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Comment by evrydayhustling | Hacker News Reader

There is a DL community that is actually advancing real applications of machine learning at an alarming rate. And there is a rhetorical alliance between AGI spiritualists who are more interested in getting poetic about their moving goalpost, academic politicos that want to shape terminology so that their ideas were important all along (like this article), and DL overhypers who get caught up in the power and attention that come from velocity. To ignore the hype, focus on measurable research results. You'll end up in the DL community, and things are plenty exciting enough without anthropomorphizing.

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Both are focusing on different problems.

The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence; they are working to automate, optimize and scale business cases while trying to reduce real costs. No corporation really wants another untamed general intelligence (human or otherwise) to cross them anyway. We already have human general intelligence.

The AGI community is still in the fundamental research mode, which is the mirror of the corporate interests. They have to shift goalposts to ask fundamental questions about AGI which is hypothetical (and to reiterate, not desired in a corporate use case, we already have humans who are cheaper and not hypothetical)

Both DeepMind and OpenAI have explicit goal of creating AGI.

...And? Having a goal and being even 1% along the way of achieving it are extremely different things.

I have a goal to be immortal. Am I a threat? Of course I'm not.

You don't have billions in funding, a deep roster with some exceptionally gifted researchers / engineers or a stellar track record including, e.g. reliably raising C. elegans specimens with a lifetime measured in years, compared to 10-20 days for naturally occurring speciments, see e.g. Alpha Zero. Indeed, you are not a threat, but DeepMind might be.

Sure and indeed. My point also was that a hurricane class 5 is not a threat to London while it's ravaging a town in Kansas.

Meaning: I remain skeptical that the "stellar track record researchers" are even on the right path. The stellar track record thing is kind of funny in this context because we're treading an unknown territory i.e. there are NO experts in inventing a general AI.

As an external layman it looks to me people are over-fixating on ML / DL. Would love to be proven wrong actually, not joking, but at the moment I am mostly pessimistic.

They have solved "finite ruleset competitive games" space to the point at which humans need not apply. Proficiency in such games used to be a sign of "intelligence": highly gifted kids would be recruited young and intensively train for a decade or more to compete at the highest levels. DeepMind artificial version thereof consistently trounces humans, and can be trained in a few days.

The obvious next horizon is darker, military applications. We probably won't hear much about it until some large state-actor will be strategically dominated in a way that defies conventional wisdom.

I was 14-16 when I playing chess programs on my Apple II and even then I didn't consider playing these games well "a sign of intelligence". I understood even then it's a finite searching space and that brute force (with rules to throw away some defective variants) can and will solve those games one day. It was just a matter of better hardware.

So maybe those people who considered playing these games a sign of intelligence were not very bright. And using their obviously flawed take on this is not and should not be a benchmark about our progress towards general AI.

I am not patting myself on the back here. I would never call myself a genius. I am a fairly average programmer. But, if I knew what I knew at 16 then I am pretty sure there are many much more gifted individuals that knew that and more. So maybe those people proclaiming beating chess is a sign of intelligence were just at the right place at the right time; maybe even nepotism or relationships with investors and politicians were involved? And maybe they didn't have that much expertise in the first place?

You know what I'd consider a very good progress towards a general AI? A system that can play StarCraft so well that it can beat all world champions -- and I don't mean with perfect micro-management of units (which I think is already achieved) but with creative strategies e.g. you're losing the center-map fight but you do a drop of troops in the main resource-mining operation of the enemy, severely crippling their economy for several minutes, giving you time to recover troops (something I've seen several times in playoffs).

And you are right here, general AI is most likely first going to be used in the military and maybe in financial markets as well.

I'm just saying that the statement:

> The DL community is not actually working on general intelligence

is factually false. They are working on it.

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