When will the bubble pop?
Some people are rightly pointing out that for quite a lot of things right now we probably already have AGI to a certain extent. Your average AI is way better than the average schmuck on the street in basically anything you can think of - maths, programming, writing poetry, world languages, music theory. Sure there are outliers where AI is not as good as a skilled practitioner in foo, but I think the AGI bar is about being "about as good as the average human" and not showing complete supremacy in every niche. So far the world has been disrupted sure, but not ended.
ASI of course is the next thing, but that's different.
I've gotten some great results out of LLM's, but thats often because the prompt was well crafted, and numerous iterations were performed based on my expertise.
You couldn't get that out of the LLM without that person most of the time.
To highlight the inverse: If someone truly has an "AGI" system (the acronym the goalposts have been moved-to) then it wouldn't matter who was wrangling it.
These models don't understand anything similar to reality and they can be confused by all sorts of things.
This can obviously be managed and people have achieved great things with them, including this IMO stuff, but the models are despite their capability very, very far from AGI. They've also got atrocious performance on things like IQ tests.
Yeah, that framing for LLMs is one of my pet-causes: It's document generation, some documents resemble stories with characters, and everything else (e.g. "chatting" with an LLM) is an illusion, albeit an impressive and sometimes-useful one.
Being able to generate a document where humans perceive plausible statements from Santa Claus does not mean Santa Claus now lives inside the electronic box, that flying sleighs are real, etc. The principle still holds even if the character is described as "an intelligent AI assistant named [Product Name]".
In the opposite direction, people (understandably) fall for the illusion, and start operating under the assumption that they are "talking to" some kind of persistent entity which is capable of having goals, beliefs, or personality traits. Voodoo debugging.
https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
I think a possible scenario is that we see huge open source advances in training and inference efficiency that ends up making some of the mega-investments in AI infrastructure look silly.
What will probably ‘save’ the mega-spending is (unfortunately!) the application of AI to the Forever Wars for profit.
Whenever and however it comes, it’s going to be a bloodbath because we haven’t had a proper burst since 2008. I don’t count 2020.
AI is great and it's the future, and a bunch of people will probably eventually turn it into very powerful systems able to solve industrially important maths and software development problems, but that doesn't meant they'll make huge money from that.