Comment by bbarnett
15 hours ago
The first plane ever flies, and people think "we can fly to the moon soon!".
Yet powered flight has nothing to do with space travel, no connection at all. Gliding in the air via low/high pressure doesn't mean you'll get near space, ever, with that tech. No matter how you try.
AI and AGI are like this.
The first plane to ever fly was in fact ignored by the general public for several years
https://bigthink.com/the-past/wright-brothers-ignored/
And yet, the moon was reached a mere 66 years after the first powered flight. Perhaps it's a better heuristic than you are insinuating...
In all honesty, there are lots of connections between powered flight and space travel. Two obvious ones are "light and strong metallurgy" and "a solid mathematical theory of thermodynamics". Once you can build lightweight and efficient combustion chambers, a lot becomes possible...
Similarly, with LLMs, it's clear we've hit some kind of phase shift in what's possible - we now have enough compute, enough data, and enough know-how to be able to copy human symbolic thought by sheer brute-force. At the same time, through algorithms as "unconnected" as airplanes and spacecraft, computers can now synthesize plausible images, plausible music, plausible human speech, plausible anything you like really. Our capabilities have massively expanded in a short timespan - we have cracked something. Something big, like lightweight combustion chambers.
The status quo ante is useless to predict what will happen next.
By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.
No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon. Ever. Never ever.
If you think it is, you're adding things to make a plane capable of space flight.
>By that metric, there are lots of connections between space flight and any other aspect of modern society.
Indeed. But there's a reason "aerospace" is a word.
>No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon
No indeed. But if you want to build a moon rocket, the relevant skillsets are found in people who make airplanes. Who built Apollo? Boeing. Grumman. McDonnell Douglas. Lockheed.
I feel like aeronautics and astronautics are deeply connected. Both depend upon aerodynamics, 6dof control, and guidance in forward flight. Advancing aviation construction techniques were the basis of rockets, etc.
Sure, rocketry to LEO asks more in strength of materials, and aviation doesn’t require liquid fueled propulsion or being able to control attitude in vacuum.
These aren’t unconnected developments. Space travel grew straight out of aviation and military aviation. Indeed, look at the vertical takeoff aircraft from the 40s and 50s, evolving into missile systems with solid propulsion and then liquid propulsion.
2 replies →
That’s not true. There was not endless hype about flying to the moon when the first plane flew.
People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.
As slow as the progress is, we now have metrics and measurable progress towards agi even when there are clear signs of limitations on LLMs. We never had this before and everyone is aware of this. No one is delusional about it.
The delusion is more around people who think other people are making claims of going to the moon in a year or something. I can see it in 10 to 30 years.
That’s not true. There was not endless hype about flying to the moon when the first plane flew.
I didn't say there was endless hype, I gave an example of how one technology would never result in another... even if to a layperson it seems connected.
(The sky, and the moon, are "up")
People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.
Surely you mean "Some people". Because the point in this thread is that there is a lot of hype, and FOMO, and "OMG AGI!" chatter running around LLMs. Which will never ever make AGI.
You said you didn’t comprehend why there was hype and I explained why there was hype.
Then you made an analogy and I said your analogy is irrelevant because nobody thinks LLMs are agi nor do they think agi is coming out of LLMs this coming year.
And yet, the overall path of unconcealment of science and technological understanding definitely traces a line that goes from the Wright brothers to Vostok 1. There is no reason to think a person from the time of the Wright brothers would find it to be a simple one easily predicted by the methods of their times, but I doubt that no person who worked on Vostok 1 would say that their efforts were epochally unrelated to the efforts of the Wright brothers.