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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I'm convinced AI research and development is already far ahead of where it needs to be for AGI in the next couple of years

I’m not! Is your contention that AGI is a bigger, better LLM?

I think LLMs with an "agent wrapper" should be enough. AutoGPT is a primitive wrapper. It can't do much with the LLMs of today, but it wouldn't surprise me if the LLMs of tomorrow OR a more sophisticated wrapper around GPT-4 suffices to bootstrap a generally intelligent agent.

I don't think they'll be able to recursively self improve right away... modern foundation models take a LOT of dollars and time to train, so a "just barely AGI" model won't be able to execute a takeoff. But in principle it could still be a full agentic AGI.

That is my contention in a way. I think the models that can work in multiple modes, which are already out can be scaled up to something approximating AGI.

My bar is probably quite lower than others here, but even if we just scale up the current models, and work out the kinks and plug-ins, as well as web access, I’d argue that qualifies as AGI. The average human is not actually that smart or economically productive, and if you can get something that does even a good approximation of the work but runs thousands of times faster at his order of magnitude it’s cheaper you’ll start increasing productivity and advancing the pace of AI research quite quickly.

I think the way people focus on timelines with regards to tech development is a bit narrow. I don’t fully buy into the singularity, but what makes it a compelling argument is that we will recursively continue to increase the speed of improvements. Even if we don’t get self recursion, we humans can do a good job leveraging the tech we have now.

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