> no one knew how to even convincingly fake a natural language interaction.

There was some decent attempts at the turing test given limited subject matter long before LLM’s. As in people looking at the conversation where unsure if one of the parties was a computer. It’s really interesting to read some of those transcripts.

LLM’s actually score worse one some of those tests. Of course they do a huge range of other things, but it’s worth understanding both their strengths and many weaknesses.

> It won't happen right away, but I'd be a little surprised if we didn't see it within 10 years.

Meanwhile, even after the infamous LK-99 fiasco (which gripped this forum almost more than anywhere else) was exposed as an overblown nothingburger, I still had seemingly-intelligent people telling me with all seriousness that the superconductor breakthrough had a 50% chance of happening within the next year. People are absolutely, terminally terrible at estimating the odds of future events that are surrounded by hype.

I thought Waymo was much more ML than logical rules based subsumption? I’m not sure it’s possible to do more than simple robotics without jumping into ML, I guess maybe if you had high level rules prioritized via subsumption but manipulating complex ML-trained sensors and actuators.

> clear path to AGI

What are the steps?

But the distinction that we're trying to make here is that people hear "plausible in theory" and think "plausible in practice within the timespan of human civilization", which does not follow.

I'm not trying to say anything about whether or not a CRQC will ever be built. I'm also not trying to say that pursuing PQC in the short term is a bad idea. But what I am saying is that the burden of proof remains on the believers to show that the engineering challenges are more than theoretically surmountable.

It's not what it can do today (which is already pretty impressive) it is what it can do in another century, which too is a relatively short time.

The Wright Flyer was a complete aircraft but small, awkward and not very practical. But it had all of the parts and that was the bit that mattered.

LLMs are not a 'complete AI' at all, they are just a very slick imitation of one through a completely different pathway. Useful, but not AI (at least, not to me). Meanwhile, a very large fraction of the users of OpenAI, Claude etc all think that AI has arrived and from that perspective it is mostly the tech crowd that is disappointed. For the rest of the people the thing is nothing short of magic compared to what they were able to do with a computer not so long ago. And for people like translators it is a massive threat to their jobs, assuming they still have one.

It is both revolutionary and a letdown, depending on your viewpoint and expectations.

This rhymes with “we were promised The Jetsons and all we got was Facebook.”

Sci-fi is fanciful and doesn’t take into account psychology. What we got is the local maxima of what entrepreneurs think they can build and what people are willing to pay for.

Sci-fi is not a prediction. It is a hypothetical vision for what humanity could be in a distant future. The writer doesn’t have to grapple with limitations of physics (note FTL travel is frequently a plot device, not a plausible technology) or limitations about what product-market-fit the market will adopt.

And, of course, sci-fi dates are rarely close or accurate. That’s probably by design (most Star Trek space technologies would be unbelievable if the timeline was 2030, but more easily believable if you add a few thousand years for innovation).

Well... the 200K is so loosely defined that it could well be 210000 or 190000 (or even further out) so I figured it would be funny to be exact. But you're right that that doesn't carry well online.