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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

An AI agent with superhuman coherence that can run indefinitely without oversight.

People sincerely think we're < 5 years away from this?

Is there some fundamental constraint keeping it from happening? What cognitive capability do humans have that machines won't be able to replicate in that time frame?

Each remaining barrier has been steadily falling.

We don't even have AI which can do useful things yet. The LLMs these companies make are fun toys, but not useful tools (yes, I know that hype-prone people are using them as such regardless). It beggars belief that we will go from "it's a fun toy but can't do real work" to "this can do things without even needing human supervision" without a major leap in capabilities.

This is certainly hyperbole. You can say current LLMs don’t match human capabilities. But people are using them for a lot of practical tasks already.

Using chatgpt to format text is a task that it can do really well and is useful. Yeah, you can write a script to do it, but chatgpt is faster and you don't need to know programming.

What barriers have fallen? Computers still can't even drive cars

Something that requires a lot less than a PhD

PhD work might turn out to be a lot easier to automate than effectively interacting with the physical world.

Is that true? What’s the current rate of accidents per miles driven for self driving cars vs human drivers?

Even with cutting edge technology the number of transistors on a chip is nowhere close to the number of neurons in the brain.

Creativity, tastes, desires?

All the LLM tech so far still requires a human to actually prompt them.

Continual Learning, it's a barrier that's been there from the very start and we've never had a solution to it.

There are no solutions even at the small scale. We fundamentally don't understand what it is or how to do it.

If you could solve it perfectly on Mnist just scale and then we get AGI.

People on HN in 2015 were saying that by now car ownership would be dying and we’d be renting out our self driving cars as we sat at work and did fuck all. Ben Thompson had podcasts glazing Uber for 3 hours a month.

The hype cycle for tech people is like a light bulb for a moth. We’re attracted to potential, which is both our superpower and kryptonite.

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