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Comment by slaterbug | Hacker News Reader

What evidence is there that AGI will come “soon”?

Or "ever"?

(I'm not denying the possiblity. I'm proclaiming a lack of evidence.)

I’ve been daydreaming lately about what the fundamental limits of “intelligence” could be, something like the concept of computability but for AI, or even biological brains.

Though I will say, surely the existence of the human brain (which by definition is general intelligence), suggests that creating AGI is fundamentally possible?

Sure, it's possible - as you say, we have an existence proof. We don't know how to do it any other way, though. None of the people who claim that they or somebody else is on the trail has produced any evidence that they are correct.

What evidence did we have that LLMs would be such transformative techs before they were suddenly introduced, and have such surprising behaviors? Not sure we need to always be looking for evidence for potentially surprising and disruptive tech

They can "feel it", like people "felt" we'd have commercial space flight "soon" after we put people on the moon, it's all delusion and wishful thinking.

It's worse than that, really, because there was at least a fairly obvious _path_ there, even if the economics were, to say the least, shaky. For AGI... not so much.

Yeah, if energy continued to get exponentially more plentiful like it used to then a casual trip to the moon or flying cars today wouldn't have been out of the question.

People imagined a future where everyone had their own personal fusion reactor to power their devices with infinite energy, that world didn't happen but the exponential rate energy technologies used to develop in made that seem feasible.

It's not an energy question, for the moon it's a "why the fuck would we even do this" question and for flying car it's a thing about bald monkeys being on average quite stupid and not responsible.

Yeah, more or less from the start, commercial space was always more of a “could, but won’t” thing than anything else.

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