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625 points lukebennett | 7 comments | | HN request time: 1.408s | source | bottom
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thousand_nights ◴[] No.42139132[source]
not long ago these people would have you believe that a next word predictor trained on reddit posts would somehow lead to artificial general superintelligence
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SpicyLemonZest ◴[] No.42139443[source]
I don't understand why you'd be so dismissive about this. It's looking less likely that it'll end up happening, but is it any less believable than getting general intelligence by training a blob of meat?
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1. namaria ◴[] No.42140287[source]
This is a bad comparison. Intelligence didn't appear in some human brain. Intelligence appeared in a planetary ecosystem.
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2. aniforprez ◴[] No.42140374[source]
Also it took hundreds of millions of years to get here. We're basically living in an atomic sliver on the fabric of history. Expecting AGI with 5 of years of scraping at most 30 years of online data and the minuscule fraction of what has been written over the past couple of thousand years was always a pie-in-the-sky dream to raise obscene amounts of money.
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3. Zopieux ◴[] No.42141514[source]
I can't believe this still needs to be laid down years after the start of the GPT hype. Still, thanks!
4. danielbln ◴[] No.42144791[source]
We built planes, which works quite differently from birds, in the span of what, 100 years? I think we've long left evolution behind when building machines, thinking or otherwise, so I'm not sure why the powerful but inefficient evolutionary process is held to some gold standard here.
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5. namaria ◴[] No.42145542{3}[source]
It's not a gold standard. It just shows how difficult the problem really is.

Flying machines rest on the excess power of internal combustion. They have nothing to do with bird evolution.

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6. danielbln ◴[] No.42148991{4}[source]
The fact that it has nothing to do with evolution is exactly my point. We built something that can fly but has nothing to do with how birds fly. So we might be able to build an AGI that isn't based on biological mechanism and/or evolutionary principles.
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7. aniforprez ◴[] No.42154431{5}[source]
Planes don't fly radically differently than birds. Birds can flap their wings because they're light and small. Birds don't fly by flapping their wings, they flap their wings to fly. The flapping is to gain and maintain height but beyond that they use the same principle to stay afloat. Birds expend massive amounts of energy to flap too and eat a lot of food to compensate. Large predatory birds try their best to glide as much as possible as a consequence. To carry a human, you need a proportionally larger machine and the square-cubed law would stop us from being able to flap plane size wings. Aside from that, birds and planes fly on the same Bernoulli's Principle of fluid motion and to compensate for being unable to take off from rest with wings, we made engines that provide thrust.

If AGI doesn't take the form of human-ish intelligence, then we'd never know it was intelligence. This means that the target is always a "visible" human like intelligence and that was gained through evolution and millions of years of experimentation and records. It will most certainly not take that long for human-like intelligence to form given our current progress but we would not recognise anything else.