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Comment by solid_fuel | Hacker News Reader

Whoa, be careful, I think those goalposts just broke the speed of sound.

> Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear."

He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem".

He was wrong that the path to AGI was "basically clear".

And if you want to play definition games and start waving your hands around and accept the claim "oh well actually we don't really know how to define AGI now", then he was wrong to claim that the path to AGI was "basically clear"!

Even if you play that game, it's still simple: either he was wrong about the path being clear, or he was wrong about the destination being clearly definable. That's still being wrong.

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> He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem".

> He was wrong that the path to AGI was "basically clear".

Why do you say that?

For context, Jensen Huang says:

> "For many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI... I think of all of those milestones…they’re kind of senseless at this point.[1]

Even if you disagree with that, Altman's statement seems more about the idea that "more data + more compute + transformer based neural networks" will get us to something called AGI.

I think that statement is true. I guess you don't.

> if you want to play definition games and start waving your hands around and accept the claim "oh well actually we don't really know how to define AGI now", then he was wrong to claim that the path to AGI was "basically clear"!

No - because I think his and Jenson's definition means we have achieved AGI.

So it goes back to my point: this isn't falsifiable.

[1] https://mashable.com/tech/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-agi-a...

> Why do you say that?

Because he was wrong. That's how it works.

> For context, Jensen Huang says:

>> "For many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI... I think of all of those milestones…they’re kind of senseless at this point.[1]

This statement is nonsense. It's Artificial General Intelligence that was promised. Not Artificial Some Things Intelligence.

> Even if you disagree with that, Altman's statement seems more about the idea that "more data + more compute + transformer based neural networks" will get us to something called AGI.

His statement was wrong. I don't care what other ideas you want to read into it, he was incorrect about AGI arriving in 2025. That's all there is to it. Twist it into a knot and smear butter on it if you want, wrong is wrong.

> No - because I think his and Jenson's definition means we have achieved AGI

Yeah they can twist definitions all they want. I don't really care. We have seen that LLMs and transformers have not delivered AGI, and they certainly didn't deliver it in 2025.

> Because he was wrong. That's how it works.

> His statement was wrong. I don't care what other ideas you want to read into it, he was incorrect about AGI arriving in 2025.

Sam Altman never claimed we'd get AGI in 2025. That is Tom's Hardware incorrect headline.

Altman's quote is:

"I felt like we actually know what to do like I think from here to building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work there are some known unknowns but I think we basically know what to go what to go do and it'll take a while it'll be hard but that's tremendously exciting I also think on the product side there's more to figure out but roughly we know what to shoot at and what we want to optimize for that's a really exciting time.."

See here: https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?t=2327

It's not Altman's fault that people misreported him.

I think the alleged 2025 prediction comes from this part: https://youtu.be/xXCBz_8hM9w?t=2768

Interviewer: "What are you excited about in 2025? What's to come?" Altman: "AGI. Excited for that."

I don't know if that counts as predicting it would be here in 2025 or that he's just excited to work on it in 2025

All in all, it's clearly the AI skeptics that have egg on their faces. Sam Altman is very flawed and you could make a strong argument for why that's why he blew an enormous lead to Anthropic. Dario's predictions in general haven't been that far off. The general public is becoming increasingly aware of AI as a big deal (and something about 60% hates). Our jobs, regardless of where on the adoption curve we are, have undeniably changed a lot.

Zitron and a whole lot of people on HN were trying to claim this was a nothingburger or at least no more important than the invention of IDEs up until Dec 2025, and then all of a sudden everyone quietly shifted what the "reasonable" opinion was. If I were those people, I'd spend more time taking a look at what was wrong with my priors than look outward.

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