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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

Did he say he doesn't believe in the concept of AGI? What does that mean? He doesn't believe machine intelligence will ever surpass human intelligence? That's surprising.

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Having been in the industry, I think a lot of the researchers at that level get tired of every layman jumping to discussion of AGI, so Ive heard some of them refuse to comment on it. (or have a prepped one liner) Who can blame them?

AGI at some point will become more about the semantics of the term. Does it mean an intelligence that can self improve? etc. Generally I think game worlds are likely to have the right conditions for the first emergence of primitive agi-precursors.

He means AGI is not a meaningful term, because 'general' is too ambiguous - ie, even human intelligence is not truly general. So it's a meaningless term according to him. I think he would not oppose a term such as 'superhuman AI'. He goes into this in some depth in lex fridman's interview of him, can check that out if you're curious.

This is not surprising, because virtually every AI expert (except Kurzweil) don't think AGI is even a remote possibility in this century.

The only "AI experts" who believe that AGI is something to worry about are self appointed AI experts - Elon Musk, Sam Harris, Sam Altman etc. Zuckerberg had actually set up a dinner with Musk and LeCun to explain to him that AGI is not a realistic possibility. This led to Musk stating that Zuckerberg had a very poor understanding of AI. Looks like Musk is the self appointed AI expert in that table of 3!

Oh BTW, Musk, if you are reading this - how is the FSD project coming along?

Note: Scientists working for Open AI will pretend that AGI is a real possibility because the folks funding Open AI have a predilection for AGI.

Do you consider gwern not to be an AI expert? I think this is a reasonably technical explanation of how we may not be as far away from AGI as some choose to believe: https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

I am not sure who this person is. How much has he published in ML and what is his h-index.

As examples, Le Cun has a h-index of 127 Hinton 164 Goodfellow 75 etc. None of them consider AGI to be a realistic possibility this century. Kurzweil, the AGI proponent, has an hindex of 22.

always remember that the scientific community was pretty much against Einsteins ideas when he first began publishing.

I don't recall any such thing. His papers were peer reviewed and published in science journals by the scientific community. Minkowski famously followed up with the concept of spacetime as a consequence of relativity.

Nah, he’s more of a hobbyist in AI. I don’t necessarily think you need to be explicitly in academia to produce good academic work (independent researchers do exist), but he hasn’t really produce anything (in terms of actual theoretical/experimental results) that could be regarded as a substantial contribution to the field. He’s made some anime datasets though, maybe it could be useful to some.

I often wonder if being too close to the experimental results and current techniques blinds some people from seeing the bigger picture. Gwern certainly seems good at analyzing large-scale trends in AI research, perhaps broad high-level knowledge of the field is advantageous for this vs deep understanding of specific neural network details.

I trust Hinton and LeCun who have actually created the trends and bigger picture and invented the now "current" techniques over commentators who show up years later and offer shallow non peer reviewed analysis and predictions.

Reminds me of this talk by the failed tech startup's non technical CEO who apparently was able to see the bigger picture that scientist aspergers needs weren't able to see.

https://youtu.be/ukgnU2aXM2c

The notion of anyone being an "expert" on AGI is rather silly considering that we have no AGI and don't even have a plausible path to build one. It's sort of like being an expert on warp drives or time machines.

This poll covers a group of the "100 Top authors in academic AI research according to Microsoft Academic search" and shows a mean "50% confidence that High level machine intelligence will exist" date of 2074. Clearly at least some AI researchers think it's a remote possibility this century.

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf

At 50:11 of this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDR1I2Shw_E&t=0s) Geoffrey Hinton estimates that super human AI is possible within 100 years.

Experts also said that having a computer beat a professional Go player was at least 10 years off.

Be critical of what experts say.

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