OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

Question for the group here: do we honestly feel like we've exhausted the options for delivering value on top of the current generation of LLMs?

I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go.

GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential applications.

For example, combining a human-moderated knowledge graph with an LLM with RAG allows you to build "expert bots" that understand your business context / your codebase / your specific processes and act almost human-like similar to a coworker in your team.

If you now give it some predictive / simulation capability - eg: simulate the execution of a task or project like creating a github PR code change, and test against an expert bot above for code review, you can have LLMs create reasonable code changes, with automatic review / iteration etc.

Similarly there are many more capabilities that you can ladder on and expose into LLMs to give you increasingly productive outputs from them.

Chasing after model improvements and "GPT-5 will be PHD-level" is moot imo. When did you hire a PHD coworker and they were productive on day-0 ? You need to onboard them with human expertise, and then give them execution space / long-term memories etc to be productive.

Model vendors might struggle to build something more intelligent. But my point is that we already have so much intelligence and we don't know what to do with that. There is a LOT you can do with high-schooler level intelligence at super-human scale.

Take a naive example. 200k context windows are now available. Most people, through ChatGPT, type out maybe 1500 tokens. That's a huge amount of untapped capacity. No human is going to type out 200k of context. Hence why we need RAG, and additional forms of input (eg: simulation outcomes) to fully leverage that.

Great question. Im very confident in my answer, even though it’s in the minority here: we’re not even close to exhausting the potential.

Imagine that our current capabilities are like the Model-T. There remains many improvements to be made upon this passenger transportation product, with RAG being a great common theme among them. People will use chatbots with much more permissive interfaces instead of clicking through menus.

But all of that’s just the start, the short term, the maturation of this consumer product; the really scary/exciting part comes when the technology reaches saturation, and opens up new possibilities for itself. In the Model-T metaphor, this is analogous to how highways have (arguably) transformed America beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, changing the course of various historical events (eg WWII industrialization, 60s & 70s white flight, early 2000s housing crisis) so much it’s hard to imagine what the country would look like without them. Now, automobiles are not simply passenger transportation, but the bedrock of our commerce, our military, and probably more — through ubiquity alone they unlocked new forms of themselves.

For those doubting my utopian/apocalyptic rhetoric, I implore you to ask yourself one simple question: why are so many experts so worried about AGI? They’ve been leaving in droves from OpenAI, and that’s ultimately what the governance kerfluffle there was. Hinton, a Turing award winner, gave up $$$ to doom-say full time. Why?

My hint is that if your answer involves less then a 1000 specialized LLMs per unified system, then you’re not thinking big enough.

> why are so many experts so worried about AGI?

FYI, I find this line of reasoning to be unconvincing both logically and by counter-example ("why are so many experts so worried about the Y2K bug?")

Personally, I don't find AI foom or AI doom predictions to be probable but I do think there are more convincing arguments for your position than you're making here.

Fair enough, well put to both of these responses! I’m certainly biased, and can see how the events that truly scare me (after already assessing the technology on my own and finding it to be More Important Than Fire Or Electricity) don’t make very convincing arguments on their own.

For us optimistic doomers, the AI conversation seems similar to the (early-2000s) climate change debate; we see a wave of dire warnings coming from scientific experts that are all-to-often dismissed, either out of hand due to their scale, or on the word of an expert in an adjacent-ish field. Of course, there’s more dissent among AI researchers than there was among climate scientists, but I hope you see where I’m coming from nonetheless — it’s a dynamic that makes it hard to see things from the other side, so-to-speak.

At this point I’ve pretty much given up convincing people on HackerNews, it’s just cathartic to give my piece and let people take it or leave it. If anyone wants to bring the convo down from industry trends into technical details, I’d love to engage tho :)