Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

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Very honestly asking - how do you convince investors you’re $100B away from an independent thinking computer if you’re not hiring to show that?

I’m sure these people are very serious about their work - do they actually know how far we are - technologically, spend, and time wise from real non word generating AGI with independent thought processes?

It’s an amazing research subject. And even more amazing a corporation is willing to pay people to research it. But it doesn’t mean it’s close in any way, or that anthropic would reach that goal in a decade or 3

I would compare spending this money and hiring these people to what Google Moonshot tried to do long ago. Very cool, very interesting, but also there should be a caveat on how far away it is in reality

I think that if I tried to rank-order strategies optimizing for fundraising, "act as if I'm trying to invent technology that I think stands a decent chance of causing human extinction, in the limit" would not come close to making the cut.

I don't see Anthropic making very confident claims about when they're going to achieve AGI (however you want to define that). Predicting how long it'll take to produce a specific novel scientific result is, by its very nature, pretty difficult. (You might have some guesses, if you have a comprehensive understanding of what unsolved dependencies there are, and have some reason to believe you know how long it'll take to solve _those_, and that's very much not the case here. But if you're in that kind of situation, it's much more likely you're dealing with an engineering problem, not a research problem.) Elsewhere in the comments on this link, their CISO predicts a 50% chance of hitting capabilities that'll trigger their ASL-3 standard in the next 6 months (my guess is on the strength of its ability to find vulnerabilities in open-source codebases). That's predicting the timeline for a small advancement in a relatively narrow set of capabilities where we can at least sort of measure progress.

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