[kromem]

I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of compounding effects.

Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon.

But the trends in the space are developing around self-interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's Dall-E).

The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, the faster we're going to see impressive results.

As with most compounding effects, it's slower growth today than the growth tomorrow. But a faster growth today than it was yesterday.

The human brain technically took 13.7 billion years to develop from purely chaotic driven processes, and even then it was pretty worthless up until we finally developed both language and writing so we could ourselves have lasting compounding effects from scaling up parallel self-interactions.

And from 200,000 years of marginal progress we suddenly went in less than 7,000 years from no writing and thinking the ground below our feet the largest thing in existence to measuring how long it takes the fastest thing in our universe (light) to cross the smallest stable object in our universe (a hydrogen atom).

Let's give the computers some breathing room before declaring the impossibility of their taking the torch from us, and in the process, let's not underestimate the effects of exponential self-interactions and the compounding effects thereof.

[coldtea]

>are missing the impact of compounding effects.

On the other hand those saying "it will sure happen" are missing the impact of diminishing returns.

[scubakid]

True, at a high level I think the central issue is what kind of curve we're on.

[KronisLV]

> And from 200,000 years of marginal progress we suddenly went in less than 7,000 years from no writing and thinking the ground below our feet the largest thing in existence to measuring how long it takes the fastest thing in our universe (light) to cross the smallest stable object in our universe (a hydrogen atom).

Personally, i don't doubt that AGI is possible, even though it becoming a reality might take any number of centuries or millennia, if humanity even sticks around for that long and AGI is still a goal that they pursue.

The problem lies in everyone thinking on a more human timescale: "Will we see AGI during my lifetime?" The answer to that is almost certainly no, no matter how much the industry tries to sell state machines as AI or fledgling efforts as revolutionary advances.

Being overly optimistic in regards to time scales only hurts oneself, like expecting that we'd all have flying cars or even that we'll be able to get rid of ICE vehicles or make significant improvements to slowing the pace of climate change.

[dan-robertson]

The opposite of compounding effects are compounding difficulties. Computer science is full of problems where a multiplicative increase in effort results in an additive increase in output. We call these “exponentially hard” and they crop up annoyingly frequently. So one argument is that compounding improvements will result in linear increases in output because of exponential difficulty. The counter-argument is that many of these hard problems have good but not perfect solutions which may be found more efficiently.