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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I think by 2027. Executives in Anthropic, OpenAI seem to give that as their date.

Defining AGI is tricky. I think the key element is take-off. AI right now is best at coding. You use code to make AI. Recursive self-improvement is the name of the game, AGI will be when you have bots performing the tasks that AI researchers do now in collating data and training models (not in the partial sense like how synthetic data is used today but in a holistic sense where the main intellectual work would be done by AIs). And AGI will be ephemeral because superintelligence will happen immediately afterwards and things will get very crazy very quickly, the world power structure will change fundamentally. Nobody will be asking 'what does this mean for unemployment' because that will be the least of our concerns. We will know AGI when we see it.

Little things like mapping the relations between objects in space don't disprove intelligence. If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning. The intelligence is there, that's what they're working on. Advanced vision isn't there, people don't particularly need AIs to play Pokemon, they're needed for writing code.

And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.

If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning.

doubt pretty much, given what with chess it gets out lost of track very quickly

If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning.

Text adventure games exist. Has anyone tried pitting Claude against one?

I tried with Colossal Cave, but it's in the training set.

AI right now is best at coding. You use code to make AI. Recursive self-improvement is the name of the game, AGI will be when you have bots performing the tasks that AI researchers do now in collating data and training models (not in the partial sense like how synthetic data is used today but in a holistic sense where the main intellectual work would be done by AIs).

I'm struggling to come up with a way to contribute something valuable to the conversation, I just want to put my name down as predicting nothing remotely close to this will end up happening in two years.

We already have AI models improving kernels (for AI deployments) today. It's not a big leap of logic that they'll do more and more, achieving takeoff.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/

And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.

Do you have any interesting recommendations? It always seemed like apart from Google, the most interesting ones are not publicly traded. MSFT for a while seemed like a way to get exposure to OpenAI, but now there are rumours that they may want to divest.