Hacker News Reader

Comment by loa_in_ | Hacker News Reader

AGI is about as far away as it was two decades ago. Language models are merely a dent, and probably will be the precursor to a natural language interface to the thing.

View on HN

It’s useful to consider the rise of computer graphics and cgi. When you first see CGI, you might think that the software is useful for general simulations of physical systems. The reality is that it only provides a thin facsimile.

Real simulation software has always been separate from computer graphics.

AGI would seem to require consciousness or something that behaves in the same manner, and there does not seem to be anything along those lines currently or in the near future.

So far, everyone that has theorized that AGI will happen soon seems to be believe that with a sufficiently large amount of computing resources, "magic happens" and poof, we get AGI.

I've yet to hear anything more logical, but I'd love to.

We are clearly closer than 20 years ago - o1 is an order of magnitude closer than anything in the mid-2000s.

Also I would think most people would consider AGI science fiction in 2004 - now we consider it a technical possibility which demonstrates a huge change.

"Her" is from 2013. I came out of the cinema thinking "what utter bullshit, computers that talk like human beings, à la 2001" (*). And yes, in 2013 we weren't any closer to it than we were in 1968, when A Space Odyssey came out.

* To be precise, what seemed bs was "computers that talk like humans and it's suddenly a product on the market, and you have it on your phone, and yet everyone around act like it's normal and people still habe jobs!" Ah, I've been proven completely wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com