Comment on Another OpenAI researcher quits—claims AI labs are taking a ‘very risky gamble’ with humanity amid the race toward AGI

• davidgro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I can imagine it really easily for the foreseeable future, all that would need to happen is for the big corporations and well funded researchers to stick to optimizing LLMs.

  Yeah that’s not the rest of human history (unless the rest of it isn’t very much) but enough to make concerns about AGI into someone else’s problem.

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  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Like I said; I’ve made no claims about the timeline. All I’ve said is that incremental improvements will lead to us getting there eventually.

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    • davidgro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      In this scenario reaching the goal would require an entirely different base technology, and incremental improvements to what we have now do not eventually lead to AGI.

      Kinda like incremental improvements to cars or even trains won’t eventually get us to Mars.

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      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Firstly, I’ve been talking about improvements in AI technology broadly, not any specific subfield. Secondly, you can’t know that. While I doubt LLMs will directly lead to AGI, I wouldn’t claim this with absolute certainty - there’s always a chance they do, or at the very least, that they help us discover what the next step should be.

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    • jrs100000@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Just like incremental improvements in the bicycle will eventually allow for hypersonic peddling.

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• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  By saying this aren’t you assuming that human civilization will last long enough to get there?

  Look at the timeline of other species on this planet. Vast numbers of them are long extinct. They never evolved intelligence to our level. Only we did. Yet we know our intelligence is quite limited.

  What took biology billions of years we’re attempting to do in a few generations (the project for AI began in the 1950s). Meanwhile the amount of non-renewable energy resources we’re consuming has hit exponential takeoff. Our political systems are straining and stretching to the breaking point.

  And of course progress towards AI has not been steady with the project. There was an initial burst of success in the ‘50s followed by a long AI winter when researchers got stuck in a local maximum. It’s not at all clear to me that we haven’t entered a new local maximum with LLMs.

  Do we even have a few more generations left to work on this?

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  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m talking about AI development broadly, not just LLMs.

    I also listed human extinction as one of the two possible scenarios in which we never reach AGI, the other being that there’s something unique about biological brains that cannot be replicated artificially.

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    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      We could witness a collapse in our high tech civilization that effectively ends AI research without necessarily leading to extinction. Think of a global warming supercharged Mad Max post-apocalyptic future. People still survive but the population has crashed and there’s a lot of fighting for survival and scavenging among the ruins of civilization.

      There’s gotta be countless other variations on this theme. Global dystopian techno-feudalism perhaps?

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      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Sure, but that’s still just a speedbump. In a few hundred or thousand years the civilization would rebound and we’d continue from where we left.

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