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Comment by alganet | Hacker News Reader

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alganet

Microwaves didn't replace ovens. The Segway didn't replaced bikes. 3D movies didn't replace IMAX. I can go on and on...

Some things fail, or fail to meet their initial overblown expectations.

The microwave oven was indeed a commercial success. And that's fine, but it sucks at being an oven. Everyone knows it.

Now, this post is more about the scientific part of it, not the commercial one.

What makes an oven better than a microwave oven? Why is pizza from an oven delicious and microwave pizza sucks?

Maybe there's a reason, some Maillard reaction that requires hot air convection and can't be replicated by shaking up water molecules.

We are talking about those kinds of things. What makes it tick, how does it work, etc. Not if it makes money or not.

Damn, the thing doesn't even make money yet. Why talk about a plus that the technology still doesn't have?

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The thread we're in was arguing that the requirement to be AGI is to fail the exact same way humans do. I pointed out by showing these examples that failing the exact same way is not a requirement for a new technology to replace people or other technology. You're reading too much into what I said and putting words in my mouth.

What makes it tick is probably a more interesting question to me than to the AI skeptics. But they can't stop declaring a special quality (consciousness, awareness, qualia, reasoning, intelligence) that AI by their definition cannot ever have and that this quality is immeasurable, unquantifable, undefinable... This is literally a thought stopper semantic deadend that I feel the need to argue against.

Finally, it doesn't make money the same way Amazon or Uber didn't make money for a looong time, by making lots of money, reinvesting it and not caring about profit margins for a company in its growth stage. Will we seriously go through this for every startup? It's already at $10-20b a year at least as an industry and that will keep growing.

AGI does not currently exist. We're trying to think what we want from it. Like a perfect microwave oven. If a company says they're going to make a perfect microwave oven, I want the crusty dough and delicious gratin cheese effect on my cooked focaccia-inspired meals.

What exists is LLMs, transformers, etc. Those are the microwave oven, that results in rubbery cheese and cardboard dough.

It seems that you are willing to cut some slack to the terrible microwave pizza. I am not.

You complained about immensurable qualities, like qualia. However, I gave you a very simple measurable quality: failing like a decent human would instead of producing jibberish hallucinations. I also explained in other comments on this thread why that measurable quality is important (it plays with existing expectations, just like existing expectations about a good pizza).

While I do care about those more intangible characteristics (consciousness, reasoning, etc), I decided to concede and exclude them from this conversation from the get-go. It was you that brough them back in, from who-knows-where.

Anyway. It seems that I've addressed your points fairly. You had to reach for other skeptic-related narratives in order to keep the conversation going, and by that point, you missed what I was trying to say.

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