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Comment by demirbey05 | Hacker News Reader

It is not exactly AGI but huge step toward it. I would expect this step in 2028-2030. I cant really understand why people are happy with it, this technology is so dangerous that can disrupt whole society. It's neither like smartphone nor internet. What will happen to 3rd world countries. Lots of unsolved questions and world is not prepared for such a change. Lots of people will lose their jobs I am not even mentioning their debts. No one will have chance to be rich anymore, If you are in first world country you will probably get UBI, if not you wont.

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Same, I don’t really get the excitement. None of these companies are pushing for a utopian Star Trek society either with that power.

Open models will catch up next year or the year after, there only so many things to try and there's lots of people trying them, so it's more or less an inevitability.

The part to get excited about is that there's plenty of headroom left to gain in performance. They called o1 a preview, and it was, a preview for QwQ and similar models. We get the demo from OAI and then get the real thing for free next year.

> What will happen to 3rd world countries

Probably less disruption than will happen in 1st world countries.

> No one will have chance to be rich anymore

It's strange to reach this conclusion from "look, a massive new productivity increase".

its not like sonnet, yes current ai tools are increasing productivity and provides many ways to have chance to be rich, but agi is completely different. You need to handle evil competition between you and big fishes, probably big fishes will have more ai resources than you. What is the survival ratio in such a environment ? Very low.

Strange indeed if we work under the assumption that the profits from this productivity will be distributed (even roughly) evenly. The problem is that most of us see no indication that they will be.

I read “no one will have a chance to be rich anymore” as a statement about economic mobility. Despite steep declines in mobility over the last 50 years, it was still theoretically possible for a poor child (say bottom 20% wealth) to climb several quintiles. Our industry (SWE) was one of the best examples. Of course there have been practical barriers (poor kids go to worse schools, and it’s hard to get into college if you can’t read) but the path was there.

If robots replace a lot of people, that path narrows. If AGI replaces all people, the path no longer exists.

Intelligence is the thing distinguishing humans from all previous inventions that already were superhuman in some narrow domain.

car : horse :: AGI : humans

It is not strange at all, a very big motivation of spending billions in AI research is basically to remove what is called "skill premium" from the labor market. That "skill premium" was usually how people got richer than their fathers.

> I would expect this step in 2028-2030.

Do you work at one of the frontier labs?

I’ve never understood this perspective. Companies only make money when there are billions of customers. Are you imagining a total-monopoly scenario where zero humans have any income/wealth and there are only AI companies selling/mining/etc to each other, fully on their own? In such an extreme scenario, clearly the world’s governments would nationalize these entities. I think the only realistic scenario in which the future is not markedly better for every single human is if some rogue AI system decides to exterminate us, which I find to be increasingly unlikely as safety improvements are made (like the paper released today).

As for the wealth disparity between rich and poor countries, it’s hard to know how politics will handle this one, but it’s unlikely that poor countries won’t also be drastically richer as the cost of basic living drops to basically zero. Imagine the cost of food, energy, etc in an ASI world. Today’s luxuries will surely be considered human rights necessities in the near future.

> In such an extreme scenario, clearly the world’s governments would nationalize these entities

Those entities are the worlds governments regardless how things play out. People just worry they will be hostile or indifferent to humans, since that would be bad news for humans. Pet, cattle or pest, our future will be as one of those.

I’m extremely excited because I want to see the future and I’m trying not to think of how severely fucked my life will be.

I hope governments will finally take action.

What action do you expect them to take?

What law would effectively reduce risk from AGI? The EU passed a law that is entirely about reducing AI risk and people in the technology world almost universally considered it a bad law. Why would other countries do better? How could they do better?

If their mission is the wellbeing of their peoples, they should take any action that ensures that.

Besides regulating the technology, they could try to protect people and society from the effects of the technology. UBI for example could be an attempt to protect people from the effects of mass unemployment, as i understood it.

Actually i'm afraid even more fundamental shifts are necessary.

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