Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

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I have no idea whom this guy is, and have no thoughts here on his opinions or their falsifiability (happy to agree with you on that aspect if it matters), but just to reply to this particular point here:

> This is well beyond what was considered possible at the time. We're certainly not at 'everything' but shrug. Maybe in ten years.

This feels a lot like what people were saying about self-driving cars being imminent circa... 2015 or so? [1] The skeptical folks rolled their eyes at suggestions that we'd have self driving cars everywhere in a few years, but lo and behold, they were right. Just because we had a massive amount of progress in the years before, that doesn't mean we were on the cusp of achieving the goal. Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit.

This feels like the same thing all over again. Yes, there's been a lot of progress in LLMs. No, that doesn't mean we're anywhere close to deep learning being able to do 'everything' in 10 years, whatever that means.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomou...

"Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit."

True. But Calfornia's DMV makes Waymo publish their stats, and they get maybe 50% better each year. That's a good rate of gain.

Of course they've been making good gains. We may very well get there someday. It's just nowhere near the timeline many experts were so confident in.

Citation needed

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

> Waymo [..] get[s] maybe 50% better each year. That's a good rate of gain.

Remind me what we're measuring?

"A seasoned San Francisco cab driver might have avoided the intersection of Jackson Street and Grant Avenue, in the heart of the city's Chinatown on the first day of Chinese New Year. An autonomous Waymo robotaxi, by contrast, drove toward the cross streets on Saturday evening, when crowds were blocking all sides and revelers were lighting fireworks, according to two witnesses. Minutes later, some in the crowd attacked the car and set it on fire."

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/san-fr...

Would you apply the same line of reasoning to flying? That branch of engineering had a huge amount of detractors too who were confidently right until they weren't. My point is, no one knows how close we are to AGI. Taking the sceptical stance is rewarding because you're right most of the time, except when you aren't in which case you're astronomically wrong.

> Would you apply the same line of reasoning to flying?

No, because I have no idea who predicted what at which point in time.

Or yes, because it took [hundreds? thousands?] of years before someone managed to get it to work. We've only worked on LLMs for so long.

i.e. I have no idea how to answer your question, other than to point out the prediction here was not "never", but rather "not in the next 10 years".

>The skeptical folks rolled their eyes at suggestions that we'd have self driving cars everywhere in a few years, but lo and behold, they were right.

What? Where?

Lots of places, including here on HN. Here's a random link from Googling right now: https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/10/22/175716/driverles...

> But such projections tend to overlook just how challenging it will be to make a driverless car. [...] It could take decades for the technology to come down in cost, and it might take even longer for it to work safely enough that we trust fully automated vehicles to drive us around.

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