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AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

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174 points Philpax | 4 comments | 17 Apr 25 16:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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yibg ◴[17 Apr 25 20:51 UTC] No.43722091[source]▶
Might as well be 10 - 1000 years. Reality is no one knows how long it'll take to get to AGI, because:

1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI

Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.

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timewizard ◴[17 Apr 25 21:12 UTC] No.43722264[source]▶
That we don't have a single unified explanation doesn't mean that we don't have very good hints, or that we don't have very good understandings of specific components.

Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having.

From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.

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1. threatofrain ◴[17 Apr 25 22:02 UTC] No.43722709[source]▶
We'll be experiencing extreme social disruption well before we have to worry about the cost-efficiency of strong AI. We don't even need full "AGI" to experience socially momentous change. We might even be on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities.

We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.

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2. timewizard ◴[17 Apr 25 22:39 UTC] No.43722997[source]▶
> experiencing extreme social disruption

I think this just displays an exceptionally low estimation of human beings. People tend to resist extremities. Violently.

> experience socially momentous change

The technology is owned and costs money to use. It has extremely limited availability to most of the world. It will be as "socially momentous" as every other first world exclusive invention has been over the past several decades. 3D movies were, for a time, "socially momentous."

> on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities.

Lidar can't read street lights and vision systems have all sorts of problems. You might be able to code an agent that can drive a car but you've got some other problems that stand in the way of this. AGI is like 1/8th the battle. I referenced just the brain above. Your eyes and ears are actually insanely powerful instruments in their own right. "Real world agency" is more complicated than people like to admit.

> We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.

You've lost sight of the forest for the trees.

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3. achierius ◴[17 Apr 25 22:57 UTC] No.43723096[source]▶
Re.: self driving cars -- vision systems have all sorts of problems sure, but on the other hand that _is_ what we use. The most successful platforms use Lidar + vision -- vision can handle the streetlights, lidar detects objects, etc.

And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.

4. yibg ◴[17 Apr 25 23:37 UTC] No.43723413[source]▶
It's not just a energy cost issue with AGI though. With autonomous vehicles we might not have the technology, but we can build a good mental model of what the thing can look like and how various pieces can function long before we get there. We have different classifications of incremental steps to get there as well. e.g. level 1, 2 and so on where we can make incremental progress.

With AGI, as far as I know, no one has a good conceptual model of what a functional AGI even looks like. LLM is all the rage now, but we don't even know if it's a stepping stone to get to AGI.