Comment by solenoid0937

7 hours ago

I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

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solenoid0937

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aleph_minus_one  4 hours ago

> I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.

With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.

frollogaston  6 hours ago

How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.

  • solenoid0937  6 hours ago

    Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously.

    I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework

    • nsagent  6 hours ago

      I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released).

      Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

      5 replies →

    • PunchyHamster  5 hours ago

      AGI might be a risk but what top AI firms are doing is not really getting us closer to AGI in a meaningful way, it is pretty clear now LLM is not the way to get there

Zigurd  5 hours ago

A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.

oblio  6 hours ago

I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.

Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).

  • Zigurd  5 hours ago

    I believe in AGI to the extent that if what's going on between your ears isn't happening on a network of neurons, it's magic. And I also believe the idea that AGI is near is based on the emergent capabilities of LLMs. There's a chance that AGI will emerge from bigger faster better LLMs. But without a theory of when and how that will happen, I'm not counting on it.

  • Nifty3929  6 hours ago

    Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.

    • underlipton  4 hours ago

      Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body.

      It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.

      1 reply →