Comment by mordymoop
6 hours ago
I think it’s time to consider that maybe being a venerable graybeard of AI just means you happened to be early to the party. Most of the “breathtaking” innovations of the early pioneers of the field are obvious solutions that anyone would have thought of when faced with the problems they encountered. LeCun’s primary contribution was Convnets, which is almost literally just “what if we organized ANNs in a way similar to how animal visual neurons are organized?”
In other words, I’m kind of tired of having to hear the opinions of dudes whose claim to fame was being at the right place at the right time. I’d rather hear from people who correctly predicted 10 years ago that AGI would arrive by 2027 (of which there are many) than people who continue to insist that it somehow won’t.
> I’d rather hear from people who correctly predicted 10 years ago that AGI would arrive by 2027
Where is this AGI you speak of? What?
See sibling comments: Modern AI is AGI according to any reasonable definition from prior to 2016.
AGI doesn’t mean superintelligence.
Saying it repeatedly doesn't make it true. I have no idea why your calling back before 2016 for a definition of AGI when its been in recent years that the leaders of some American labs have been trying to water down the definition AGI for self-enrichment purposes (i.e. IPO cash out).
AGI hasn't arrived. why would you care about a prognostication that has not yet played out?
AGI arrived recently because Jensen Huang is getting scared shitless about the unprofitability of the LLM companies that are his customers.
I don't think he's concerned at all. He wants to destroy their profitability before they remove his chips from inference. Thats why they are selling billions at scale of chips to China, he needs llms to be commodities. He wants to eliminate any company that can rival him, like any monopolist oligarch.
Modern AI is AGI according to any reasonable definition from prior to 2016.
By this definition everyone is at the right place at the right time.
ML research is weird because it's really about
- compute
- data
- architecture
You're at the right place at the right time for the first two and you're probably rediscovering a Schmidhuber for the third
Most problems are actually not that hard; most everything is actually mainly a result of right place, right time. If I hadn’t been the one to do my PhD research, someone else would have. Very few people are actually paradigm-shifting geniuses. This is fine. Good, even. But it does imply that people who are early to a field shouldn’t generally be deferred to. If anything, they’re more likely to have outmoded opinions.
LeCun is a lot more than a "Grey Beard"... lol, that is a significant understatement of his contributions to the field and position in the field.
Among other things, LeCun is one of the senior people industry who has a deep understanding of the mathematics and analysis underlying neural networks and "neural network like" approaches to machine learning. I think he understands a lot more about neural networks than most researchers today.
I also don't think our current LLM models are AGI and think the LLM approach is, mathematically, incapable of producing an AGI. At the end of the day, the architecture is still a streaming token plinko machine with a lot of guide-rails to achieve good behavior.
I do think it is very impressive how far hundreds of billions of dollars have been able to take LLMs in terms of usefulness (I use LLMs everyday in my job). AGI or not, current LLM models are a pretty incredible achievement and will provide lasting benefit even after the economic implosion of the AI industry occurs (which I think is imminent).
I looked up his achievements to double check my understanding before writing my comment. Convnets are regarded as his headline achievement. Everything else is basically incremental. Note that I am not calling him some kind of fraud or moron. He is “just” a normal academic, a pretty smart guy who did research in his field for decades. Many thousands of people have similarly impressive resumes. This does not mean they should be deferred to.
> Most of the “breathtaking” innovations of the early pioneers of the field are obvious solutions that anyone would have thought of when faced with the problems they encountered.
This is just straight up arrogance without any proof. Every breakthrough builds off another's work. Then to claim that 'AGI has been correctly predicted', I honestly don't even know what you are talking about.
Modern AI would be considered AGI by anyone having this conversation in 2016.
> who correctly predicted 10 years ago that AGI would arrive by 2027
hahahahahahahaha i guess this is the techbro culture of HN :))) any actual people using Astra daily must be just belly laughing along with me hahahahahahahaha agi hahahahaha
This site is becoming insufferable