Comment by atleastoptimal

7 months ago

If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.

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atleastoptimal

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godelski  7 months ago

I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.

  • atleastoptimal  7 months ago

    The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress

    https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...

    >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors.

    >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027.

    >In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 (and definitely by 2024).

    >Most of their other estimates declined significantly between 2023 and 2022.

    >The median estimate for achieving ‘high-level machine intelligence’ shortened by 13 years.

    Basically every median timeline estimate has shrunk like clockwork every year. Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents. I think is reasonable to expect that the pace of "prediction error" won't change significantly since it's been on a straight downward trend over the past 4 years, and if it continues as such, AGI around 2028-2030 is a median estimate.

    • jodrellblank  7 months ago

      > "Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents."

      Claim doesn't check out; here's a YouTube video from Apple uploaded in 2021, explaining how to enable and use the iPhone feature to speak a high level human description of what the camera is pointed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY

    • p1esk  7 months ago

      Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.

      4 replies →

    • godelski  7 months ago 

        > The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress

      What's your argument?

      That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions?

      Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction?

      Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there is a thing as "more accurate" right?

        >> In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027.

      Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 < 2027.

      And just look at the line that follows

        > In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023

      Something doesn't add up here... My guess, as someone who literally took that survey, is what's being referred to as "a simple program" has a different threshold.

      Here's the actual question from the survey

        Write concise, efficient, human-readable Python code to implement simple algorithms like quicksort. That is, the system should write code that sorts a list, rather than just being able to sort lists.
  
  Suppose the system is given only:
    A specification of what counts as a sorted list
    Several examples of lists undergoing sorting by quicksort

      Is the answer to this question clear? Place your bets now!

      Here, I asked ChatGPT the question[1], it got it wrong. Yeah, I know it isn't very wrong, but it is still wrong. Here's an example of a correct solution[2] which shows the (at least) two missing lines. Can we get there with another iteration? Sure! But that's not what the question was asking.

      I'm sure some people will say that GPT gave the right solution. So what that it ignored the case of a singular array and assumed all inputs are arrays. I didn't give it an example of a singular array or non-array inputs, but it did just assume. I mean leetcode questions pull out way more edge cases than I'm griping on here.

      So maybe you're just cherry-picking. Maybe the author is just cherry-picking. Because their assertion that "AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023" is not unobjectively true. It's not clear that this is true in 2025!

      [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843

      [1] https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0da...

      [2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-inse...

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