Comment by delis-thumbs-7e

I think the advancement in AI over the last four years has greatly exceeded the advancement in understanding the workings of human intelligence. What paradigm shift has there been recently in that field?

I would agree with you if we were talking about trying to replicate some form of general intelligence, but we are talking about creating artificial intelligence.

AGI is a business term nowadays, it has nothing to do with the hard to define term intelligence.

AGI - Automatically Generating Income.

AGI moved from a technical goal to a marketing term

The Turing test ended up being kind of a flop. We basically passed it and nobody cared. That's because the turing test is about whether a machine can fool a human, not about its intelligent capabilities per se.

AGI in the common man's world model is ASI in the AI researcher's definitions, i.e. something obviously smarter at anything and everything you could ask it for regardless of how good of an expert you are in any domain.

also, I'm pretty sure some people will move goalposts further even then.

Hasn't met your sci-fi expectations, maybe. I pull a computer out of my pocket, and talk with it. Sure, I gets tripped up here and there, but take a step back, holy shit that's freaking amazing! I don't have a flying car or transparent aluminum, and society has its share of issues right now, but my car drives itself. Coming from the 90's, I think living in the sci-fi future! (Only question is, which one.)

AGI means artificial general intelligence, as opposed to artificial narrow intelligence. General intelligence means being able to generalise to many tasks beyond the single narrow one that an AI has been designed/trained on, and LLMs fit that description perfectly, being able to do anything from writing poetry, programming, summarising documents, translating, NLP, and if multi-modal, vision, audio, image generation... not all to human-level performance, but certainly to a useful one. As opposed to previous AI that was able to do only a single thing, like play chess or classify images, and had no way of being generalised to other tasks.

LLMs aren't artificial superintelligence and might not reach that point, but refusing to call them AGI is absolutely moving the goalposts.

Vision is still much weaker than text for LLMs. So you could argue we already have AGI for text but not vision inputs, or you could argue AGI requires being human level at text vision and sound.

> It's not a great definition but it's also not a terrible one either. For an AI system to be able to do all or even most of the jobs in an economy

That's not the definition they have been using. The definition was "$100B in profits". That's less than the net income of Microsoft. It would be an interesting milestone, but certainly not "most of the jobs in an economy".

Yeah I think this is more coherent than people realize. Economically relevant knowledge work is things that humans find cognitively demanding. Otherwise they wouldn't be valued in the first place.

It ties the definition to economic value, which I think is the best definition that we can conjure given that AGI is otherwise highly subjective. Economically relevant work is dictated by markets, which I think is the best proxy we have for something so ambiguous.

Around the end of 2024, it was reported that OpenAI and Microsoft agreed that for the purposes of their exclusivity agreement, AGI will be achieved when their AI system generates $100 billion in profit: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

It’s a system that generates $100 billion in profit. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity

From: https://openai.com/charter/

Here's the sauce you requested: [0]

"OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits."

Given that the definition of AGI is beyond meaningless, it is clear that the "I" in AGI stands for IPO.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-openai-financial-de...

It doesn’t though, AGI have far greater implications than doing mundane work of today. Actual AGI would self improve, that in itself would change literally every single thing of human civilization, instead we are talking about replacing white collar jobs.

When we are having serious conversations about AI rights and shutting off a model + harness was impactful as a death sentence. (I'm extremely skeptical that given the scale of computer/investment needed to produce the models we have _good as they are_ that our current llm architecture gets us there if there is even somewhere we want to go).

wiktionary is better for this usecase since it tends to have a richer coverage of various meanings

We need to stop pretending we can do the next step without a hardware tock. It's not happening with current Nvidia products.

ATG = Advanced Technology Group, i.e. Uber's self-driving org.

Autonomous Thriving Hroup?

In the context of raising money and justifying investment?

We already know that same problem has been examined by many credible mathematicians already and couldn't be solved by any of them yet.

Why are we expecting AGI to one shot it? Can't we have an AGI that can fails occasionally to solve some math problem? Is the expectation of AGI to be all knowing?

By the way I agree that AGI is not around the corner or I am not arguing any of the llm s are "thinking machines". It's just I agree goal post or posts needs to be set well.

You could also nerf your performance at random times and then get good at it again, and extend the illusion for longer.

It is a simple mathematical fact that if you get married one year and have twins the next, your household will contain over a million people within 20 years.

Thing is that distillation is so easy that it would also need large scale regulatory capture to keep smaller competitors out.

What kind of ludicrous statement is this? Any monopoly with viable economics for profit with no threat of competition yields monopoly profits…

They already did that, and AI. That's how we got into this mess.

A "surplus of money"? So people saving for retirement have a "surplus of money"? Basically if any money is standing still, it's a legitimate tactic to just...take it, in your mind.

Other people just call it "theft".

I'm curious, do you recall if they gave any technical details about how they thought about AGI? Like, was it based on neural networks or something else, like symbolic AI?

Asking because, reading the tea leaves from the outside, until ChatGPT came along, MSFT (via Bill Gates) seemed to heavily favor symbolic AI approaches. I suspect this may be partly why they were falling so far behind Google in the AI race, which could leverage its data dominance with large neural networks.

So based on the current AI boom, MSFT may have been chasing a losing strategy with symbolic AI, but if they were all-in on NN, they were on the right track.

Let me just repeat that: "Microsoft" came to your school in 2002 and "confidently stated" that AI had been solved. Really interesting story.

I knew flappy bird was a bigger deal than it got credit for. Didn’t realize it was agi until just now.

