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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

LLMs no matter how clever have no agency or creativity or ability to innovate, anticipate beyond what they’re prompted, etc. It’s crucial to realize that LLM chat interfaces disguise the fact they’re still completing a prompt. This isn’t AGI as AGI requires agency. GPT4/5 or whatever successor might be a key building block, and I suspect we’ve already discovered the missing elements in classical AI and the challenge will be integration, constraint, feedback, etc, but nothing will make LLMs alone AGI. That shouldn’t be surprising. Our brains are composed of many models, some heuristic, some optimizers, some solvers, some constrainers, and some generative. The answer won’t be a single magic thing operating in a black box. It’ll be an ensemble. We already see this effort beginning with plugins and things like langchain. This is the path forward.

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> “No agency or creativity or ability to innovate, anticipate beyond what they’re prompted, etc.”

Sadly, you’ve just described the majority of the developers I’ve had to work with recently.

Most have no agency, write boilerplate code with no creativity, need their hand held every step of they way, and won’t do anything they’re not explicitly ordered to do.

You probably work in an SV startup with a highly skilled workforce. Out there in the real world there are armies of low-skill H1Bs and outsourcers that will soon be replaced with automation.

It’s a recurring theme in economics. Outsource to low cost labour, insource with automation, repeat.

I’m describing the human mind, which all people have. But I get your point - and I think most of those people who aren’t particularly adept or skilled or interested in their jobs might find their jobs are more easily done by more adept or skilled or interested people. Consider digging tunnels. John Henry was skilled and adept and interested in what he did. He could beat the steam drill (at a cost!). But if you visit tunnel digs today isn’t not a thousand people slinging hammers, most of whom were unskilled and uninterested in the labor itself. It’s a thousand skilled engineers digging tunnels never dreamed of in John Henry’s day.

“Our brains are composed of many models, some heuristic, some optimizers, some solvers, some constrainers, and some generative.”

We need an AI that iteratively tweaks its own architecture (to recreate and surpass those modules which are necessary for human thought), and maps out hardware enhancements* to accommodate the new architecture.

*I seem to remember Google working on ML software that proposes new chip designs a few years ago

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