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Comment by D-Machine | Hacker News Reader

It is almost certainly a completely made up number though. It's not quite on the same level of emptiness as "rate your emotion on a scale of 1-10", but it might as well be.

I.e. are we 80% of the way by the calendar, then if so, as measured by when? We're only about 66% of the way through the current year. Is it that they are 80% of the way through some final totally defined training or tuning procedure? Not likely. And it is 80% of the way to AGI, which is vaguely defined as that which can "outperform humans [by how much? what proportion of humans?] at most [how much, exactly, again?] economically valuable work [what work is not economically valuable?]."

Call a spade a spade, the 80% thing is 100% total bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense, i.e. it is completely unconcerned about truth, and is all just about generating feels).

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> Frankfurtian

It probably is, but not necessarily generally speaking: explicitly intended gross estimates may not be Galileian - they are, well, gross and estimates. You are pointing to the wrong detail: it is not that they would be "80% of the way": the news is that "the CRO estimates them at 80% of the way". It may be true that such is his estimation. And we cannot discard a priori his good faith. Of course more meaningful details would have had more juice.

But that he made that statement is actual banging news. It may just mean they are "80% on the way to redefine "AGI" in a biased partial exploitable way", but it is a statement that can make the journalists update the journals.

It could not be Frankfurtian if we say that he was just speaking colloquially and obviously only really meant something like "quite close", and indeed making up random percentages to stand for such vague feelings is really quite a normal thing in certain styles of everyday conversation. Whether or not such a style is appropriate in this context is debatable, but it could save him from the bullshit charge.

But I don't see how it being an estimation makes it less bullshitty, because there is simply no reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful. It is stated in such a way that evaluating the truth or accuracy of the estimate is basically impossible, i.e. it is bullshit by vagueness, even if it is an estimate. Only the "end of the year" claim is concrete, but the AGI definition has much of the same BS-via-vagueness problem, so it is still all very Frankfurtian to me.

So I don't see it as banging news, but just as more BS and almost certainly a nothingburger. But, hey, whatever, time will tell.

> reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful

80% of the implementation of an internal project, I guessed.

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