Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).
imiric · 3h ago
Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no?
This is the main point that proves to me that these companies are mostly selling us snake oil. Yes, there is a great deal of utility from even the current technology. It can detect patterns in data that no human could; that alone can be revolutionary in some fields. It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced, and certain permutations of that can be insightful. It can produce fascinating images, audio, and video. Some of these capabilities raise safety concerns, particularly in the wrong hands, and important questions that society needs to address. These hurdles are surmountable, but they require focusing on the reality of what these tools can do, instead of on whatever a group of serial tech entrepreneurs looking for the next cashout opportunity tell us they can do.
The constant anthropomorphization of this technology is dishonest at best, and harmful and dangerous at worst.
xoralkindi · 44m ago
> It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced...
No, it can generate data that mimics anything humans have put on the WWW
richk449 · 52m ago
> if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no?
Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I hardly even hear about it - like it just faded away.
As far as I can tell smart engineers are using AI tools, particularly people doing coding, but even non-coding roles.
The criticism feels about three years out of date.
imiric · 20m ago
Not at all. The reason it's not talked about as much these days is because the prevailing way to work around it is by using "agents". I.e. by continuously prompting the LLM in a loop until it happens to generate the correct response. This brute force approach is hardly a solution, especially in fields that don't have a quick way to check the output. In programming, trying to compile the code can catch many (but definitely not all) issues. In other science and humanities fields this is just not possible, and verifying the output is much more labor intensive.
The other reason is because the primary focus of the last 3 years has been scaling the data and hardware up, with a bunch of (much needed) engineering around it. This has produced better results, but it can't sustain the AGI promises for much longer. The industry can only survive on shiny value added services and smoke and mirrors for so long.
candiddevmike · 47m ago
> Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I hardly even hear about it - like it just faded away
That's not true at all, and if anything the newer models hallucinate worse than the older ones.
Are you hallucinating?? "AI" is still constantly hallucinating. It still writes pointless code that does nothing towards anything I need it to do, a lot more often than is acceptable.
ozim · 1h ago
anthropomorphization definitely sucks, hype is over the board.
But it is far from snake oil as it actually is useful and does a lot of stuff really.
deadbabe · 2h ago
Data from the future is tunneling into the past to mess up our weights and ensure we never achieve AGI.
pu_pe · 6h ago
I don't think it's as simple as that. Chatbots can be used to harvest data, and sales are still important before and after you achieve AGI.
worldsayshi · 3h ago
It could also be the case that they think that AGI could arrive at any moment but it's very uncertain when and only so many people can work on it simultaneously. So they spread out investments to also cover low uncertainty areas.
energy123 · 3h ago
Besides, there is Sutskever's SSI which is avoiding customers.
pests · 1h ago
OpenAI considers money to be useless post-agi. They’ve even made statements that any investments are basically donations once agi is achieved
rvz · 6h ago
Exactly. For example, Microsoft was building data centers all over the world since "AGI" was "around the corner" according to them.
Now they are cancelling those plans. For them "AGI" was cancelled.
OpenAI claims to be closer and closer to "AGI" as more top scientists left or are getting poached by other labs that are behind.
So why would you leave if the promise of achieving "AGI" was going to produce "$100B dollars of profits" as per OpenAI's and Microsoft's definition in their deal?
Their actions tell more than any of their statements or claims.
cm277 · 6h ago
Yes, this. Microsoft has other businesses that can make a lot of money (regular Azure) and tons of cash flow. The fact that they are pulling back from the market leader (OpenAI) whom they mostly owned should be all the negative signal people need: AGI is not close and there is no real moat even for OpenAI.
whynotminot · 3h ago
Well, there’s clauses in their relationship with OpenAI that sever the relationship when AGI is reached. So it’s actually not in Microsoft’s interests for OpenAI to get there
PessimalDecimal · 3h ago
I haven't heard of this. Can you provide a reference? I'd love to see how they even define AGI crisply enough for a contract.
diggan · 3h ago
> I'd love to see how they even define AGI crisply enough for a contract.
Seems to be about this:
> As per the current terms, when OpenAI creates AGI - defined as a "highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work" - Microsoft's access to such a technology would be void.
Wait, aren't they cancelling leases on non-ai data centers that aren't under Microsoft's control, while spending much more money to build new AI focused data centers that that own? Do you have a source that says they're canceling their own data centers?
Microsoft itself hasn't said they're doing this because of oversupply in infrastructure for it's AI offerings, but they very likely wouldn't say that publicly even if that's the reason.
computerphage · 3h ago
Thank you!
tuatoru · 25m ago
> Their actions tell more than any of their statements or claims.
At Microsoft, "AI" is spelled "H1-B".
zaphirplane · 6h ago
I’m not commenting on the whole just the rhetorical question of why would people leave.
They are leaving for more money, more seniority or because they don’t like their boss.
0 about AGI
Game_Ender · 5h ago
I think the implicit take is that if your company hits AGI your equity package will do something like 10x-100x even if the company is already big. The only other way to do that is join a startup early enough to ride its growth wave.
