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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

Theoretical foundation was slowly built over decades before it started though. And correct me if I'm wrong, but calculations that it was feasible were present before the start too. They had to calculate how to do it, what will be the processes, how to construct it and so on, but theoretically scientists knew that this amount of material can start such process. On the other hand not only there is no clear path to AI today (also known as AGI, ASI, SI etc.), but even foundations are largely missing. We are debating what is intelligence, how it works, how to even start simulating it, or construct from scratch.

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There are algorithms that should work, they're just galactic[0] or are otherwise expected to use far too much space and time to be practical.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm

That wiki article has nothing to do with AI. The whole AI space attracts BS talk

What do you think AI is? On that one page there's simulated annealing with a logarithmic cooling schedule, Hutter search, and Solomonoff induction, all very much applicable to AI. If you want a fully complete galactic algorithm for AI, look up AIXItl.

Edit: actually I'm not sure if AIXItl is technically galactic or just terribly inefficient, but there's been trouble making it faster and more compact.

The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 ). Training them on next-token-prediction is essentially training them to compress, and more optimal compression requires a more accurate model of the world, so they're being trained to model the world better and better. However you want to define intelligence, for practical purposes models with better and better models of the world are more and more useful.

The disagreement here seems merely to be about what we mean by “AGI”. I think there’s reasons to think current approaches will not achieve it, but also reason to think they will.

In any case anyone who is completely sure that we can/can’t achieve AGI is delusional.

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