Comment by jillesvangurp
1 month ago
I don't think it's that binary. We've had a lot of progress over the last 25 years; much of it in the last two. AGI is not a well defined thing that people easily agree on. So, determining whether we have it or not is actually not that simple.
Mostly people either get bogged down into deep philosophical debates or simply start listing things that AI can and cannot do (and why they believe why that is the case). Some of those things are codified in benchmarks. And of course the list of stuff that AIs can't do is getting stuff removed from it on a regular basis at an accelerating rate. That acceleration is the problem. People don't deal well with adapting to exponentially changing trends.
At some arbitrary point when that list has a certain length, we may or may not have AGI. It really depends on your point of view. But of course, most people score poorly on the same benchmarks we use for testing AIs. There are some specific groups of things where they still do better. But also a lot of AI researchers working on those things.
What acceleration?
Consider OpenAI's products as an example. GPT-3 (2020) was a massive step up in reasoning ability from GPT-2 (2019). GPT-3.5 (2022) was another massive step up. GPT-4 (2023) was a big step up, but not quite as big. GPT-4o (2024) was marginally better at reasoning, but mostly an improvement with respect to non-core functionality like images and audio. o1 (2024) is apparently somewhat better at reasoning at the cost of being much slower. But when I tried it on some puzzle-type problems I thought would be on the hard side for GPT-4o, it gave me (confidently) wrong answers every time. 'Orion' was supposed to be released as GPT-5, but was reportedly cancelled for not being good enough. o3 (2025?) did really well on one benchmark at the cost of $10k in compute, or even better at the cost of >$1m – not terribly impressive. We'll see how much better it is than o1 in practical scenarios.
To me that looks like progress is decelerating. Admittedly, OpenAI's releases have gotten more frequent and that has made the differences between each release seem less impressive. But things are decelerating even on a time basis. Where is GPT-5?
>Let's say 25 years ago you had the idea to build a product
I resemble that remark ;)
>that can now be solved more generally with LLMs
Nope, sorry, not yet.
>"Nah, don't build that business, it will eventually be solved with some new technology?"
Actually I did listen to people like that to an extent, and started my business with the express intent of continuing to develop new technologies which would be adjacent to AI when it matured. Just better than I could at my employer where it was already in progress. It took a couple years before I was financially stable enough to consider layering in a neural network, but that was 30 years ago now :\
Wasn't possible to benefit with Windows 95 type of hardware, oh well, didn't expect a miracle anyway.
Heck, it's now been a full 45 years since I first dabbled in a bit of the ML with more kilobytes of desktop memory than most people had ever seen. I figured all that memory should be used for something, like memorizing, why not? Seemed logical. Didn't take long to figure out how much megabytes would help, but they didn't exist yet. And it became apparent that you could only go so far without a specialized computer chip of some kind to replace or augment a microprocessor CPU. What kind, I really had no idea :)
I didn't say they resembled 25-year-old ideas that much anyway ;)
>We've had a lot of progress over the last 25 years; much of it in the last two.
I guess it's understandable this has been making my popcorn more enjoyable than ever ;)