Comment by tim333

I guess people talk about AGI as in human abilities or better AI because it'll have a big effect when it gets here.

I think a lot of confusion with skeptics is they think - oh someone's invented the LLM algorithm but it's not that good - what's the big deal?

The people who think it's coming eg. Musk, Altman, Kurzweil, the Wait Not Why guy and myself tend to think of it more coming down to hardware - the brain's a biological computer and as computer hardware get's faster each year it'll overtake at some stage. The current backprop algo was invented around 1982. It works now because hardware.

Also the present algorithms are a bit lacking but now we have the hardware to run better algorithms, billions of dollars and many of the best minds are getting thrown at that. Before the hardware was there there wasn't much financial motivation to do so. So I think things will advance quite quickly there.

(Wait But Why thing from eleven years ago. Has cartoons. Predicted human level about 2025 https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

Moravec's 1997 paper "When will computer hardware match the human brain?" Quite science based - predicted "required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s" https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf

And here we are.)