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Comment by medler | Hacker News Reader

> AGI—meaning a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work

On a literal reading, this definition of AGI seems impossible to meet without extensive breakthroughs in robotics. Even today, most work involves a physical component. Those of us who wrote text for a living are a small minority.

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The big hurdle in robotics is the scale and complexity of the software required. Hardware to outperform humans at most physical tasks has existed for a long time, we just dont have the software that makes it function the way we want.

AGI would solve that problem.

Some would say we’ve reached AGI when a bot can write code as well as the average software engineer. (OpenAI is nowhere close to this but let’s leave that aside for now).

What you’re saying is, the bot needs to be 1 million times better at writing software than John Carmack to reach OpenAI’s definition of AGI, because it needs to be able to produce software that no one else has even come close to producing. That’s a much higher bar.

AI operates in a different time domain than humans. ChatGPT can't write code well, but it can write it far faster than any human alive. The moment its able to write code as well as a senior engineer, it will likely be able to do so at a speed that renders teams of 100's of engineers useless. Additionally, it will have the benefit of a single vision, as opposed to the competing visions and priorities of traditional teams.

LLM costs and “think” time continue to increase exponentially as their capabilities increase. If ChatGPT ever does get to the level of an average SWE, a SWE-year of work could take an actual year and cost $10 million. We have a long way to go before the singularity, I’m afraid

At a certain point we're just going to start relying on AGI to design all our technology for us. You can get a head start on physical automation by advancing robotics now, but AGI, once it exists, will close that gap soon enough.

I think we are already mostly there.

https://in.ign.com/playstation-4-neo-ps4/148831/news/a-fully...

With more universal machines (powered by AGI), with human-like hands and maybe legs for outdoors, I think cost will come down due to economics of scale and the ability to repurpose machines easily.

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