Comment by yCombLinks
2 hours ago
> The overlapping AGI definition I use here is "Most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans".
That's a poor definition. Nowhere have I seen cheapness as being a requirement to count as AGI. If we have something that can do everything people can do and more, but it costs a lot means it's not AGI?
Author here, I drew on this from AI 2027. Yes, a very-expensive AGI, e.g. $1 million / day to simulate a smart human, would be a huge deal. But it would have meaningfully different effects than a cheap one.
Here's one definition AI 2027 used [1]: "Superhuman coder (SC): An AI system for which the company could run with 5% of their compute budget 30x as many agents as they have human research engineers..."
[1] https://ai-2027.com/research/timelines-forecast
I've got no problem with your concept, and even think it's useful. I just don't think that concept and AGI are the same thing. Economically useful has no relation to what has been called AGI before.
I take it as a sign of how close it is (or how close people think it is). When AGI was SFnal magic, merely having it at all is a fascinating concept. Now that (people think) it's on the horizon, there are more practical concerns, like the fact that running these things might cost a substantial amount of money.
If it's merely human equivalent but somehow costs a lot more than actual humans, then it's actually pretty marginal until the cost comes down. There are a lot of humans.
So you could technically have AGI without entering a true AGI era. "95% as good as an average Harvard graduate across the board, but it costs $5 million/year to run" is impressive and scientifically interesting, but not economically transformative.
But if it costs $50,000/year to run, then everything changes really fast. And not necessarily in a good way.
Plenty of C-level executives have salaries around that number. Replacing them with AGI would be cost-effective. Cost is contingent, shouldn't be part of the AGI definition.
You could replace them with a potato and get similar economic outcomes for their companies.
They get this much money not because their work is worth this much. It's just how the system is set up.
AGI couldn't be CEO BECASUE it can't receive millions of dollars in compensation the same way potato can't. Getting this much money is what the CEO does. Apart from that they do very little when summed up.
Well, let's look at someone like Einstein. Just for argument's sake let's say he has a flat salary demand of $5 million dollars. It's not cost effective to hire Einstein to write your CRUD apps in this situation. That doesn't mean there isn't somewhere that he would have a value of $5 million.
No insult to the Harvard grads I know. But the median grad isn't Einstein, and they won't magically earn back $5 million/year. They're not that special, on average.
Now, if you have an AGI that can reliably and repeatedly do Einstein-level science, then I'd argue that we're starting to talk about ASI, aka, "superintelligence." Which would be providing something that humans can't consistently produce at any cost. So cost becomes much less relevant.
But if the best you can do is replace an ordinary smart human for $5 million/year, you have to compete with ordinary smart humans. Who are abundant and who very rarely cost more than $500,000/year, if you're willing to shop around and gamble a bit.
It's also a very lame definition. Intelligence - and humans - are more than just labor.
(You'll forgive me for conflating humanity and intelligence - we are homo spaiens, after all. Thinking man.)
I'm not _confused_ why these "AI" "Labs" are using that definition though. It's extremely clear they're trying to eliminate the need for the non-owner class. They're not selling LLMs (some companies are, but not these companies). These companies are selling the idea of labor without laborers to people who hate and fear laborers - and their utter dependence on them - more than anything else in their lives.
Really looking forward to the scam collapsing. Crypto wasn't very satisfying to me because too many of the victims were just idiots. This time, it's class warfare.
If it's not cheaper, it won't be automated. So saying that it's gonna get massively automated already includes assumption that it's gonna be cheaper. No harm in mentioning it again.