.

Explain what?

How to get to AGI.

If you know how to get there why don’t you build it?

1) Indeed we are doing a few of the things on the checklist to build AGI.

2) Our focus is on helping improve medical and clinical science and cancer tooling first.

3) If we needed AGI to cure cancer, perhaps we'd be working directly on AGI. If anyone thinks this is the case, please let me know, as at the moment I don't think it is.

You don’t think AGI would dramatically speed up cancer research (or any other research)?

Of course I do, but my back of the envelope guess is there's a 30% shot we can cure cancer in 15 years without AGI, and a 1% shot we can reach AGI in 15 years. I think AGI is cool but I'm much more concerned about helping people with cancer.

> because you simply are stating that exponential processes are going to continue.

Exponential process continuing doesn't imply "we're going to get there soon" in any way, shape or form. The desired goal can still be arbitrarily far.

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