Comment by foo3a9c4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foo3a9c4 | Hacker News Reader

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> For info: I don't believe (1), I do believe (2) although not that strongly

Thanks for clarifying. Do you believe there is a better than 20% chance that humans will develop AGI in the next 30 years?

> I simply don't see anything right now that convinces me it's just over the next hill.

These are the reasons that I believe we are close to developing an AGI system.

  (1) Many smart people are working on capabilities.
  (2) Many investment dollars will flow into AI development in the near future.
  (3) Many impressive AI systems have recently been developed: Meta's CICERO, OpenAI's GPT4, DeepMind's AlphaGo.
  (4) Hardware will continue to improve.
  (5) LLM performance significantly improved as data volume and training time increased.
  (6) Humans have built other complex artefacts without good theories of the artefact, including: operating systems, airplanes, beer.

These achievements are impressive, but I'd rather not overhype it.

* GPT-4 still hallucinates as hell, can't do math, fails as basic logic, can't handle really big contexts, hard to update, easy to jailbreak etc.

* AlphaGo was defeated by a Go amateur with a help of another AI.

* AlphaStar basically failed to achieve real goals, was trivial to cheese even after defeating high-ranked players sometimes.

All these problems are architectural, you can't just throw more money and GPUs at it like GPT-2-3-4.

It's hard to predict at this point. We may get to AGI anywhere from 5 years to 100 years.

I don't think these reasons are very persuasive, as everything but 5 has been true at different times in the past. Obviously it's much more people, more dollars, and more impressive systems (but slower hardware progress), but I hope you see what I'm getting at.

And of course there's differences in what someone considers to be soon. Many AI x-risk believers think there's a ~50% chance of AGI before 2031 (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...) (I've heard this prediction site's userbase tends towards futurists/techno-optimists/AI x-riskers). I would consider that soon, I wouldn't consider 2054 soon.

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