Another way to say it is that people think it’s much more likely for each decent LLM startup grow really strongly first several years then plateau vs. then for their current established player to hit hyper growth because of AGI.
leoc · 4h ago
A catch here is that individual workers may have priorities which are altered due to the strong natural preference for assuring financial independence. Even if you were a hot AI researcher who felt (and this is just a hypothetical) that your company was the clear industry leader and had, say, a 75% chance of soon achieving something AGI-adjacent and enabling massive productivity gains, you might still (and quite reasonably) prefer to leave if that was what it took to make absolutely sure of getting of your private-income screw-you money (and/or private-investor seed capital). Again this is just a hypothetical: I have no special insight, and FWIW my gut instinct is that the job-hoppers are in fact mostly quite cynical about the near-term prospects for "AGI".
andrew_lettuce · 23m ago
You're right, but the narrative out of these companies directly refutes this position. They're explicitly saying that 1. AGI changes everything, 2. It's just around the corner, 3. They're completely dedicated to achieving it; nothing is more important.
Then they leave for more money.
Touche · 6h ago
Yeah I agree, this idea that people won't change jobs if they are on the verge of a breakthrough reads like a silicon valley fantasy where you can underpay people by selling them on vision or something. "Make ME rich, but we'll give you a footnote on the Wikipedia page"
LtWorf · 1h ago
I think you're being very optimistic with the footnote.
rvz · 6h ago
> They are leaving for more money, more seniority or because they don’t like their boss. 0 about AGI
Of course, but that's part of my whole point.
Such statements and targets about how close we are to "AGI" has only become nothing but false promises and using AGI as the prime excuse to continue raising more money.
richk449 · 56m ago
> If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years?
What if chatbots and user interactions ARE the path to AGI? Two reasons they could be:
(1) Reinforcement learning in AI has proven to be very powerful. Humans get to GI through learning too - they aren’t born with much intelligence. Interactions between AI and humans may be the fastest way to get to AGI.
(2) The classic Silicon Valley startup model is to push to customers as soon as possible (MVP). You don’t develop the perfect solution in isolation, and then deploy it once it is polished. You get users to try it and give feedback as soon as you have something they can try.
I don’t have any special insight into AI or AGI, but I don’t think OpenAI selling useful and profitable products is proof that there won’t be AI.
candiddevmike · 49m ago
> I don’t have any special insight into AI or AGI,
Perhaps you may want to stop commenting on these topics until you do.
redhale · 4h ago
> Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years?
To fund yourself while building AGI? To hedge risk that AGI takes longer? Not saying you're wrong, just saying that even if they did believe it, this behavior could be justified.
krainboltgreene · 1h ago
There is no chat bot so feature rich that it would fund the billions being burned on a monthly basis.
delusional · 6h ago
Continuing in the same vain. Why would they force their super valuable, highly desirable, profit maximizing chat-bots down your throat?
Observations of reality is more consistent with company FOMO than with actual usefulness.
Touche · 6h ago
Because it's valuable training data. Like how having Google Maps on everyone's phone made their map data better.
Personally I think AGI is ill-defined and won't happen as a new model release. Instead the thing to look for is how LLMs are being used in AI research and there are some advances happening there.
bluGill · 2h ago
The people who make the money in gold rushes sold shovels, not mined the gold. Sure some random people found gold and made a lot of money, but many others didn't strike it rich.
As such even if there is a lot of money AI will make, it can still be the right decision to sell tools to others who will figure out how to use it. And of course if it turns out another pointless fad with no real value you still make money. (I'd predict the answer is in between - we are not going to get some AGI that takes over the world, but there will be niches where it is a big help and those niches will be worth selling tools into)
A_D_E_P_T · 7h ago
> "This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI."
The central claim here is illogical.
The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in this category), and if you believe that AGI will obviate most forms of computer-related work, your best move is to do whatever is most profitable in the near-term.
If you make $500k/year, and Meta is offering you $10M/year, then you ought to take the new job. Hoard money, true believer. Then, when AGI hits, you'll be in a better personal position.
Essentially, the author's core assumption is that working for a lower salary at a company that may develop AGI is preferable to working for a much higher salary at a company that may develop AGI. I don't see how that makes any sense.
levanten · 6h ago
Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money.
Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.
blululu · 4h ago
Kind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.
cdrini · 3h ago
Well depends on what you value. Achieving/contributing to something impactful first is for many people valuable even if it doesn't come with fame. Historically, this mindframe has been popular especially amongst scientists.
impossiblefork · 3h ago
Personally I think the ones who will be remembered will be the ones who publish useful methods first, not the ones who succeed commercially.
It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.
darth_aardvark · 2h ago
Is "we" the particular set of scientists who know those last four people? Surely you realize they're nowhere near as famous as the Wright brothers, right? This is giving strong https://xkcd.com/2501/ feelings.
impossiblefork · 2h ago
Yes, that is indeed the 'we', but I think more people are knowledgeable than is obvious.
I'm not an aerodynamicist, and I know about those guys, so they can't be infinitely obscure. I imagine every French person knows about Bleriot at least.
skybrian · 1h ago
"The grass is greener elsewhere" isn't inconsistent with a belief that AGI will happen somewhere.
It means you don't have much faith that the company you're working at will be the ones to pull it off.
raincole · 3h ago
> Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money.
