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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.

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There are so many things wrong in this statement (starting with "immediately"). Let's assume they built a system they claim is AGI. Let's assume its energy consumption is smaller than that of a small country. Let's assume that we can verify it's AGI. Let's assume its intelligence is higher than average human. That's many "ifs" and I omitted quite a few.

Now, the question is: would you trust it? As a human, a manager, a president? With the current generation, I treat is as a dumb but quick typist, it can create code much faster than I can, but the responsibility to verify it all is entirely on me. We would need decades of proof such an AGI is reliable in order to actually start trusting it - and even then, I'm not sure how safe it would be.

If anyone in the thread has used o1 or the real-time voice tools, it's pretty clear AGI is here already, so we are really talking about ASI.

You have no option but to trust an ASI as it is all-powerful by definition. If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with.

Edit: please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)

> please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)

By this definition a calculator would be an AGI. (Behold -- a man!)

Meh, what I've seen is that we continually move the goalposts for AGI, and even GTP-3.5 would have been considered AGI by our standards from just 5 years ago.

But if I can't convince you, maybe Norvig can: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

Let’s say you gave o1 an API to control a good robot. Could it throw a football? Could it accomplish even the most basic tasks? If not, it’s not generally intelligent.

> Let’s say you gave o1 an API to control a good robot. Could it throw a football?

Maybe.

> Could it accomplish even the most basic tasks?

Definitely: https://youtu.be/Sq1QZB5baNw

I stand corrected

> If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with.

I don't understand this sentence. I don't trust Generative AI because it often spits out false, inaccurate or made up answers, but I don't believe my "only option is to prevent it from existing".

ASI by definition will be all-powerful or close to it. What are you gonna do if it comes into existence?

Because if you don't trust it, you're fucked:

- Your attempts to limit its influence on your life will be effective only if the ASI decides to willfully ignore or not notice you.

- If it lies or not, there's nothing you can really do. The outcome it wants is practically guaranteed regardless. It will be running circles around your mental capacity like a human drawing circles around an ant on a piece of paper.

So what option do you really have but to trust it? I mean, sure, you can not trust the all-powerful god, but your lack of trust will never really have any effect on the real world, or even your life, as the ASI will always get what it wants.

Really, your only option is to prevent it from happening to begin with.

All that said - I think ASI will be great and people's concerns are overblown.

> ASI by definition will be all-powerful or close to it.

That's a huge assumption.

AI in SF: all-powerful all-controlling abstract entity.

AI in reality: LLMs on thousands of servers with GPUs, operated and controlled by engineers, gated by a startup masquerading as a non-profit and operating for years at a loss, with a web interface and an API, fragile enough that it becomes unavailable at times.

You are conflating AGI (what we have today) with ASI (what you are referring to in science-fiction.) These are completely different things and my comment refers to ASI, not AGI.

Would you settle for a few days of testing in perfect conditions? Just kidding, companies don't care!

/All Gifts, Bestowed/ by Gayou is a great read that explores this topic.

The problems with central planning that capitalism ostensibly solves don't exist because of a lack of intelligence, but due to the impedance mismatch between the planner and the people.

Making the central planner an AGI would just make it worse, because there's no guarantee that just because it's (super)intelligent it can empathize with its wards and optimize for their needs and desires.

The problem isn't AGI becomes the oracle central planner. The problem is AGI becomes the central planner, the government and everybody else who currently has a job.

I think there won't be just one AGI, no central planner. LLM abilities leak, other models can catch up in a few months.

The problem with all such criticisms is that there is an implicit assumption that humans can be trusted.

I know human limitations. I don’t know AGI limtations.

Most humans can not lie all the time. Their true intentions do come out from time to time.

AGI might not have that problem - AGI might hide its true intentions for hundreds of years.

Have you… met humans?

I don't think the concern is that an AGI would become a central planner, but that an AGI would be so much better than human investors that the entire VC class would be outclassed, and that the free market would shift towards using AGI to make investment/capital allocation decisions. Which, of course, runs the risk of turning the whole system into a paperclip optimizing machine that consumes the planet in pursuit of profit; but the VC class seems to desire that anyway, so I don't think we can assume that a free market would consider that a bad outcome.

That VC class appears to really enjoy the frisson of bullshit, elaborate games of guess-what’s-behind-the-curtain, and status posturing. Remove that hedonistic factor and the optimization is likely to be much more effective.

A fair amount of evidence has existed for at least 50 years that a chimpanzee throwing darts at a wall can outperform most active fund managers, yet this has done nothing to reduce their compensation or power.

It has been known since the 1920s that capitalism isn't perfectly efficient. The competition has always been between an imperfect market directed by distributed human compute vs a planner directed by politicians directed by human computed.

It is an argument about signal bandwidth, compression, and noise.

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