People really really don’t understand the implications of AGI.

Whether or not you believe we will reach it in a fee years, we are certainly wayy closer today than we were even two years ago.

The possibility of genuine AGI obliterates all the financial or energy related worries, they pale in comparison to the ultimate impact of such a technology.

However, yes, if you believe AGI is not possible or won’t arrive in the coming decade then all the data center buildup seems foolish.

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tipiirai 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I believe AGI is mostly a marketing term, so the data center buildup definitely seems foolish.

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danaris 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

First, you have to define "AGI".

Next, you have to have a clear path to reaching it.

Then, you have to have the resources to actually walk that path.

Only with all three of those can you make any credible claim that AGI is near.

As it stands, we have none of them—and the lack of the second is the most damning. It's very, very clear at this point that just scaling up the existing LLMs is not going to reach some critical mass and result in AGI, like the serendipitous sapience of Mycroft in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Given that, any path to AGI necessarily includes some new breakthrough on it (or more than one). And by their essential nature, breakthroughs are not something you can predict or schedule. Indeed, you cannot even be guaranteed that they will ever happen. (It is likely, assuming that it is physically possible to build AGI, that we will figure out how at some point...but not guaranteed.)

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surgical_fire 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"any day now"

Gotta love this argument. Top it off by saying anyone skeptical is a fool, because of course.

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atleastoptimal 9 hours ago | parent [-]

i’m sure my argument would have no merit if you ignored the thousands of advancements made in AI over the past few years

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CamperBob2 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the biggest case for a bearish attitude towards AGI is simply that we don't take advantage of the intelligence we already have. Look at our elected human leaders, for Pete's sake.

If we had access to AGI today, we'd just find novel and interesting ways to ignore it, enslave it, gimp it, and/or bias it.

	▲	sph 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What, your preference would be to just unleash it upon the world? I wish the average software engineer had any foundation whatsoever in humanities and philosophy before being allowed to make such decisions, but alas, we are doomed.

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surgical_fire 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really?

The last major advancement was probably GPT3, af least if we are talking about the LLM companies, the ones involved in the current data center boom.

After that was we experienced were marginal improvements of the same technology. Yes, the current models are better than what OpenAI put out at the time of ChatGPT 3, but none of it was revolutionary (and the gains have been less and less perceptible in newer versions).

We might be as far from AGI as we were in 2022. I think we are multiple revolutions in technology away from it.