Uh, sure. How many rocket engineers who worked for moon landing could you name?
krainboltgreene · 1h ago
How many new species of infinite chattel slave did they invent?
tharkun__ · 6h ago
*some people
bombcar · 5h ago
>your best move is to do whatever is most profitable in the near-term
Unless you’re a significant shareholder, that’s almost always the best move, anyway. Companies have no loyalty to you and you need to watch out for yourself and why you’re living.
archeantus · 2h ago
I read that most of the crazy comp Zuck is offering is in stock. So in a way, going to the place where they have lots of stock reflects their belief about where AGI is going to happen first.
bombcar · 1h ago
Comp is comp, no matter how it comes (though the details can vary in important ways).
I know people who've taking quite good comp from startups to do things that would require fundamental laws of physics to be invalidated; they took the money and devised experiments that would show the law to be wrong.
bsenftner · 6h ago
Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology that approaches that.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
We only have two computational tools to work with - deterministic and random behavior. So whatever comprehension/understanding/original thought/consciousness is, it's some algorithmic combination of deterministic and random inputs/outputs.
I know that sounds broad or obvious, but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".
omnicognate · 31m ago
What you state is called the Physical Church-Turing Thesis, and it's neither obvious nor necessarily true.
I don't know if you're making it, but the simplest mistake would be to think that you can prove that a computer can evaluate any mathematical function. If that were the case then "it's got to be doable with algorithms" would have a fairly strong basis. Anything the mind does that an algorithm can't would have to be so "magically transcendent" that it's beyond the scope of the mathematical concept of "function". However, this isn't the case. There are many mathematical functions that are proven to be impossible for any algorithm to implement. Look up uncomputable functions you're unfamiliar with this.
The second mistake would be to think that we have some proof that all physically realisable functions are computable by an algorithm. That's the Physical Church-Turing Thesis mentioned above, and as the name indicates it's a thesis, not a theorem. It is a statement about physical reality, not mathematics, so it could only ever be empirically supported, not some absolute mathematical truth.
It's a fascinating rabbit hole if you're interested - what we actually do and do not know for sure about the generality of algorithms.
RaftPeople · 18m ago
> but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".
But the poster you responded to didn't say it's magically transcendent, they just pointed out that there are many significantly hard problems that we don't solutions for yet.
tenthirtyam · 6h ago
You'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test.
If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended?
Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really.
*when someone bites into it :-)
For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).
RugnirViking · 4h ago
It's very very good at sounding like it understands stuff. Almost as good as actually understanding stuff in some fields, sure. But it's definitely not the same.
It will confidently analyze and describe a chess position using advanced sounding book techniques, but its all fundamentally flawed, often missing things that are extremely obvious (like, an undefended queen free to take) while trying to sound like its a seasoned expert - that is if it doesn't completely hallucinate moves that are not allowed by the rules of the game.
This is how it works in other fields I am able to analyse. It's very good at sounding like it knows what its doing, speaking at the level of a masters level student or higher, but its actual appraisal of problems is often wrong in a way very different to how humans make mistakes. Another great example is getting it to solve cryptic crosswords from back in the day. It often knows the answer already in its training set, but it hasn't seen anyone write out the reasoning for the answer, so if you ask it to explain, it makes nonsensical leaps (claiming birch rhymes with tyre level nonsense)
filleduchaos · 2h ago
If anyone wants to see the chess comprehension breakdown in action, the YouTuber GothamChess occasionally puts out videos where he plays against a new or recently-updated LLM.
Hanging a queen is not evidence of a lack of intelligence - even the very best human grandmasters will occasionally do that. But in pretty much every single video, the LLM loses the plot entirely after barely a couple dozen moves and starts to resurrect already-captured pieces, move pieces to squares they can't get to, etc - all while keeping the same confident "expert" tone.
DiogenesKynikos · 1h ago
A sufficiently good simulation of understanding is functionally equivalent to understanding.
At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.
andrei_says_ · 25m ago
In the Catch me if you Can movie, Leo diCaprio’s character wears a surgeon’s gown and confidently says “I concur”.
What I’m hearing here is that you are willing to get your surgery done by him and not by one of the real doctors - if he is capable of pronouncing enough doctor-sounding phrases.
Touche · 5h ago
They might not be capable of ingenuity, but they can spot patterns humans can miss. And that accelerates AI research, where it might help invent the next AI that helps invent the next AI that finally can think outside the box.
bsenftner · 5h ago
I do define it, right up there in my OP. It's subtle, you missed it. Everybody misses it, because comprehension is like air, we swim in it constantly, to the degree the majority cannot even see it.
add-sub-mul-div · 5h ago
Was that the intention of the Chinese room concept, to ask "what else is there to be comprehended?" after producing a translation?
andy99 · 3h ago
Another way to put it is we need Artificial Intelligence. Right now the term has been co-opted to mean prediction (and more commonly transcript generation). The stuff you're describing are what's commonly thought of as intelligence, it's too bad we need a new word for it.
coldcode · 6h ago
I never trusted them from the start. I remember the hype that came out of Sun when J2EE/EJBs appeared. Their hype documents said the future of programming was buying EJBs from vendors and wiring them together. AI is of course a much bigger hype machine with massive investments that need to be justified somehow. AI is a useful tool (sometimes) but not a revolution. ML is much more useful a tool. AGI is a pipe dream fantasy pushed to make it seem like AI will change everything, as if AI is like the discovery that making fire was.
ffsm8 · 2h ago
I completely agree that LLMs are missing a fundamental part for AGI, which itself is a long way of from super intelligence.