Yes, all of the people involved live in a delusion bubble. Their economic and social existence depends, at this point, on making increasingly bombastic and eschatological claims about AGI. By the standards of normal human psychological function, these people are completely insane.

Definitely interesting to watch from the perspective of human psychology but there is no real content there and there never was.

The stuff around Mythos is almost identical to O1. Leaks to the media that AGI had probably been achieved. Anonymous sources from inside the company saying this is very important and talking about the LLM as if it was human. This has happened multiple times before.

There’s 3 main facets behind AGI pushers

1) True believers 2) Hype 3) A way to wash blatant copyright infringement

True believers are scary and can be taken advantage of. I played DOTA from 2005 on and beating pros is not enough for AGI belief. I get that the learning is more indirect than a deterministic decision tree, but the scaling limitations and gaps in types of knowledge that are ingestible makes AGI a pipe dream for my lifetime.

> Ilya Sutskever genuinely believed it

Seems more like an incredibly embarrassing belief on his part than something I should be crediting.

From the reporting I’ve read his main attributes are being a sociopath with an amazing ability to manipulate people 1:1

Sure, but it was probably stuck at doing that one thing.

neural networks are solving huge issues left and right. Googles NN based WEathermodel is so good, you can run it on consumer hardware. Alpha fold solved protein folding. LLMs they can talk to you in a 100 languages, grasp tasks concepts and co.

I mean lets talk about what this 'hype' was if we see a clear ceiling appearing and we are 'stuck' with progress but until then, I would keep my judgment for judgmentday.

I'm pretty sure most people take issue with AGI, because we've been raised in culture to believe that AGI is a super entity who is a complete superset of humans and could never ever be wrong about anything.

In some sense, this isn't really different than how society was headed anyways? The trend was already going on that more and more sections of the population were getting deemed irrational and you're just stupid/evil for disagreeing with the state.

But that reality was still probably at least a century out, without AI. With AI, you have people making that narrative right now. It makes me wonder if these people really even respect humanity at all.

Yes, you can prod slippery slope and go from "superintelligent beings exist" to effectively totalitarianism, but you'll find so many bad commitments there.

No one who read science fiction in 1955 would call any of the various models we know to be "artificial intelligence". They would be impressed with it, even excited at first that it was that... until they'd had a chance to evaluate it.

Science fiction from that era even had the concept of what models are... they'd call it an "oracle". I can think of at least 3 short stories (though remembering the authors just isn't happening for me at the moment). The concept was of a device that could provide correct answers to any question. But these devices had no agency, were dependent on framing the question correctly, and limited in other ways besides (I think in one story, the device might chew on a question for years before providing an answer... mirroring that time around 9am PST when Claude has to keep retrying to send your prompt).

We've always known what we meant by artificial intelligence, at least until a few years ago when we started pretending that we didn't. Perhaps the label was poorly chosen (all those decades ago) and could have a better label now (AGI isn't that better label, it's dumber still), but it's what we're stuck with. And we all know what we mean by it. We all almost certainly do not want that artificial intelligence because most of us are certain that it will spell the doom of our species.

Just don't move the goal posts. AGI was already here the day ChatGPT came out:

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

How is this relevant? Human General Intelligence has a lot of limitations as well and we have managed to do lots.

People always over estimate the impact of technology because they dont Understand human aspect of many businesses. Will it eventually replaced or will the shape of these kind of work will be completely different in the future? That’s an easy yes, when is that future? That’s a big unknown, in my experience this kind of stuff takes at least a decade (and possibly more on this case) to make a big impact like replacing all of X.

What kind of litigation attorney?

I've been working with a startup, and I want to invest in it, and for the paperwork for that, all the nitty gritty details; instead of spending $20k in lawyers and a whole bunch more time going back and forth with them as well, the four of us, me, their CEO, my AI, and their AI; we all sat in a room together and hashed it out until both of us were equally satisfied with the contract. (There's some weird stuff so a templated SAFE agreement wasn't going to work.) I'm not saying you're wrong, just that lawyers, as a profession isn't going to be unchanged either.

Yes! Same logic as the financials, in which the companies pass back and forth the same $200 Billion promissory note.

No, it’s just an example of something that’s indistinguishable from AGI. Of all the things that are or are indistinguishable from AGI, a sufficiently complex LLM is one. A sufficiently complex decision tree is probably another. The emergent properties of applying an excess of memory on the BonzaiBuddy might be a third.

>I'll believe it when I see it.

And how will you know AGI when you saw it?

Its not a statistical next word predictor.

The 'predicting the next word' is the learning mechanism of the LLM which leads to a latent space which can encode higher level concepts.

Basically a LLM 'understands' that much as efficient as it has to be to be able to respond in a reasonable way.

A LLM doesn't predict german text or chinese language. It predicts the concept and than has a language layer outputting tokens.

And its not just LLMs which are progressing fast, voice synt and voice understanding jumped significantly, motion detection, skeletion movement, virtual world generation (see nvidias way of generating virutal worlds for their car training), protein folding etc.

I found there demonstration at the CES this year very spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw

I can also recommend looking at Generalist: https://www.youtube.com/@Generalist_AI

> Their progress is almost nought.

How can you say the advancements since Honda's asimo robot amount to "almost naought"?

Which ones? At least in the last 4 years, there was no AI winter.

Self-driving had never the amount of compute, research adoption and money than what the current overall AI has. Its not comparable.

Crypto was flawed from the beginning and lots of people didn't understood it properly. Not even that a blockchain can't secure a transaction from something outside of a blockchain.