Comment by fragmede
5 months ago
I'm equally sure there are true believers who've drunk the Kool-aid and really believe AGI is right around the corner, just need to fix a few bugs and wait just a few more generations of Moore's law. What difference does the beliefs of a nameless engineer at an AI company make?
>What difference does the beliefs of a nameless engineer at an AI company make?
Hopefully a manager and proper task scheduling. If I made these promises every sprint and kept saying "yea the task is only a week away from completion!" I'd be fired unless I fell down the rabbit hole to Alice in Wonderland. I'm using good faith to assume a lot of those AI engineers are smarter and better schedulers than I am.
But that's what managers and proper scoping and perspective is for. Maybe they're okay with that, but I'd wager any profit motivated company would not keep exploring unless the gains are enormous.
but we're laymen with no attempts to define what AGI means in concrete terms, nevermind remotely come to any agreement over it, so the manager and proper task scheduling is gonna have much more concrete and discreet task in the sprint in jira. it's not like there's just one ticket with a billion points or umptuple XL that says AGI. That's not even gonna be an epic with a million tickets. (or maybe it is. I don't work there, lol)
The people in the trenches there are working on tactical specific things and aren't going to be fired for meeting their internal KPIs which aren't nebulously AGI.
>so the manager and proper task scheduling is gonna have much more concrete and discreet task in the sprint in jira
Yes, that's the true meaning behind my words. The marketing is saying "were working on AGI as we speak!" and that's only bare bones true in the same way that someone is buying a house... While baeeot starting their savings, and unsure or where they are buying and what they want in it. It's barely an idea, per alone "around the corner".
Meanwhile, they are given small, unexciting, but important stepping stones to experiment. Nothing that makes line go up, because that means being truthful. Thars why I hate hype culture. It obscures true progress and honesty towards progress. A distraction because talking about a "thing" in a blue sky is more profitable than talking about the actual stepping stones.