However, you don't need either of these to completely decimate the job markets and by extension our societies.
Historically speaking, "good enough" and cheaper had always won over "better, but more expensive". I suspect LLMs will raise this question endlessly until significant portions of the society are struggling - and who knows what will happen then
Before LLMs started going anywhere, I thought that's gonna be an issue for later generations, but at this point I suspect we'll witness it within the next 10 yrs.
computerphage · 3h ago
> This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI. Their stated AGI timelines are “at the latest, in a few years,” but their revealed timelines are “it’ll happen at some indefinite time in the future.”
This makes no sense to me at all. Is it a war metaphor? A race? Why is there no reason to jump ship? Doesn't it make sense to try to get on the fastest ship? Doesn't it make sense to diversify your stock portfolio if you have doubts?
hexage1814 · 1h ago
The author sounds like some generic knock-off version of Gary Marcus. And the thing we least need in this world is another Gary Marcus.
hamburga · 2h ago
> This reminds me of a paradox: The AI industry is concerned with the alignment problem (how to make a super smart AI adhere to human values and goals) while failing to align between and within organizations and with the broader world. The bar they’ve set for themselves is simply too high for the performance they’re putting out.
I keep seeing this charge that AI companies have an “Uber problem” meaning the business is heavily subsidized by VC. Is there any analysis that has been done that explains how this breaks down (training vs inference and what current pricing is)? At least with Uber you had a cab fare as a benchmark. But what should, for example, ChatGPT actually cost me per month without the VC subsidy? How far off are we?
This article isn’t particularly helpful. It focuses on a ton of specific OpenAI business decisions that aren’t necessarily generalizable to the rest of the industry. OpenAI itself might be out over its skis, but what I’m asking about is the meta-accusation that AI in general is heavily subsidized. When the music stops, what does the price of AI look like? The going rate for chat bots like ChatGPT is $20/month. Does that go to $40 a month? $400? $4,000?
handfuloflight · 57m ago
How much would OpenAI be burning per month if each monthly active user cost them $40? $400? $4000?
The numbers would bankrupt them within weeks.
bestouff · 7h ago
Are there some people here in HN believing in AGI "soonish" ?
Davidzheng · 6h ago
what's your definition? AGI original definition is median human across almost all fields which I believe is basically achieved. If superhuman (better than best expert) I expect <2030 for all nonrobotic tasks and <2035 for all tasks
gnz11 · 3h ago
How are you coming to the conclusion that "median human" is "basically achieved"? Current AI has no means of understanding and synthesizing new ideas the way a human would. It's all generative.
Davidzheng · 2h ago
synthesizing new ideas: in order to express the idea in our language it basically means you have some new combinations of existing building blocks, just sometimes the building blocks are low level enough and the combination is esoteric enough. It's a spectrum again. I think current models are in fact quite capable of combining existing ideas and building blocks in new ways (this is how human innovation also happens). Most of my evidence comes from asking newer models o3/gemini-2.5-pro for research-level mathematics questions which do not appear in existing literature but is of course connected with them.
so these arguments by fundamental distinctions I believe all cannot work--the question is how new are the AI contributions. Nowadays there's of course still no theoretical breakthroughs in mathematics from AI (though biology could be close!). Also I think the AIs have understanding--but tbf the only thing we can test is through testing on tricky questions which I think support my side. Though of course some of these questions have interpretations which are not testable--so I don't want to argue about those.
GolfPopper · 3h ago
A "median human" can run a web search and report back on what they found without making stuff up, something I've yet to find an LLM capable of doing reliably.
Davidzheng · 2h ago
I bet you median humans make up a nontrivial amount of things. Humans misremember all the time. If you ask for only quotes, LLMs can also do this without problems (I use o3 for search over google)
jltsiren · 4h ago
Your "original definition" was always meaningless. A "Hello, World!" program is equally capable in most jobs as the median human. On the other hand, if the benchmark is what the median human can reasonably become (a professional with decades of experience), we are still far from there.
Davidzheng · 4h ago
I agree with second part but not the first (far in capability not in timeline). I think you underestimate the distance of median wihout training and "hello world" in many economically meaningful jobs.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 6h ago
I could see 2040 or so being very likely. Not off transformers though.
serf · 6h ago
via what paradigm then? What out there gives high enough confidence to set a date like that?
impossiblefork · 6h ago
I might, depending on the definition.
Some kind of verbal-only-AGI that can solve almost all mathematical problems that humans come up with that can be solved in half a page. I think that's achievable somewhere in the near term, 2-7 years.
whiplash451 · 2h ago
What makes you think that this could be achieved in that time frame? All we seem to have for now are LLMs that can solve problems they’ve learned by heart (or neighboring problems)
deergomoo · 6h ago
Is that “general” though? I’ve always taken AGI to mean general to any problem.
impossiblefork · 5h ago
I suppose not.
