zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects.

Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)

The New Deal: $1T,

Interstate Highway System: $618B,

OpenAI Stargate: $500B,

The Apollo Project: $278B,

International Space Station: $180B,

South-North Water Transfer: $106B,

The Channel Tunnel: $31B,

Manhattan Project: $30B

Insane Stuff.

>>wujerr+DI
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.

And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?

Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:

- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B

- ITER: $65B

- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B

- JWST: $11B

- LHC: $10B

Sources:

https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget

https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/

>>krick+tY
The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on short clips of the press conference.

It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal Models).

>>nopins+861
Here we go again... Ok, I'll bite. One last time.

Look, making up a three-letter acronym doesn't make whatever it stands for a real thing. Not even real in a sense "it exists", but real in a sense "it is meaningful". And assigning that acronym to a project doesn't make up a goal.

I'm not claiming that AGI, ASI, AXY or whatever is "impossible" or something. I claim that no one who uses these words has any fucking clue what they mean. A "bomb" is some stuff that explodes. A "road" is some flat enough surface to drive on. But "superintelligence"? There's no good enough definition of "intelligence", let alone "artifical superintelligence". I unironically always thought a calculator is intelligent in a sense, and if it is, then it's also unironically superintelligent, because I cannot multiply 20-digit numbers in my mind. Well, it wasn't exactly "general", but so aren't humans, and it's an outdated acronym anyway.

So it's fun and all when people are "just talking", because making up bullshit is a natural human activity and somebody's profession. But when we are talking about the goal of a project, it implies something specific, measurable… you know, that SMART acronym (since everybody loves acronyms so much).