Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

This large piece of text starts kinda convincing but then there are nuggets, like I guess glitches in the matrix, that kind-of ruin the show. for example:

"""There’s some assumptions that flow into the exact numbers, including that humans “think” at 100 tokens/minute (just a rough order of magnitude estimate, e.g. consider your internal monologue)"""

also for example quoting AlphaGo's move 37 against Lee Sedol, but failing to quote the fact that AlphaGo's domination against even non-grandmasters was soon enough destroyed (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/man-b...)

This makes me think the whole thing is not really science. For example there is very little about energy costs and energy availability limits in there, just the amazing statement that the US only has to burn lots of its nat-gas (emitting lots of CO2 btw.) to get the power needed.

It doesn’t start off convincing though. His premise is that since 2018-2024 follows exponential growth, 2024 onward will. Contrast with Yann’s oft repeated mantra that what looks like exponential growth is more likely the beginning of a sigmoid.

That’s the difference between someone with 3+ decades in the field of AI research vs someone with barely 2 decades on earth.

This is a fair critism. However, I don't think it matters much, to the overall argument he makes.

Why?

We don't need AGI to see massive geopolitical disruption. We are already seeing this. The US has put up a GPU wall around China. That is evidence enough.

The capability we have already is enough to greatly upset the balance of power in a variety of spheres... Both sides lag in implementation. The capability is alresdy there. Capability will grow. AGI is not relevant to the concern for security. We've past that point already. The labs are a key NAT security asset. They just are privately owned/operated... For now. This is the way of things. History shows this.

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