Things I think will be hard for LLMs to do, which some humans can: you get handed 500 pages of Geheimschreiber encrypted telegraph traffic and infinite paper, and you have to figure out how the cryptosystem works and how to decrypt the traffic. I don't think that can happen. I think it requires a highly developed pattern recognition ability together with an ability to not get lost, which LLM-type things will probably continue to for a long time.
But if they could maths more fully, then pretty much all carefully defined tasks would be in reach if they weren't too long.
With regard to what Touche brings up in the other response to your comment, I think that it might be possible to get them to read up on things though-- go through something, invent problems, try to solve those. I think this is something that could be done today with today's models with no real special innovation, but which just hasn't been made into a service yet. But this of course doesn't address that criticism, since it assumes the availability of data.
Touche · 6h ago
Yes, general means you can present it a new problem that there is no data on, and it can become a expert o that problem.
bdhcuidbebe · 6h ago
Theres usually some enlightened laymen in this kind of topic.
PicassoCTs · 6h ago
St. Fermi says no
conartist6 · 6h ago
I love how much the proponents is this tech are starting to sound like the opponents.
What I can't figure out is why this author thinks it's good if these companies do invent a real AGI...
taormina · 3h ago
"""
I’m basically calling the AI industry dishonest, but I want to qualify by saying they are unnecessarily dishonest. Because they don’t need to be! They should just not make abstract claims about how much the world will change due to AI in no time, and they will be fine. They undermine the real effort they put into their work—which is genuine!
Charitably, they may not even be dishonest at all, but carelessly unintrospective. Maybe they think they’re being truthful when they make claims that AGI is near, but then they fail to examine dispassionately the inconsistency of their actions.
When your identity is tied to the future, you don’t state beliefs but wishes. And we, the rest of the world, intuitively know.
"""
He's not saying either way, just pointing out that they could just be honest, but that might hamper their ability to beg for more money.
conartist6 · 1h ago
But that isn't my point. Regardless of whether they're honest, have we even agreed that "AGI" is good?
Everyone is so tumbling over themselves even to discuss will-it-won't-it, but they seem to think about it like some kind of Manhattan project or Space race.
Like, they're *so sure* it's gonna take everyone's jobs so that there will be nothing left for people other than a life of leisure. To me this just sounds like the collapse of society, but apparently the only thing worse would be if China got the tech first. Oh no, they might use it to collapse their society!
Somebody's math doesn't add up.
Findecanor · 5h ago
AGI might be a technological breakthrough, but what would be the business case for it? Is there one?
So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.
amanaplanacanal · 1h ago
The women of the world are creating millions of new intelligence beings every day. I'm really not sure what having one made of metal is going to get us.
Right now the AGI tech bros seem to me to be subscribed to some new weird religion. They take it on faith that some super intelligence is going to solve the world problems. We already have some really high IQ people today, and I don't see them doing much better than anybody else at solving the world's problems.
leptons · 4m ago
Exactly.. even if we had an AGI superintelligence, and it came up with a solution to global warming, we'd still have right-wingnuts that stands in the way of any kind of progress. And the story is practically the same for every other problem it could solve - people are still the problem.
krapp · 5h ago
AGI would mean fully sentient, sapient and human or greater equivalent intelligence in software. The business case, such that it exists (and setting aside Roko's Basilisk and other such fears) is slavery, plain and simple. You can just fire all of your employees and have the machines do all the work, faster, better, cheaper, without regards to pesky labor and human rights laws and human physical limitations. This is something people have wanted ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed robots to exist as a concept.
I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.
danielbln · 4h ago
AGI is AGI, not ASI though. General intelligence doesn't mean sapience, sentience or consciousness, it just means general capabilities across the board at the level of or surpassing human ability. ASI is a whole different beast.
callc · 1h ago
This sounds very close to the “It’s ok to abuse and kill animals (for meat), they’re not sentient”
danielbln · 1h ago
That's quite the logical leap. Pointing out their lack of sapience (animals are absolutely sentient) does not mean it's ok to kill them.
4ndrewl · 3h ago
No-one authentically believes LLMs with whatever go-faster stripes are a path to AGI do they?
NickNaraghi · 2h ago
Point 1. could just as easily be explained by all of the labs being very close, and wanting to jump ship to one that is closer, or that gives you a better deal.
lherron · 4h ago
Honestly this article sounds like someone is unhappy that AI isn’t being deployed/developed “the way I feel it should be done”.
Talent changing companies is bad. Companies making money to pay for the next training run is bad. Consumers getting products they want is bad.
In the author’s view, AI should be advanced in a research lab by altruistic researchers and given directly to other altruistic researchers to advance humanity. It definitely shouldn’t be used by us common folk for fun and personal productivity.
hexage1814 · 1h ago
This. The point of whining about VEO 3, “AI being used to create addictive products” really shows that. It's a text-to-video technology. The company has nothing to do if people use it to generate "low quality content". The same way internet companies aren't at fault that large amounts of the web are scams or similar junk.
bsenftner · 7h ago
Maybe I'm too jaded, I expect all this nonsense. It's human beings doing all this, after all. We ain't the most mature crowd...
lizknope · 6h ago
I never had any trust in the AI industry in the first place so there was no trust to lose.
bsenftner · 5h ago
Take it further, this entire civilization is an integrity void.
davidcbc · 6h ago
> Right before “making tons of money to redistribute to all of humanity through AGI,” there’s another step, which is making tons of money.
