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Comment by z7 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, two days ago Altman said that the pathway to AGI is now clear and "we actually know what to do", that it will be easier than initially thought and "things are going to go a lot faster than people are appreciating right now."

To which Noam Brown added: "I've heard people claim that Sam is just drumming up hype, but from what I've seen everything he's saying matches the ~median view of OpenAI researchers on the ground."

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1855037689533178289

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It’s in his (and his company’s) best interest to drive hype as hard and fast as he can. The deal they inked to go private includes penalties if they don’t do so within a defined timeframe (two or three years, I think?). I believe the terms specify that they can be made to pay back investors if they fail to meet that goal. They don’t have that money, not even close. It would mean death for OpenAI.

Show me a better reason to lie and pump up your company’s tech and I’ll buy you lunch. AGI is nowhere on their (feasible) near-term roadmap.

It's also Marcus's best interest to push "LLM is hitting a wall" agenda. Check his blog. It's basically his whole online personality now.

So Marcus and Altman are both speaking out of their agendas, except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.

> except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.

That makes it sound like Altman has even greater incentive for motivated reasoning.

Altman does deliver while Marcus ponders

Depends Marcus might need the book to do well more than Sam who could pivot into another 100 billion dollar company.

If they signed such a deal, I wonder what the legal definition of AGI is?

I think it's only about going from non-profit to private, but I haven't read the deal.

To be fair 1. He's not saying that this is true. Only that the view is popular among the researchers.

2. This view of "were just this close and were only getting closer" is exactly the kind of dogma that you have to accept when you become a researcher.

But how can then someone from the outside claim anything more accurate or even more claim that Altman is finding diminishing returns when Altman themselves claim otherwise. They offerene no arguments of substance in this article except some dramatic language on how they predicted it even before GPT3.5 came out.

I find it difficult to believe that LLMs were even on the path toward AGI, let alone one of the last steps.

I think LLMs will have something to contribute to AGI but by themselves they ain’t no AGI. Maybe some LLM of concepts and abstract thought would yield more squeeze but some fundamentally new (or old) things need to be added to the mix IMO.

I don't know if we can trust OpenAI researchers to be objective after the recent escapades with Sam Altman, public opinion and its effect on OpenAI's valuation. They are intelligent people and we all know now what the public wants - needs - to hear.

Sounds like Musk describing FSD.

I don’t think Altman’s predictions about AI progress can be relied upon. With tens of billions of dollars or more in company value tied up in that claim, I don’t think any person could be capable of true objective assessment. See for example Musk’s decade of baffling promises about self driving, which have ensured high stock values for Tesla while also failing to come to pass.

News Flash: company that has sunk billions into GPT and LLMs trying to get AGI asserts that AGI is just around the corner.

We can send the AGI to the Mars colony which Elon Musk will have going by 2022.

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