I agree. Everything I’ve learned about personal finances has come from podcasts - not school. I started when I was around 27, and I’m now by far the wealthiest in my friend group despite all of them being higher educated than me.

As thankful as I am for having learned this stuff later rather than never, I’d be so much better off if I’d known it when I was 18. When it comes to investing, missing a decade is a massive nerf. I’d be on my way to being a millionaire by the time I retire.

I’d say LLMs are not necessarily an indicator that we’re close to AGI, but they’re also not a non-indicator. Certaintly more of an indicator of it than the invention of the steam engine was. For narrowly intelligent systems, they’re getting quite advanced. We’re not there yet, but I worry that the moment we actually step into the zone of general intelligence might not be as obvious as one would think.

However, I also don’t think there’s any basis to make the absolute claim that LLMs will never lead there, because nobody could possibly know that with that degree of certainty.

And yeah, there are multiple ways to screw things up even with narrowly intelligent AI - we don’t need AGI for that.

The “AI” that we have now is not actually AI

This is simply just false. We’ve had AI since 1956

AI isn’t any one thing. It’s an broad term used in computer science to refer to any system designed to perform a cognitive task that would normally require human intelligence. The chess opponent on an old Atari console is an AI. It’s an intelligent system - but only narrowly so. That’s called “narrow” or “weak” AI.

It can still have superhuman abilities, but only within the specific task it was built for - like playing chess or generating language.

A large language model like ChatGPT is also narrow AI. It’s exceptionally good at what it was designed to do: generate natural-sounding language. What people expect from it, though, isn’t narrow intelligence - it’s general intelligence. The ability to apply cognitive skills across a wide range of domains the way a human can. That’s something LLMs simply can’t do - at least not yet. Artificial General Intelligence is the end goal for many AI companies, but LLMs are not generally intelligent. However they still fall under the umbrella of AI as a broad category of systems.

Making what we’ve got into actual AI like you said isn’t going to happen, full stop.

I’ve never claimed LLMs will lead to AGI as I stated in the comment you quoted above.

Feel free to help me realize it then, because whatever irony or conflict you’re seeing there, I don’t see.

AI is not something somebody is going to develop in their moms basement. AGI is NOT inevitable.

Plenty of AI systems have already been developed by private individuals on their personal computers. This is not hypothetical. And I’m not claiming that our first AGI will have anything to do with LLMs.

I view AGI as inevitable because it’s the natural end goal of us incrementally improving our AI systems over a long enough period of time. As with all human-created technology, we will keep improving it. It doesn’t matter how slow the process is - as long as we keep heading in that direction, we will eventually reach the destination. The only things that could stop us, as far as I can see, are either destroying ourselves some other way before we get there or substrate independence - meaning general intelligence simply cannot be created without our biological wetware. I however see no reason to assume that, since human brains are made of matter just like computers are and I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about intelligence.

Nobody could possibly know. That’s why I make no claims about the timeline.

I’m just going to ignore your completely uncalled-for smug and dismissive tone and note that at no point have I suggested LLMs will lead to AGI.

Thank you for your contribution to making this platform a worse place for everyone.

The way I see it:

• AGI is inevitable given enough time, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves some other way first.
• It has the capacity to solve literally all our problems and make life on Earth as close to utopia as possible.
• That same capacity, however, also enables it to end the human race - either intentionally or as a byproduct of misalignment.
• If the “West” doesn’t build it first, then China will. There’s no second place in this race.
• Even if all nation-states somehow agreed to stop its development, a rogue underground group would do it - or possibly some random dude in his mom’s basement.

I genuinely see no solution to this. I can only hope things turn out well, or at the very least that it doesn’t happen during my lifetime. The genie isn’t going back into the bottle.

Have the comments here read the article?

You serious? Ofcourse not - but they did see the letters “AI” in the title.

It is still a first party web interface.

uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock works just fine. When it comes to AI content, just ignore it and it’ll dissapear from your recommendations.

For virtually everything wrong with youtube there’s an add-on to fix it or a behavior to change. So many people can’t help but watch short-form content for example and then they complain their feed is all shorts - I wonder why.