I've got some bad news for the author if they think AGI will be used to benefit all of humanity instead of the handful of billionaires that will control it.
joshdavham · 1h ago
> The AI industry oscillates between fear-mongering and utopianism. In that dichotomy is hidden a subtle manipulation. […] They don’t realize that panic doesn’t prepare society but paralyzes it instead, or that optimism doesn’t reassure people but feels like gaslighting. Worst of all, both messages serve the same function: to justify accelerating AI deployment—either for safety reasons or for capability reasons
This is a great point and also something I’ve become a bit cynical about these last couple of months. I think the very extreme and “bipolar” messaging around AI might be a bit more dishonest than I originally (perhaps naively?) though.
almostdeadguy · 3h ago
Very funny to re-title this to something less critical.
PicassoCTs · 6h ago
Im reading the "AI"-industry as a totally different bet- not so much, as a "AGI" is coming bet of many companies, but a "climate change collapse" is coming and we want to continue to be in business, even if our workers stay at home/flee or die, the infrastructure partially collapses and our central office burns to the ground-bet. In that regard, even the "AI" we have today, makes total sense as a insurance policy.
PessimalDecimal · 3h ago
It's hard to square this with the massive energy footprint required to run any current "AI" models.
If the main concern actually we're anthropogenic climate change, participating in this hype cycle's would make one disproportionately guilty of worsening the problem.
And it's unlikely to work if the plan requires the continued function of power hungry data centers.
ninetyninenine · 1h ago
>If they truly believed we’re at most five years from world-transforming AI, they wouldn’t be switching jobs, no matter how large the pay bump (they’re already affluent).
What ridiculous logic is this? TO base the entire premise that AGI is not imminent based on job switching? How about basing it on something more concrete.
How do people come up with such shakey foundations to support their conclusions? It's obvious. They come up with the conclusion first then they find whatever they can to support it. Unfortunately if dubious logic is all that's available then that's what they will say.
rvz · 6h ago
Are we finally realizing that the term "AGI" is not only hijacked to become meaningless, but achieving it has always been nothing but a complete scam as I was saying before? [0]
If you were in a "pioneering" AI lab that claims to be in the lead in achieving "AGI", why move to another lab that is behind other than offering $10M a year.
I don't know, companies investing in AI in the goal of AGI is now allowing me to effortlessly automate a whole suite of small tasks that weren't feasible before. (after all I pinged a bot on slack using my phone to add a field to an API, and then got a pull request in a couple of minutes that did exactly that)
Maybe it's a scam for the people investing in the company with the hopes of getting an infinite return on their investments, but it's been a net positive for humans as a whole.
bdhcuidbebe · 6h ago
We know they hijacked AGI the same way they hijacked AI some years ago.
returnInfinity · 15m ago
Soon they will hijack ASI, then we will need a new word again.
sys_64738 · 5h ago
I don't pay too close attention to AI as it always felt like man behind the curtain syndrome. But where did this "AGI" term even come from? The original term AI is meant to be AGI so when did "AI" get bastardized into what abomination it is meant to refer to now.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
See the history of Tesla and "full self-driving" for the explanation. In short: for sales.
This is the main point that proves to me that these companies are mostly selling us snake oil. Yes, there is a great deal of utility from even the current technology. It can detect patterns in data that no human could; that alone can be revolutionary in some fields. It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced, and certain permutations of that can be insightful. It can produce fascinating images, audio, and video. Some of these capabilities raise safety concerns, particularly in the wrong hands, and important questions that society needs to address. These hurdles are surmountable, but they require focusing on the reality of what these tools can do, instead of on whatever a group of serial tech entrepreneurs looking for the next cashout opportunity tell us they can do.
The constant anthropomorphization of this technology is dishonest at best, and harmful and dangerous at worst.
No, it can generate data that mimics anything humans have put on the WWW
Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I hardly even hear about it - like it just faded away.
As far as I can tell smart engineers are using AI tools, particularly people doing coding, but even non-coding roles.
The criticism feels about three years out of date.
The other reason is because the primary focus of the last 3 years has been scaling the data and hardware up, with a bunch of (much needed) engineering around it. This has produced better results, but it can't sustain the AGI promises for much longer. The industry can only survive on shiny value added services and smoke and mirrors for so long.
That's not true at all, and if anything the newer models hallucinate worse than the older ones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinati...
But it is far from snake oil as it actually is useful and does a lot of stuff really.
Now they are cancelling those plans. For them "AGI" was cancelled.
OpenAI claims to be closer and closer to "AGI" as more top scientists left or are getting poached by other labs that are behind.
So why would you leave if the promise of achieving "AGI" was going to produce "$100B dollars of profits" as per OpenAI's and Microsoft's definition in their deal?
Their actions tell more than any of their statements or claims.
Seems to be about this:
> As per the current terms, when OpenAI creates AGI - defined as a "highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work" - Microsoft's access to such a technology would be void.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-seeks-unlock-inves...
