Tangential: This title is weird. As if no one but the top minds in AI didn't know this? This isn't big news to anyone who has done even just a modicum of AI research.
Sounds like an opportunity to place some bets and probably win some money. Or maybe they'll back down and widen their intervals -- less than a decade, maybe, but probably longer. Maybe quite a long time too, and maybe after development of some other planet-changing tech.
It's worth thinking about this section of [0] when various AI experts offer predictions:
> Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away, five years before they show up.
> In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.
> In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.
> And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.
If there is AGI all bets are off so to speak, what's a few dollars worth then? If there isn't AGI the money still has value. Doesn't sound like a rational bet, even if you think the odds of AGI soon are high.
My impression is this is common among DeepMind folks and not an aberration. (See also dwiel's comment elsewhere.) It is super weird for me that Demis Hassabis says AGI is nowhere close. Is he lying? Or does he mean 10 years is not close?
> It is super weird for me that Demis Hassabis says AGI is nowhere close. Is he lying? Or does he mean 10 years is not close?
Maybe he just doesn’t believe the same thing some of his coworkers do? Seems pretty drastic to jump to the conclusion he’s lying if he implies it’s more than 10 years away.
The problem is when non-technical people write articles or respond to posts about Deepmind. They think all AIs are the same and that one specific AI achievement means the Matrix is coming.
When I was at ICLR a couple years ago, a group of 10 or so researchers from deepmind took a poll of themselves at breakfast and found the general consensus was that AGI was between 5-10 years away.
Research can tell you current effort fall far short. Research can tell you current efforts are moving incrementally towards the goal, even. But research won't you when something we don't understand will happen. "A long time" but overall, it seems like the kind of situation where probably as such isn't particularly applicable.
Anecdotal, but nearly all of my programmer friends believe that full-blown AGI is less than a decade away.