Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

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> It's a lot harder to see AGI as being possible in the next few decades (the current state of the art is still a sensationalized party trick

That's precisely the mindset that drives climate change denial, applied to technological developments. I can promise you that OpenAI isn't valued in the tens of billions because they produce "party tricks". People with money and influence have clearly already recognized what this technology is capable of, not in some unspecified future but today. They're tightly controlling access to GPT-3 because they're worried that it could be used to manipulate elections and drive social unrest by mass-producing messages that promote specific ideologies. That's reality today. The damage that could be wrought by the most advanced AIs 15-20 years from now is unimaginable, and could easily destroy humanity even if they aren't self aware.

Given the history of technology investing, companies being valued in the 10s of billions is itself not a proof of anything other than investor excitement.

I agree that even today's "AI" can be used to cause massive societal harm, the same as many recent technologies that have yet to destroy humanity (weapons of mass destruction, for instance).

That said, I think a consensus view in the AI community is great skepticism that the current AI progress is actually a recipe for AGI. We've made great progress in AI over decades, often followed by long winters when it became clear the current methods would not get us to the next threshold.

Human intelligence is remarkable precisely because it needs extremely scarce data to generalize, and because it is self-aware. As far as I know, OpenAI's approaches aren't on a path to replicate those capabilities artificially.

I'd welcome links and articles from experts that might correct my POV on this.

There's a century wide gap between "useful products that use AI techniques" and "sentient programs." Pretending to be sentient is a party trick, automating large portions of white collar work isn't. But it still isn't AGI.

> They're tightly controlling access to GPT-3 because they're worried that it could be used to manipulate elections and drive social unrest by mass-producing messages that promote specific ideologies.

That's not humanity-ending, it doesn't require AI, and AI doesn't make it more efficient.

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