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Comment by mrDmrTmrJ | Hacker News Reader

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute?

I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment.

If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

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What I think is that something the "exponential scaling to AGI" thesis pays too little attention to is resource constraints, and that this is the answer to your question. What will happen if it becomes difficult to sustain the investment of resources necessary to continuously train newer and better models is that the s-curve will start to inflect toward plateau, just like any other technology.

> If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow.

My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.

That's a non sequitur. While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.

There is no reliable evidence they won’t.

Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.

The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.

Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.

OK well then let's check back here in a few years to see if any of them managed to build an AGI. Until then it's just idle speculation. Anything could happen ... or not.

First, both of you must agree on one definition of AGI.

I'd be willing to wager that you can't.

And I’ll bet someone made a comment exactly like yours here, a couple of years ago… and guess what definitely didn’t happen?

https://xkcd.com/605/

I think we have more than 1 data point for AI progress.

We have zero data points for AGI progress.

Progress is defined by capability data points over time that we have plenty where AGI is a threshold ie. stuff like METR [0] and dozens of others.

[0] https://metr.org/time-horizons

None of those are AGI data point points. LLMs are making terrific progress but it's unknown whether they're progressing towards true AGI or in some other direction.

What would be an AGI data point?

> as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER

I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.

Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?

Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?

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