mdp2021 a day ago

> That completely made up number

That «completely made up number» was said by "Chief research officer Mark Chen", and that is news - curious, and somehow interesting. It is in the article, and probably more notable than 'Inside OpenAI’s Reboot'.

> Amid all this, company leaders believe they have arrived at the cusp of a milestone that could change the course of humanity: the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Its leaders won’t quite declare they’ve reached that threshold. But they no longer speak about it as a distant abstraction. Chief research officer Mark Chen estimated OpenAI is “80% of the way” to AGI. Brockman said that viewed from two years in the future, this may be remembered as the moment AGI was created. Altman told me that OpenAI was “not quite yet” there, but that by the end of the year the company would have an internal system he would call AGI

The submitter is relatively new here (maybe he has not consulted the guidelines that much yet), but I will give a token of my understanding on why one would replace the original title with the "Oh, by the way, <outlandish statement>".

> for that matter

Nah. Every intellectual dealing with Intelligence should have an idea at least of what is missing ("if that should be a cat where are the ears"). Construct a set difference between an ideal human cognitive system and current LLMs, and you will get an idea approximating AGI.

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D-Machine 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It is almost certainly a completely made up number though. It's not quite on the same level of emptiness as "rate your emotion on a scale of 1-10", but it might as well be.

I.e. are we 80% of the way by the calendar, then if so, as measured by when? We're only about 66% of the way through the current year. Is it that they are 80% of the way through some final totally defined training or tuning procedure? Not likely. And it is 80% of the way to AGI, which is vaguely defined as that which can "outperform humans [by how much? what proportion of humans?] at most [how much, exactly, again?] economically valuable work [what work is not economically valuable?]."

Call a spade a spade, the 80% thing is 100% total bullshit (in the Frankfurtian sense, i.e. it is completely unconcerned about truth, and is all just about generating feels).

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mdp2021 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> Frankfurtian

It probably is, but not necessarily generally speaking: explicitly intended gross estimates may not be Galileian - they are, well, gross and estimates. You are pointing to the wrong detail: it is not that they would be "80% of the way": the news is that "the CRO estimates them at 80% of the way". It may be true that such is his estimation. And we cannot discard a priori his good faith. Of course more meaningful details would have had more juice.

But that he made that statement is actual banging news. It may just mean they are "80% on the way to redefine "AGI" in a biased partial exploitable way", but it is a statement that can make the journalists update the journals.

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D-Machine 18 hours ago | parent [-]

It could not be Frankfurtian if we say that he was just speaking colloquially and obviously only really meant something like "quite close", and indeed making up random percentages to stand for such vague feelings is really quite a normal thing in certain styles of everyday conversation. Whether or not such a style is appropriate in this context is debatable, but it could save him from the bullshit charge.

But I don't see how it being an estimation makes it less bullshitty, because there is simply no reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful. It is stated in such a way that evaluating the truth or accuracy of the estimate is basically impossible, i.e. it is bullshit by vagueness, even if it is an estimate. Only the "end of the year" claim is concrete, but the AGI definition has much of the same BS-via-vagueness problem, so it is still all very Frankfurtian to me.

So I don't see it as banging news, but just as more BS and almost certainly a nothingburger. But, hey, whatever, time will tell.

	▲	mdp2021 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> reasonable way to tie that 80% to anything concrete or meaningful 80% of the implementation of an internal project, I guessed.