[mindcrime]

Just ML is never going to lead to an AGI.

I think there's a chance it could in principle. Or at least, I think it could yield something close. If human intelligence is largely rooted in a neural network with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, then it seems reasonable to think that, in principle, a sufficiently deep/wide ANN could show "intelligence".

But here's the rub. Doing that would be silly. We already know how to make a neural network with human like intelligence using billions of neurons and trillions of synapses... it just takes a man, a woman, and about 9 months. :-)

Also consider the power consumption of an ANN of that scale, given the current state of things.

So yeah, to achieve anything truly AGI like, which doesn't need it's own nuclear power plant, I suspect we're going to need other approaches in addition to today's ML/DL stuff.

[dnautics]

i think it's very unlikely. Keep in mind the genesis of the current round of AI algorithms have largely been enabled by 1) the easy access to parallel computing (e.g. GPU, clustering solutions), and 2) large amounts of ingestable data. The truly spectacular AGI will emerge when you can do "one shot" learning. With the exception of zero-shot translation (which is a phenomenal result) we haven't seen very much along those lines.