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khafra

> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right

- Arthur C. Clarke

Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want?

*Corrected by kranner

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This is like a second-order appeal to authority fallacy, which is kinda funny.

Hinton says that superintelligence is still 20 years away, and even then he only gives his prediction a 50% chance. A far cry from the few year claim. You must be doing that "strawberry" thing again? To us humans, A-l-t-m-a-n is not H-i-n-t-o-n.

> superintelligence is still 20 years away, and even then he only gives his prediction a 50% chance

I don't know the details of Hinton's probability distribution. If his prediction is normally distributed with a mean of 20 years and a SD of 15, which is reasonable for such a difficult and contentious prediction, that puts over 10% of the probability in the next 3 years.

Is 10% a lot? For sports betting, not really. For Mankind's Last Invention, I would argue that it is.

You don't know because he did not say. He said 20 years, which are more than a few.

> Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Nobel Prize winner.

Turing Award, not Nobel Prize

Thanks for the correction; I am undistinguished and getting more elderly by the minute.

Reality has now corrected my error, which was amongst the funniest possible outcomes.

Indeed! Your comment was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news and I thought of replying too but assumed you might not have enabled notifications Hilarious, all in all!

I'd like to see a study on this, because I think it is completely untrue.

When he said this was he imagining an "elderly but distinguished scientist" who is riding an insanely inflated bubble of hype and a bajillion dollars of VC backing that incentivize him to make these claims?

What are you talking about? How would Hinton be incentivized by money?

I'm talking about Altman.

It doesn't quite have the same ring to it: "If a young, distinguished business executive says something is possible, when that something greatly effects his bottom line..."

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