Comment by mlyle
12 hours ago
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.
AGI may use the same hardware, or same compute concepts.
But LLMs (like low/high pressure wing flight) will never result in AGI (you won't get to the moon with a wing).
You're making my point.
I thought your point was terrible about aerospace. And since you're insisting I follow you further into the analogy, I think it's terrible here.
LLMs may be a key building block for early AGI. The jury is still out. Will a LLM alone do it? No. You can't build a space vehicle from fins and fairings and control systems alone.
O1 can reach pretty far beyond past LLM capabilities by adding infrastructure for metacognition and goal seeking. Is O1 the pinnacle, or can we go further?
In either case, planes and rocket-planes did a lot to get us to space-- they weren't an unrelated evolutionary dead end.
> Yet powered flight has nothing to do with space travel, no connection at all.
Fully disagree.