zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...

I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.

>>TheAce+9g
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.

Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.

>>famous+Qv
>Maybe they really are all wrong

All? Quite a few of the best minds in the field, like Yann LeCun for example, have been adamant that 1) autoregressive LLMs are NOT the path to AGI and 2) that AGI is very likely NOT just a couple of years away.

>>DebtDe+uE1
You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.

So the statement becomes tautological “all researchers who believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent”.

And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don’t perform actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of public sharing of information), so they win every disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what they have behind closed doors, you’d become a true believer.

>>skepti+6Y1
>You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.

When the old gang at Open ai was together, Sutskever, not Sam was easily the most hypey of them all. And if you ask Norvig today, AGI is already here. 2 months ago, Lecun said he believes AGI could be here in 5 to 10 years and this is supposed to be the skeptic. This is the kind of thing i'm talking about. The idea that it's just the non academics caught in the hype is just blatantly false.

No, it doesn't have to be literally everybody to make the point.

>>famous+wf3
Here's why I know that OpenAI is stuck in a hype cycle. For all of 2024, the cry from employees was "PhD level models are coming this year; just imagine what you can do when everyone has PhD level intelligence at their beck and call". And, indeed, PhD level models did arrive...if you consider GPQA to be a benchmark that is particularly meaningful in the real world. Why should I take this year's pronouncements seriously, given this?

OpenAI is what you get when you take Goodhart's Law to the extreme. They are so focused on benchmarks that they are completely blind to the rate of progress that actual matters (hint...it's not model capability in a vacuum).

Yann indeed does believe that AGI will arrive in a decade, but the important thing is that he is honest that this is an uncertain estimate and is based off of extrapolation.