“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.”
In prehistory, land was plentiful and hunting/gathering skill was scarce, so MVLE was high. In the middle ages, the population had exploded and arable land had become scarce. MVLE dropped dramatically. In the industrial revolution, capital accumulation began, and MVLE began rising. Once labor costs were high enough, productivity became king, and services and information goods became more prominent. MVLE rose much further.
Note the seemingly accidental correlation between MVLE, self-determination and human rights.
Now we're at a crossroads. There's a possibility that MVLE might completely bottom out. One edge outcome is a world with 100 trillionaires, 1000000 concubines, a bunch of butlers and hair stylists, and no other humans.
The key question is: whose utility will be maximized? It's clear that democracy's cracks have turned into fractures. Half of the population has an IQ below 100 and can be gulled into voting themselves into oblivion.
While technically true, I’d caution against assuming IQ is at all representative of average practical or applied intelligence. There’s plenty of writing out there outlining the issues with IQ as a measurement.
I also think the problems we’re struggling with—insofar as the ethics of utilization of AI—boil down to humanity’s overall inability thus far to reach consensus on what we want to optimize our society for: the most good for the most people, the most good for some people, or something completely orthogonal to good or bad for any number of people (pursuit of knowledge, culture, unity, whatever).
Regardless, a lot of folks seem to have good and widely agreed upon ideas of what we do not want and I’d love to see more conversations around how we prevent the worst case scenarios given the current political and economic environment.
I don't necessarily disagree. Unfortunately, demagoguery has paid off handsomely in recent years. It has been refined as a discipline to the point that the "self-destruction gullibility threshold" might actually be much higher than 100.
(Which is to say, it isn’t. This has to be LLMs: the final frontier)
From the frankly delusional levels of hype they've been pushing, they took a wrong turn and they don't have the cash to double back
I don't see why people are calling this "vague". It's not an announcement of GPT-5 or anything, but this seems pretty specific to me. It's good to have confirmation that OpenAI doesn't see any serious barriers to achieving AGI in the next year or two. Lots of people arguing otherwise these days and this is a direct refutation.
That's going to be very hard to argue.
What he's selling is brand Altman.
Either way, the AI bubble is going to start popping if he can’t demonstrate meaningful progress - into the realm of making decisions and taking actions - within the next year.
Frankly, I think he’s exaggerating.
Reddit is not your friend in the citation stakes.
These comments:
> Now do the same for other evaluations, remove the o family, nudge the time scale a bit, and watch the same curve pop out.
> This is called eval saturation, not tech singularity. ARC-2 is already in production btw.
A reply:
> You act like that isnt significant, people just hand wave "eval saturation"
> The fact that we keep having to make new benchmarks because ai keep beating the ones we have is extremely significant.
Agree with this. The pace has been mind boggling.
The pace has been impressive, but until hallucinations are addressed the more faith and capital you put behind an AI agent, the more you risk losing.
Note that they have an incentive to not get a system classified as AGI.