AGI is here (and I feel fine)
robinsloan.com
robinsloan.com
Can AGI not speak for itself? Does it need humans to speak and act on its behalf? Who are the high-priests and what are the sects?
I think that in an ideal world, this would thoroughly embarrass the over-promisers by forcing them to put-up-or-shut-up, and it's fun to imagine... however I worry that it won't work out that way. Instead of deflating the nonsense in its tracks, it'll just give it more momentum and worsen the eventual mess.
> What do I mean by AGI ?
Can we fight it with a better term? Something like... Oh, I dunno, maybe "Artificial Narrative Intelligence", in the same sense that we could say A* is a kind of pathfinding intelligence.
I say "narrative" because we've got these machines that grow "fitting" documents, and are often used with stories to "decide" what happens next. For example, the story setting is a Support Page, the Customer Character says X, and the Very Helpful Robot Character then does Y and says Z in response, etc.
However just because these stories fit surprisingly well doesn't mean it's doing the kind of "thinking" we really dreamed of.
> You sometimes read about employees of AI companies absorbed by their own products. Nobody on Earth has spent more hours talking to YakGPT than Katie Echo! Nobody can pump more code out of ShannonSoft than Johnny Narcissus! Recalling my Twitter experience, I think boasts (and posts) of this kind should inspire caution.
To me a lot of that feels like just the thing-of-the-day LinkedIn Lunacy, albeit running at an unusual intensity.
This has a nice litany of logical fallacies, but that's the main one.