Hitch your tits and pucker up. We’re entering a new age of industry. Much like the original Industrial Revolution, technology is going to advance at an extremely rapid pace. Fusion, quantum computing supremacy. Just… wow. How far off is general AI with this new room temperature superconductor?
And Fusion is pretty close to begin with. Commonwealth Fusion is well within their purpose time table so far. They don’t need any new superconductors for their project.
What’s holding back AGI is a complete lack of progress toward anything like intelligence. What we have now isn’t intelligent, it’s multi-variable probability.
It’s not that it’s not intelligent, it’s that predictive language models are obviously just one piece of the puzzle, and we’re going to need all the pieces to get to AGI. It’s looking incredibly doable if we figured out how to make something that’s dumb but sounds smarter than most of us already. We just need to connect it to other models that handle other things better.
The biggest hurdle is that we don’t actually know what intelligence really is at all yet, computationally. Most of the history of science has been repeatedly learning “but things were actually more complicated than originally expected,” so making claims that we’re soon to be able to replicate something that we don’t actually properly understand yet may be a bit premature. The desire to replicate human intelligence by a machine has been around since at least the 1200’s brazen heads, and yet for everything we’ve discovered since we’re still just beating our heads against a wall trying to sleuth out what it really is that makes us ‘think.’
Simply throwing computing power at the existing models won’t get us general AI. It will let us develop bigger and more complex models, but there’s no guarantee that’ll get us closer to the real thing.
Hitch your tits and pucker up. We’re entering a new age of industry. Much like the original Industrial Revolution, technology is going to advance at an extremely rapid pace. Fusion, quantum computing supremacy. Just… wow. How far off is general AI with this new room temperature superconductor?
Fusion is no closer than ever before, and AGI is hilariously over hyped. Also no closer than ever before.
And Fusion is pretty close to begin with. Commonwealth Fusion is well within their purpose time table so far. They don’t need any new superconductors for their project.
Fantasy
Stupid question probably - is computing power what is holding back general AI? I’ve not heard that.
What’s holding back AGI is a complete lack of progress toward anything like intelligence. What we have now isn’t intelligent, it’s multi-variable probability.
It’s not that it’s not intelligent, it’s that predictive language models are obviously just one piece of the puzzle, and we’re going to need all the pieces to get to AGI. It’s looking incredibly doable if we figured out how to make something that’s dumb but sounds smarter than most of us already. We just need to connect it to other models that handle other things better.
You don’t speak predictively. It’s not one of the pieces, it’s a parlor trick.
The biggest hurdle is that we don’t actually know what intelligence really is at all yet, computationally. Most of the history of science has been repeatedly learning “but things were actually more complicated than originally expected,” so making claims that we’re soon to be able to replicate something that we don’t actually properly understand yet may be a bit premature. The desire to replicate human intelligence by a machine has been around since at least the 1200’s brazen heads, and yet for everything we’ve discovered since we’re still just beating our heads against a wall trying to sleuth out what it really is that makes us ‘think.’
Simply throwing computing power at the existing models won’t get us general AI. It will let us develop bigger and more complex models, but there’s no guarantee that’ll get us closer to the real thing.