I feel like this has been the vast majority of consensus around these halls? I can't count the number of HN comments I've nodded at around the idea that irl will become the bottleneck.
The hallmark example of this is life extension. There's a not insignificant fraction of very powerful, very wealthy people who think that their machine god is going to read all of reddit and somehow cogitate its way to a cure for ageing. But how would we know if it works? Seriously, how else do we know if our AGI's life extension therapy is working besides just fucking waiting and seeing if people still die? Each iteration will take years (if not decades) just to test.
I presume the teams at the frontier labs are interdisciplinary (philosophy, psychology, biology, technology) - however that may be a poor assumption.
If it's all just information in the end, we don't know how much of all this is implementation detail and ultimately irrelevant for a system's ability to reason.
Because I am pretty sure AI researchers are first and foremost trying to make AI that can reason effectively, not AI that can have feelings.
Let's walk first before we run. We are no where near understanding what is qualia to even think we can do so.
Why do I think it's appropriate, not to be rude but I'm surprised that isn't self evident. As we seek to create understanding machines and systems capable of what we ourselves can do, understanding how the interplay works in the context of artificial intelligence will help build a wider picture and that additional view may influence how we put together things like more empathetic robots, or anything driven by synthetic understanding.
AI researchers are indeed aiming to build effective reasoners first and foremost, but effective reasoning itself is deeply intertwined with emotional and affective processes, as demonstrated by decades of neuroscience research... Reasoning doesn’t occur in isolation...human intelligence isn't some purely abstract, disembodied logic engine. The research I provided shows it's influenced by affective states and emotional frameworks. Understanding these interactions should show new paths toward richer more flexible artificial understanding engines, obvs this doesn't mean immediately chasing qualia or feelings for their own sake, it's just important to recognize that human reasoning emerges from an integrated cognitive/emotional subsystems.
Surly ignoring decades of evidence on how emotional context shapes human reasoning limits our vision, narrowing the scope of what AI could ultimately achieve?
How to best get masses of robotics operating in the real world data is debated. Can you get there in Sim2Real, where, if you can create a physically sound enough sim you can train your robots in the virtual world much easier than ours. See ... eureka ? dr eureka? i forget the main paper. Hand spinning a pen. The boston dynamics dog on a rolling yoga ball. After a billion robots train for a million "years" in your virtual world, just transfer the "brain" to a physical robot.
Jim Fan of nvidia is one to follow there. Then there's tele-operation believers. Then there's mass deployment and iterate believers (musk's "self driving" rollout), there's iirc research that believes video games and video interpretation will be able to confer some of that data from operating in the real world, similar to how it's said transformers learned utilized the implicit structure of language to learn from unclean data, even properly ordered text has meaning embedded in its relative positional values.
Just my summary of what I've seen of researchers who agree scaling text and train time is old news, I mostly see them trying to figure out how to scale "embodied" ai data collection. or derive a VLA model in fancy ways (bigger training sets of robotic behavior around a standard robot form factor maybe?) all types of avenues but yes most serious people recognize the need for "embodied" data - at least that I've read.