Re "momentous milestone, ... obvious when it has been built" personally I think a major point is when the AIs could keep running the world without us, including building energy plants, chip factories and so on. AI independence maybe?
I think they are wrong on "AGI won't be a shock to the economy because diffusion takes decades" - ChatGPT reached 100m users in 2 months. These things can happen quickly.
Whereas early AGI proponents believed that machines would soon take on all human activities, researchers have learned the hard way that creating AI systems that can beat you at chess or answer your search queries is a lot easier than building a robot to fold your laundry or fix your plumbing. The definition of AGI was adjusted accordingly to include only so-called “cognitive tasks.” DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis defines AGI as a system that “should be able to do pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do,” and OpenAI describes it as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” where “most” leaves out tasks requiring the physical intelligence that will likely elude robots for some time.
(via this excellent Melanie Mitchell essay https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado7069)Transformer-powered robots still seem exceptionally stupid compared to frogs, bees, etc.
Re the shock comment - it is difficult to argue that ChatGPT has actually changed the economy much, despite widespread adoption. Overheated tech stocks, dev tooling, better scammers, better academic cheaters, etc are not exactly an industrial revolution. And frankly for many users it is more of a toy than a useful tool, e.g. the Studio Ghibli fad.
Just as the calculator cleaved computation from mathematical understanding, LLMs have cleaved language use from linguistic reasoning. We used to treat expression and comprehension as tightly entangled. Now they're demonstrably separable. We’ve built a machine that can "speak" without understanding, just as calculators can "solve" without knowing.
And yeah I think the industry leans too heavily on LLMs right now. They don't understand, but they're really good at making it seem they do. Then the users get impressed by that and want more and more stuff that requires understanding and the industry just makes it because $$$. But because of that it's so hit and miss.
steebo•9mo ago
In this essay, we argue that AGI is not a milestone. It does not represent a discontinuity in the properties or impacts of AI systems. If a company declares that it has built AGI, based on whatever definition, it is not an actionable event. It will have no implications for businesses, developers, policymakers, or safety.
JohnFen•9mo ago
smartmic•9mo ago
steebo•9mo ago
As you can see, I don't do this often.
wkat4242•9mo ago