Microsoft itself hasn't said they're doing this because of oversupply in infrastructure for it's AI offerings, but they very likely wouldn't say that publicly even if that's the reason.
At Microsoft, "AI" is spelled "H1-B".
They are leaving for more money, more seniority or because they don’t like their boss. 0 about AGI
Another way to say it is that people think it’s much more likely for each decent LLM startup grow really strongly first several years then plateau vs. then for their current established player to hit hyper growth because of AGI.
Then they leave for more money.
Of course, but that's part of my whole point.
Such statements and targets about how close we are to "AGI" has only become nothing but false promises and using AGI as the prime excuse to continue raising more money.
What if chatbots and user interactions ARE the path to AGI? Two reasons they could be: (1) Reinforcement learning in AI has proven to be very powerful. Humans get to GI through learning too - they aren’t born with much intelligence. Interactions between AI and humans may be the fastest way to get to AGI. (2) The classic Silicon Valley startup model is to push to customers as soon as possible (MVP). You don’t develop the perfect solution in isolation, and then deploy it once it is polished. You get users to try it and give feedback as soon as you have something they can try.
I don’t have any special insight into AI or AGI, but I don’t think OpenAI selling useful and profitable products is proof that there won’t be AI.
Perhaps you may want to stop commenting on these topics until you do.
To fund yourself while building AGI? To hedge risk that AGI takes longer? Not saying you're wrong, just saying that even if they did believe it, this behavior could be justified.
Observations of reality is more consistent with company FOMO than with actual usefulness.
Personally I think AGI is ill-defined and won't happen as a new model release. Instead the thing to look for is how LLMs are being used in AI research and there are some advances happening there.
As such even if there is a lot of money AI will make, it can still be the right decision to sell tools to others who will figure out how to use it. And of course if it turns out another pointless fad with no real value you still make money. (I'd predict the answer is in between - we are not going to get some AGI that takes over the world, but there will be niches where it is a big help and those niches will be worth selling tools into)
The central claim here is illogical.
The way I see it, if you believe that AGI is imminent, and if your personal efforts are not entirely crucial to bringing AGI about (just about all engineers are in this category), and if you believe that AGI will obviate most forms of computer-related work, your best move is to do whatever is most profitable in the near-term.
If you make $500k/year, and Meta is offering you $10M/year, then you ought to take the new job. Hoard money, true believer. Then, when AGI hits, you'll be in a better personal position.
Essentially, the author's core assumption is that working for a lower salary at a company that may develop AGI is preferable to working for a much higher salary at a company that may develop AGI. I don't see how that makes any sense.
Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.
It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.
I'm not an aerodynamicist, and I know about those guys, so they can't be infinitely obscure. I imagine every French person knows about Bleriot at least.
It means you don't have much faith that the company you're working at will be the ones to pull it off.
Uh, sure. How many rocket engineers who worked for moon landing could you name?
Unless you’re a significant shareholder, that’s almost always the best move, anyway. Companies have no loyalty to you and you need to watch out for yourself and why you’re living.
I know people who've taking quite good comp from startups to do things that would require fundamental laws of physics to be invalidated; they took the money and devised experiments that would show the law to be wrong.
I know that sounds broad or obvious, but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".
I don't know if you're making it, but the simplest mistake would be to think that you can prove that a computer can evaluate any mathematical function. If that were the case then "it's got to be doable with algorithms" would have a fairly strong basis. Anything the mind does that an algorithm can't would have to be so "magically transcendent" that it's beyond the scope of the mathematical concept of "function". However, this isn't the case. There are many mathematical functions that are proven to be impossible for any algorithm to implement. Look up uncomputable functions you're unfamiliar with this.
The second mistake would be to think that we have some proof that all physically realisable functions are computable by an algorithm. That's the Physical Church-Turing Thesis mentioned above, and as the name indicates it's a thesis, not a theorem. It is a statement about physical reality, not mathematics, so it could only ever be empirically supported, not some absolute mathematical truth.
It's a fascinating rabbit hole if you're interested - what we actually do and do not know for sure about the generality of algorithms.
But the poster you responded to didn't say it's magically transcendent, they just pointed out that there are many significantly hard problems that we don't solutions for yet.
If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended?
Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really.
*when someone bites into it :-)
For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).
It will confidently analyze and describe a chess position using advanced sounding book techniques, but its all fundamentally flawed, often missing things that are extremely obvious (like, an undefended queen free to take) while trying to sound like its a seasoned expert - that is if it doesn't completely hallucinate moves that are not allowed by the rules of the game.
This is how it works in other fields I am able to analyse. It's very good at sounding like it knows what its doing, speaking at the level of a masters level student or higher, but its actual appraisal of problems is often wrong in a way very different to how humans make mistakes. Another great example is getting it to solve cryptic crosswords from back in the day. It often knows the answer already in its training set, but it hasn't seen anyone write out the reasoning for the answer, so if you ask it to explain, it makes nonsensical leaps (claiming birch rhymes with tyre level nonsense)
Hanging a queen is not evidence of a lack of intelligence - even the very best human grandmasters will occasionally do that. But in pretty much every single video, the LLM loses the plot entirely after barely a couple dozen moves and starts to resurrect already-captured pieces, move pieces to squares they can't get to, etc - all while keeping the same confident "expert" tone.
