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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> How is commoditisation of models incompatible with AGI?

A recursively self-improving AI has strong first-mover effects. That isn’t fundamentally incompatible with commoditisation if there is literally only one path to super-intelligence and you can have AIs at different rings on that ladder co-existing. (Not technically commoditised at that point. There are still different rings. But close enough.)

But the existence of commoditised AI implies model selection isn’t a huge deal, which in turn implies the models are about the same, which strongly implies there is no recursive self-improvement. Depending on your definition, you may still have AGI. But you don’t have superintelligence.

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> But the existence of commoditised AI implies model selection isn’t a huge deal, which in turn implies the models are about the same, which strongly implies there is no recursive self-improvement. Depending on your definition, you may still have AGI. But you don’t have superintelligence.

This is only true at a given AI capability level, no? e.g., if AI at the GLM-5.2 level is commoditized, all that suggests is that there's no recursive self-improvement easily possible at the capability level of GLM-5.2. (And with the harnesses for it that exist so far, etc etc.)

If I observe commoditization of a given tier of model capabilities at a given point in time, this seems to say little about what's possible with models six months later, or models that are undergoing proprietary deployments at that very moment inside the major labs, or even models that are notionally available for public use but have had recursive self-improvement adjacent capabilities intentionally nerfed (e.g., Fable).

(I might be misinterpreting your comment tbc - if you mean observing commoditization implies there is no existing, ambient superintelligence at the moment of that observation, then I don't disagree.)

> if you mean observing commoditization implies there is no existing, ambient superintelligence at the moment of that observation, then I don't disagree

This is a better way to put it, thank you. More precisely, I'd say commoditisation implies there is no existing self-improving AI on the market.

The moment someone gets exponential self-improvement, model fungibility breaks and the first mover wins. This is the Bostrom singularity the rationalists flip out about.

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