Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...

I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...

We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...

And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.

I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate

Source with interview clip: https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253

EDIT: Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.

"(...) it's going to effectively be a new human era..."

We never like it when we realize the universe doesn't circle around us.

At first we got mad to discover the Earth wasn't the center of the Solar system.

Then we got mad that the solar system wasn't even unique.

And now we're still clinging to the idea that humans always will be the most intelligent species or the only ones gifted with "creativity".

And soon we might also come to realize it might not be a new human era, but the end of it (if we're not careful).

Why are these people so obsessed with the year 2030? It keeps popping up everywhere.

It's like when people obsessed about 2020, or 2000. It's a nice clean number in the decimal numbering system.

No, there's a lot more to it. I never saw this kind of fuss about 2000 or 2020.

I keep seeing things about how some target has to be hit by 2030. Our local council keeps going on about it, in fact their WiFi network even contains 2030!

> No, there's a lot more to it. I never saw this kind of fuss about 2000

I roll to disbelieve!

We had hype about the year 2000 throughout the 20th century, and some earlier! When we were IN the year 2000, it was quite common in my circles to tack on some phrase or comment about it being the Future, now, so [whatever thing the person was on about].

A very different type of hype. I remember it. More about the Millennium Bug and the New Year celebration. It didn't have the same vibe at all. The authorities weren't trying to hit various targets since then.

The real Millennium turned out to be 11th September, 2001, which was use to bring in a lot of planned changes.

It feels close (it's only 4 years away) and yet futuristic (the new decade!). The way it feels is important because all these statements are based on jack and only exist for hype.

Someone should document these cringe comments for posterity. As a warning to future generations.

It's too bad the previous singularity cult manias 10 and 15 years ago weren't documented and are lost in time.

You know in the future they are just going to say it's different this time right?

The Enigma Of Mass Amnesia...

Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.

It doesn't mean everything you can think of is possible.

People who say every jobs will be automated never held any tool more advanced than a screwdriver and never worked a single day outside of an air conditioned office.

They were predicting flying cars for "the year 2000"...

But enough jobs are going to be automated that it will cause social and economic chaos, and political breakdown. Sure AI can't attach an air conditioning unit outside my window nor use a plunger on my toilet but it can still replace lawyers, secretaries, software devs, and many more jobs.

I'm curious: how will it replace e.g. lawyers? Will judges be replaced as well? Juries?

Are we sur eof any of that?

Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today...

Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released

Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers

No one rational ever said software engineers were going to be replaced in 6 months. Some people said AI will automate 90% of coding in 6 months and they were not far off (and accurate in some contexts, e.g. startups).

Coding has been automated since the very beginning of coding.

The first two programming languages (Fortran and Cobol) were supposed to make coding obsolete because non-coders will now just make software with natural language prompts.

LLMs are a dangerous tool for coding because they are infinite technical debt generators. Ideally only experienced senior developers should be allowed to use them.

It's amusing to think that context window capability needs to outpace technical debt pileup with LLM development and usage

Ten years ago, most people would have said cold fusion was impossible... and still is.

They'll only get to claim a hollow victory because AGI is impossible to rigorously define. None of the regulating bodies of consumer products will be able to define it better than academics. They'll use marketing to make those claims and there will be legal battles that keep it in a gray area.

They'll go for that because it's easier than actually inventing the 'sci-fi' AGI, shareholders keep making money, and it keeps them getting paid to keep going. If any of them actually do succeed, then that little deception will be peanuts.

Demis' bar is high and he stated clearly multiple times: AGI should be capable of inventing truly novel things. Examples he gave included the Theory of General Relativity and the game of Go.

Just a taste of what's to come: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...

Anthropic's latest model also solved this 80-year-old problem that eluded many expert mathematicians, in a different way, according to one of its employees.

Remember we still have 4 years until 2030.

Quite frustrating to see all these cynical, borderline-irrational comments on HN. Maybe I should do what pg and other ex-HN contributors have done--avoid taking part in the discussions here.

The level of discourse here has dropped so much.

At least I should stop replying to people hiding under throwaway accounts.

Surely you can think of some times the skeptics have been right.

I immediately thought of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

I'm sure HN cult comments from 10 and 15 years ago are still up though, the Dropbox thread is frequently linked to.

Just search for "stochastic parrot" on Algolia. Plenty of "BuT iTs NoT rEaLlY iNtElIgEnT" comments...

It literally is a stochastic parrot.

P.S. Yes, I do know how an LLM works. I code inference engines at my day job. You're consuming a cloud chat bot.

The people saying "it's just a stochastic parrot" were saying that because they thought the fact that it works by modelling the statistics of words and predicting the next most likely one meant that it would never be capable of anything sophisticated or any kind of novel output. It was just parroting things that already existed in a random way.

There was never any actual foundation for that belief, and it has been proven wrong empirically by more capable models, which is why you don't hear people saying it much any more.

If you look how much goalpost has been moved over the last decade it'd turn out that AI cultist were right more frequently than AI sceptics.

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