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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Elon is working on ML, not AGI.

Carmack is working on artificial general intelligence. As far as I know, that's well outside of anything Elon is doing.

Elon's been giving some lip service to closer-to-GI capabilities anyways, e.g. when describing how it would be optimal to be able to control Tesla's humanoid robot by saying "please go to the store and get me the following groceries"...

https://youtu.be/j0z4FweCy4M?t=7775

Whether Tesla wants to fund serious work towards that may be a different question (but they do seem to be serious about at least building the robot).

I mean, Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is. It may not be very likely to happen anytime soon, but the ambition is there at least.

If you haven't watched the Tesla AI presentation, I highly recommend it. The dancer in a spandex robot suit is getting all the headlines but the technical presentations are the real deal. Karpathy in particular is an excellent technical presenter and he didn't hold back.

> Elon just announced that they're building a literal android that is supposed to take verbal directions and perform everyday tasks for you. If that's not AGI, I don't know what is.

It's not AGI. An AGI is something that can think for itself, the way you can.

Elon described this robot as taking directions like "go to the store and get me this list of groceries", implying that it would be able to, like, read the list, choose a store, drive a car there, use a cart, locate the groceries, go through checkout, etc. It's going to need to do a lot of thinking for itself to complete tasks like that. And more generally he described replacing human labor to the point that a universal basic income becomes necessary. AGI is definitely the ambition here.

Nahhh... I'll paraphrase my old skool A(G)I advisor from my first year in grad school: you tell ML to get your groceries; AGI tells you to get the fucking groceries.

Its not AGI. It's machine learning. It's unknown if it's possible to ever achieve AGI by using machine learning techniques.

Seriously, downvotes for a 100% factual statement?

I think what's more likely is we'd discover how many common, useful tasks you could perform with a humanoid robot that don't require AGI, with a more Alexa-like approach of iteratively adding support for explicit discrete tasks over time. We've already moved back the goalposts for AGI in so many other areas as we realise how many tasks can be decomposed to something quite mechanical in the right vector space etc.

If anything, the lesson of the entire history of robotics is the exact opposite. I'm surprised to see so many people believe that a robot doesn't need AGI to replace most human labor. Or maybe people just don't believe that Tesla's general purpose robot is a real project. Which is a view I'm partially sympathetic to.

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