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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

I can’t go into specifics for obvious reasons, but I can tell you they’re a smart, capable crew, with lots of resources, and time is on their side. If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi, they’d be near the top, precisely because they’re exploring ideas that others don’t seem to be focusing on. It’s the early stages, so it’ll take a few years to get to results. But they’re laser-focused.

There are a bunch of things I thought were cool. John has a worklog going back four years or so, with entries practically every day. He’s nothing if not thorough.

Everyone tends to focus on John, but the other members are just as professional and dedicated. They’re a delight to work with. Also the investors are worth mentioning — Nat in particular has built a super cluster of H100s for startups to use, and has done a bunch of other work to support AI.

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If I had to place bets on which lab will invent agi

I'd bet against "invent AGI" being a coherent or agreed upon thing, and I'd also bet against the "wake-up" scenario of a system saying "I'm AGI"

Which lab invented deep learning? Certainly U Toronto had the breakthrough that made a 30+ year old field exciting, but there was a lot of work in Montreal, NYU, Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and many other places

Hell,LLMs can and do output strings of "I'm AGI", so in some sense we're long past that. The problem is as humans we've never defined what it means for a system to be AGI.

My back of a napkin definition is that AGI, given the same information and tools as an IQ 100 human, is able to do all of the same tasks that you could ask a human to do, at the same quality level, as well as recall the experience some time later, like a human would likely be able to do.

The particular issue here is that is subjective as any other subjective definition. 100 IQ is subjective and a moving target. 100 IQ doesn't even mean you can survive and navigate in the real world. Even worse is all humans cannot do all tasks other humans can do and we'd consider them intelligent.

Furthermore this "must behave like a human" blindness represents both a danger, and a way to miss intelligence capabilities leaving them unused/under capitalized. Humans behave like humans because we have human bodies with particular sets of strengths and weaknesses. Other 'intelligent' actors with different embodiment will necessarily behave differently.

Couple that with humans have become far more intelligent and stronger by using tools, that the ability to 'universally' interface with external tooling, at least in my subjective opinion is what will be the defining factor of higher intelligences.

Could argue ChatGPT can already do a lot of this

Didn't Schmidhuber's lab predate all of those in their inventions except ReLU (which I've heard is now out of favor as compute outpaces memory bandwidth and other activation functions have better properties).

Yeah I should have mentioned him too as evidence of the point!

How do people apply? They don't seem to have much of a web presence.

I think he sources from people he knows, so your best bet is an intro.

Thanks, I'm pretty interested, but don't have any direct connects.

I'd accept a massive pay cut to work with such legends :/

I don’t think spending is their primary constraint; they’re probably looking for talent, no matter the cost.

It seems more of a place that finds you if you are doing interesting work

Can you share if the approach is more GOFAI or more neural network-type stuff? Just curious, and I understand if you can't say much, of course.

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