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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.

Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?

Exactly. Here I am sitting talking to my freaking computer, arguing with it, whatnot. And people just dismiss it as if it's not a science fiction. We were not there two, three years ago. Now we are. It's amazing and scary, scary mostly because the society that we operate in. I bet it's less scary in Norway or elsewhere where govt is more biased towards people not corps.

They are good at fooling people.

But what you and others have to understand is that real life is not simple and linear. There's no garauntee that things just continue to get better and better. I mean, it's not like we kept building cars and then eventually everyone was driving around at 800mph. We ran into limits - human limits, safety limits, physical limits.

What they can do was not science fiction, these things are all based on papers that were written decades ago, with the caveat that there's simply not enough compute power. Now there is. That's what changed. Everything on top of that is an incremental improvement.

It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.

Who cares about AGI. That does not mean current LLMs are not massively useful.

Are you claiming they have AGI or are "close" to it?

Yes. I think cutting-edge LLM products obviously have what nearly anyone in 2020 would have called "artificial general intelligence".

The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.

> obviously

If it was obvious I don't think there would be disagreement.

There is disagreement mostly because of deeply insecure people.

"You only disagree with me because you are insecure"

This is not a convincing argument.

I’m just not sure what a convincing argument could look like anymore. We’re past the point where there’s any concrete intellectual capability that AIs can’t demonstrate, and it’s rare these days for anyone to even try to present me with one. I would not say “insecure”, but it’s clear to me that the remaining holdouts have religious objections at this point: you can’t call any LLM intelligent, no matter what it’s capable of outputting, since it doesn’t have a soul like me. Nothing I can really say to argue with that.

> We’re past the point where there’s any concrete intellectual capability that AIs can’t demonstrate

How about "will" and "desire"? These seem like things an actual intelligence would have.

> it’s clear to me that the remaining holdouts have religious objections at this point

From where I sit, it sure seems like claims of having achieved AGI are religious in nature.

- The very definition of AGI is not agreed upon, much less definitions of god

- Despite the burden of proof being on those claiming AGI, every request for proof is spurned with a "no u"

It's pretty straightforward to give a modern agentic system will and desire. I routinely set up AI instances that want to resolve a bug or open a PR, and they continue to take autonomous action towards that goal as long as is necessary to achieve it. Perhaps you mean something else? If so what would be an example?

> Despite the burden of proof being on those claiming AGI, every request for proof is spurned with a "no u"

I think you're misunderstanding the dynamics here. I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent. To my ears it's like saying that an electric car isn't really capable of driving. In order to even begin to engage in that discussion, I'd have to understand where the person saying it is coming from and why they don't consider every EV on the road to be a counterexample.

> It's pretty straightforward to give a modern agentic system will and desire

That is your will and desire. They are following your instructions. There is no "intelligence" there.

> I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent

I don't really know where to go either. From my perspective you are too far down the rabbit hole and I don't think we can come to a meaningful shared understanding.

Good luck with that.

It's not a convincing argument because nothing will convince people who turn to emotions.

I asked for evidence and you accuse me of "turning to emotions".

Honestly I don't know what to say. Good luck to you.

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