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Comment by rcr-anti | Hacker News Reader

For awhile I've found two things hard to square, that the hardware and software making up current gen AI will bring us to a socioeconomic singularity, and the reality the thing they're mostly trying to emulate is a few pounds of meat and fat running on tens of watts equivalent. On one hand the current AIs are obviously super human in some tasks, get completely dunked on in others by far simpler organisms. My cat can catch a bug out of the air, Fable 5 in Cowork can lack the dexterity to make a slideshow because I had LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Not even close to analogous, but point being they appear to have pretty fundamental differences in how they can interface with the world that the economic thesis seems to gloss over.

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Another interesting discrepancy is that people think current GPUs are maybe capable of running AGI but they still can barely manage photorealistic rendering of a single room in realtime, or simulate something like a shirt thrown into a pile of laundry. They can generate a video of it based on millions of existing videos, but not do a real simulation of light and physics in realtime.

An AGI doesn't need that level of detail to do most tasks effectively. To use the OP's example, a cat catching a bug out of the air does not need to run a fluid dynamics simulation of airflow over the bug's wings to be able to catch it. A cheap approximation of the flight path is sufficient. Perhaps some physical tasks will need that level of detail but many will not.

Is the human brain capable of doing real simulations of light and physics in realtime? Or does it hallucinate the details and represent some low-resolution mental image? You may be overestimating the capabilities of flesh-based neural networks and underestimating the capabilities of silicon-based neural networks.

That's a good point. It's just kind of surprising, there's been a lot of incremental progress towards rendering and simulation for a long time. If you'd asked 10 years ago if we'd have AGI or realistic realtime rendering and physics of a single room first I think most people would have answered the former.

You make a good point. Maybe the AI apocalypse will actually be when someone hooks up a cat brain to a super advanced AI.

No need. The 'apocalypse' will come purely out of the hubris and greed chasing untold fortunes as opposed to a healthy, considered integration.

The decision to scare the shit out of normal people early on was a short-term decision that will cost everyone dearly (it led non-technical people to believe in things about LLMs that just aren't true—even worse, they've now made difficult business decisions on bad information with seemingly limited consideration of secondary effects).

The amount of short-sightedness alone should give pause, but at least in America, we seem to have collectively lost our minds in worship of the almighty dollar.

Judgment day approaches.

> a few pounds of … running on tens of watts equivalent.

Aren’t you already describing a laptop computer? Add a local LLM and you’re fully there

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