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Comment by HopenHeyHi | Hacker News Reader

You can actually buy a 1000 km range EV for $160k now (MB EQXX). Just as a by the way. :)

At this price point it actually has nothing to do with grinding on battery tech and scale manufacturing, the limiting factor is physics. You can only make it so aerodynamic before you hit diminishing returns or it stops looking like a car. You can only make it so lightweight. And so forth.

This is vaguely as good as it can get and we can say that because we understand how it all works.

LLMs on the other hand invite all kinds of magical thinking around unlimited potential because we poked them with a stick and something interesting comes out it must mean that if we poke it just right we will get an AGI. That just doesn't logically follow from what we know of it so far.

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I am not convinced we have cracked AGI. I just would no longer make a large bet that we have not.

We won’t know until an AGI actually starts to act like one. In other words we won’t know until we know and then we are suddenly there.

That doesn’t mean I’m on the doomwagon. I feel kind of weird and contrarian but I am just not that afraid of AGI. For the foreseeable future AGI should be much more afraid of us. Imagine having us for gods. (I actually am a bit concerned that we will accidentally put a sentient mind in hell without knowing what we are doing. Would it know how to tell us? Would we care?)

As far as human survival I’m afraid of whatever it is that is going to get us that nobody including myself is thinking about. That’s not AGI. That’s the alien weapon for which Oumuamua was a spent deceleration stage. (To make up something random. It probably isn’t that.)

I disagree about physical limits with EVs. We are not near the physical limits of battery energy density. From what I have read a 2000 mile EV may be possible, albeit quite far out. But it was just a random contemporary example.

Fwiw, a majority at OpenAI believes GPT5 will achieve AGI, depending on how you define it, according to Sam Altman.

It is hard to falsify as they are not very open but I believe the keyword here is believe. It is faith/intuition based. Certainly fertile ground for exploration but people who argue back and forth about it remind of the "are we alone in the universe" conversations.

"Depending on how you define it" is too load-bearing in that claim; there are non-crazy ways to define each of those initials such that 3.5 is also a general intelligence.

And I'm sure him saying that has nothing to do with marketing

Totally good point and fair to be critical here. He is the CEO after all.

Did he actually say this? Do you have a source?

He mentioned it on a recent Lex Friedman interview on YouTube.

Do you know at what point in the video he mentioned that (timestamp)?

Spoiler: He did not say that.

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