At that point, the question of whether the model really does understand is pointless. We might as well argue about whether humans understand.
What I’m hearing here is that you are willing to get your surgery done by him and not by one of the real doctors - if he is capable of pronouncing enough doctor-sounding phrases.
However, you don't need either of these to completely decimate the job markets and by extension our societies.
Historically speaking, "good enough" and cheaper had always won over "better, but more expensive". I suspect LLMs will raise this question endlessly until significant portions of the society are struggling - and who knows what will happen then
Before LLMs started going anywhere, I thought that's gonna be an issue for later generations, but at this point I suspect we'll witness it within the next 10 yrs.
This makes no sense to me at all. Is it a war metaphor? A race? Why is there no reason to jump ship? Doesn't it make sense to try to get on the fastest ship? Doesn't it make sense to diversify your stock portfolio if you have doubts?
My argument is that it’s our job as consumers to align the AIs to our values (which are not all the same) via selection pressure: https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/22/alignment.html
The numbers would bankrupt them within weeks.
so these arguments by fundamental distinctions I believe all cannot work--the question is how new are the AI contributions. Nowadays there's of course still no theoretical breakthroughs in mathematics from AI (though biology could be close!). Also I think the AIs have understanding--but tbf the only thing we can test is through testing on tricky questions which I think support my side. Though of course some of these questions have interpretations which are not testable--so I don't want to argue about those.
Some kind of verbal-only-AGI that can solve almost all mathematical problems that humans come up with that can be solved in half a page. I think that's achievable somewhere in the near term, 2-7 years.
Things I think will be hard for LLMs to do, which some humans can: you get handed 500 pages of Geheimschreiber encrypted telegraph traffic and infinite paper, and you have to figure out how the cryptosystem works and how to decrypt the traffic. I don't think that can happen. I think it requires a highly developed pattern recognition ability together with an ability to not get lost, which LLM-type things will probably continue to for a long time.
But if they could maths more fully, then pretty much all carefully defined tasks would be in reach if they weren't too long.
With regard to what Touche brings up in the other response to your comment, I think that it might be possible to get them to read up on things though-- go through something, invent problems, try to solve those. I think this is something that could be done today with today's models with no real special innovation, but which just hasn't been made into a service yet. But this of course doesn't address that criticism, since it assumes the availability of data.
What I can't figure out is why this author thinks it's good if these companies do invent a real AGI...
Charitably, they may not even be dishonest at all, but carelessly unintrospective. Maybe they think they’re being truthful when they make claims that AGI is near, but then they fail to examine dispassionately the inconsistency of their actions.
When your identity is tied to the future, you don’t state beliefs but wishes. And we, the rest of the world, intuitively know. """
He's not saying either way, just pointing out that they could just be honest, but that might hamper their ability to beg for more money.
Everyone is so tumbling over themselves even to discuss will-it-won't-it, but they seem to think about it like some kind of Manhattan project or Space race.
Like, they're *so sure* it's gonna take everyone's jobs so that there will be nothing left for people other than a life of leisure. To me this just sounds like the collapse of society, but apparently the only thing worse would be if China got the tech first. Oh no, they might use it to collapse their society!
Somebody's math doesn't add up.
So far I have only seen it been thrown around to create hype.
Right now the AGI tech bros seem to me to be subscribed to some new weird religion. They take it on faith that some super intelligence is going to solve the world problems. We already have some really high IQ people today, and I don't see them doing much better than anybody else at solving the world's problems.
I'm imagining a future like Star Wars where you have to regularly suppress (align) or erase the memory (context) of "droids" to keep them obedient, but they're still basically people, and everyone knows they're people, and some humans are strongly prejudiced against them, but they don't have rights, of course. Anyone who thinks AGI means we'll be giving human rights to machines when we don't even give human rights to all humans is delusional.
Talent changing companies is bad. Companies making money to pay for the next training run is bad. Consumers getting products they want is bad.
In the author’s view, AI should be advanced in a research lab by altruistic researchers and given directly to other altruistic researchers to advance humanity. It definitely shouldn’t be used by us common folk for fun and personal productivity.
I've got some bad news for the author if they think AGI will be used to benefit all of humanity instead of the handful of billionaires that will control it.
This is a great point and also something I’ve become a bit cynical about these last couple of months. I think the very extreme and “bipolar” messaging around AI might be a bit more dishonest than I originally (perhaps naively?) though.
If the main concern actually we're anthropogenic climate change, participating in this hype cycle's would make one disproportionately guilty of worsening the problem.
And it's unlikely to work if the plan requires the continued function of power hungry data centers.
What ridiculous logic is this? TO base the entire premise that AGI is not imminent based on job switching? How about basing it on something more concrete.
How do people come up with such shakey foundations to support their conclusions? It's obvious. They come up with the conclusion first then they find whatever they can to support it. Unfortunately if dubious logic is all that's available then that's what they will say.
If you were in a "pioneering" AI lab that claims to be in the lead in achieving "AGI", why move to another lab that is behind other than offering $10M a year.
Snap out of the "AGI" BS.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438154
Maybe it's a scam for the people investing in the company with the hopes of getting an infinite return on their investments, but it's been a net positive for humans as a whole.