> AI is real and really could become AGI
Every single researcher not being paid $$$ by AI companies say there is 0 path between LLMs and AGI, but sure... and the next pfizer drug might make us immortal, who knows, everything is possible after all
Every single researcher not being paid $$$ by AI companies say there is 0 path between LLMs and AGI, but sure... and the next pfizer drug might make us immortal, who knows, everything is possible after all
LLMs also came out of nowhere, a series of discrete improvements that finally got over the hurdle and acheived an unprecedented functionality. Absolutely no one predicted its emergent capabilities back in 2016 when the transformer paper was proposed.
They didnt see scaling then, they might not see the next thing now, until its found.
So it wont be in the next 2 weeks, and it wont be from OpenAI, but it might be in 10 years from some random researcher at waterloo, or tiktok
Nothing is impossible!
> LLMs also came out of nowhere
No they didn't.
Will AI of today definitely become AGI of tomorrow? No, for sure not, and anyone who claims this is at best crazy.
But is it imaginable? I think totally. Andrej Karpathy' blog post about RNN writing Shakespeare 1 character at a time was 10 years ago. GPT-2 was released 6 years ago. In that time we went from something that barely speaks English, never mind any other language, to something that, on a good run, is an excellent language tutor (natural and programming), can play games, can write moderately complex programs, goodness knows what else. For some people, the romance of a ChatGPT-4 was unmatched.
Even if it doesn't become "AGI", it might just get so good at being sub-AGI that the question is irrelevant. We're seriously contemplating a near future where junior devs are replaced by LLMs; and I write this as an AI sceptic who uses LLMs to write a lot of the kind of dumb code a junior dev might do instead.
I don't like AI, in that it nibbles away at my competitive advantage in life. But it's IMO crazy to pretend it is not even potentially a game changer.
I'm not saying it doesn't bring any value, I'm just saying that if you think we should give $7 gazillion to Altman because he's building skynet by 2030 you're smoking crack
I am not saying we give all money to Altman. I'm saying AI is likely overvalued. But can it evolve into something far more capable given investment? Yes, it may.
Flying cars and space travel didn't happen, but might have. And funnily enough, they might still happen, with drone taxis and Virgin Galactic / SpaceX. Might. That's how it works with speculative investment.
So maybe it's jealousy?
I mean I don't know.
But in all seriousness until someone else invents AGI some other way, you can't disprove that LLMs aren't the way. My intuition says you need more than LLMs but I could very well be wrong.