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Comment by ragequittah | Hacker News Reader

What an odd bar. People need to be involved because we haven't built the proper amount of robotics to create a data center from sand yet. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we could given enough effort and the current set of technologies though. I actually hope I'm wrong because the implications are terrifying, but I think most people are vastly underestimating just how far this technology can go. But the thing is we won't be limited to just this technology for very long. It will keep advancing as it continues to teach us new math, science, chip design, whatever else.

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> People need to be involved because we haven't built the proper amount of robotics to create a data center from sand yet.

If you gave Mythos infinite energy and compute, it still would not autonomously create the next coherent model.

It's a good bar, or at least I don't see your counterargument. The resources to make Mythos were obviously available, but the previous gen models could not manage to build it on their own regardless. It's the bar we have set (solving increasingly complex novel problems in perpetuity), and the original bar for AGI.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-artific...

> I think most people are vastly underestimating just how far this technology can go

It's easy to say this when you don't define "this technology", isn't it? We can easily point to IBM Watson and say this is the same technology, or point at a transistor and say we'd be nowhere without those so we "vastly underestimated" them…

Now, if we're talking about just how far sophistry can go, there does appear to be no limit, and apparently we can scale it.

I don't think Mythos is even close to what is available privately. If you can touch it as a consumer it's been heavily nerfed / censored and isn't using nearly as much compute as an actual SOTA model. But it'll reach the benchmark of improving itself (it's already building improved chips for itself - crafting its own brain) and people will change the goalposts again.

It really feels like a lack of imagination to think that this technology that surprises even the researchers working on it all the time will just stop improving in the fashion skeptics keep saying it will. I've been hearing it's "hit a wall" on every update since GPT 3.5 and the rate of improvement just keeps accelerating. Every single time someone says it'll never be able to do X (math was the big one I heard a lot - how can a language model do math?) it tends to do X not only well but better than us in time.

Sophistry goes both ways. My guess is if you're a skeptic and you're able to go back and see your thoughts from 2022 they were much different arguments than what they are now. Arguing that LLMs aren't going to be more intelligent than humans because of what they can do now could be like arguing the industrial revolution will stop at the steam engine. How can we possibly know either way?

My personal bet comes from the rate of change I'm seeing and how it's making many of my friends (even the high paid ones, in fact especially the high paid ones) obsolete overnight.

I'm not a skeptic, I'm a realist. I know how the magic trick is done. That makes it a bit less magical. As for sophistry I was talking about the LLM output itself, which has done a number on many people.

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