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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

> So, AGI will likely be here in the next few months because the path is now actually clear: Training will be in three phases

My bet: "AGI" won't be here in months or even years, but it won't stop prognosticators from claiming it's right around the corner. Very similar to prophets of doom claiming the world is going to end any day now. Even in 10k years, the claim can never be falsified, it's always just around the corner...

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Maybe, but I know what my laser focus will be on for the next few weeks. I suspect a massive number of researchers around the world have just switched their focus in a similar way. The resources applied to this problem have been going up exponentially and the recent RL techniques have now opened the floodgates for anyone with a 4090 (or even smaller!) to try crazy things. In a world where the resources are constant I would agree with your basic assertion that 'it is right around the corner' will stay that way, but in a world where resources are doubling this fast there is no doubt we are about to achieve it.

Your reasoning still assumes that "AGI" can emerge from quadratic time brute force on some text and images scraped off the internet. Personally, I'm skeptical of that premise.

That's like saying sentience cannot emerge from a few amino acids tumbled together, yet here we are. There is a lot of higher dimensional information encoded in those "text and images scraped off the internet". I still don't think that's enough for AGI (or ASI) but we know a lot of very complex things that are made of simple parts.

> That's like saying sentience cannot emerge from a few amino acids

No, it's not at all the same thing.

We have great evidence that life exists. We have great evidence that amino acids can lead to life.

None of that is true of "AGI" or text scraped off the internet.

OTOH, text and images have only been around for a little while. The real question is whether text and images can contain enough information for AGI, or a physical world to interact with is needed.

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