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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

And yet, we reached the moon, and I would say airplanes were a necessary step on the way, even if only for psychological reasons. For airplanes we had at least an example in nature, birds. But I am not aware of any animal that travelled from earth to the moon on its own, except us.

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But we didn't use airplanes to get there. It needed a new approach, different propulsion, different fuel, different attitude control, etc. etc.

LLM may be a necessary step to get to AGI, but it (probably) won't be the one that achieves that goal.

I doubt that LLMs will give us AGI. But they have already given us more intelligence from a computer than I would have imagined to see during my lifetime.

I mean, if you go through the Apollo program contractors it's a who's who of aerospace. Boeing, North American Aviation, Grumman Aircraft, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, Bell Aerosystems, Rocketdyne...

Electrical parts ran at aviation-standard 400hz. Aviation gyroscopes and aviation instruments. Structural parts made of aviation aluminum alloys. Astronauts that are all airplane test pilots. I can imagine doing Apollo from complete scratch (using car manufacturers that have to invent aluminum-handling tech starting from nothing) but it would have taken a lot more than the decade Apollo took.

We are talking of LLMs, not whether we will be able to reach AGI or not.

Airplanes in this analogy are essentially the collection of matrix multiplications that emulate reasoning in a very rough but useful manner in an LLM.

It's unclear whether a rocket ship is a multimodal neural net. Or some sort of swarm of LLM's in an adversarial relationship, or something completely novel. Regardless, we might be as far between LLM's to ASI's, as airplanes are to rocket ships. Or not.

Sorry, but what’s with HN’s obsession with analogies? You see this in almost every comment section where someone tries to dis/prove a point using an analogy. I get the allure but it’s intellectually brittle; by the time someone starts to argue off the second or third incantation of the original analogy, the forest has been lost for the tree.

What if LLMs are hot air balloons of flight, or kites of flight? Kites and hot air balloons didn't really lead to getting to the moon, they are a very different tangent.

> But I am not aware of any animal that travelled from earth to the moon on its own, except us.

Tardigrades might :)

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