Hacker News Reader

Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

Who says you need anything other than the transformer? We've clearly not squeezed all the capability out of it.

I don’t think it’s so clear. The transformer has been available for 6 years, if it were possible to train one to achieve AGI then what’s stopped anyone from doing this that won’t still be the case in 5 years time, given than there’s potentially ?trillions on the table for anyone that does.

I don't understand what you're saying. People have been been training up transformers in the goal of "achieving agi". Transformers have been getting better as they've been trained up. Nobody has stopped doing this.

But they haven't achieved AGI, not even close. It can't distinguish between truth and nonsense. An LLM is essentially outputting nonsense all the time, that has been massaged by training to approximate truth through the proxy of likely-next-word.

What I’m saying is if it is possible to train transformers to achieve AGI, then why hasn’t it happened yet? What’s the limitation that will be overcome in the next 5 years?

Because training takes time (months), money and hardware. It's not like this is some instantaneous process.

Nobody has any knowledge of the "magic number" of size and data before "AGI" so people train increasingly large models.

Bigger models are in the process of being trained. They will continue to be until they no longer get better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com