[lucidbee]

I worked as a principal engineer in an AI company until a year ago and I was impressed at how hard it is to get models robustly trained. They are fragile in real world contexts (in the field) and training is full of pitfalls. I have heard so much marketing enthusiasm but the real world situation is different. Some fundamental advances are not even in sight yet. We don't know what we are missing. My view is we don't know yet whether the singularity is possible and have no idea when it could arrive.

[felipemnoa]

>>My view is we don't know yet whether the singularity is possible and have no idea when it could arrive.

The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong AI is possible.

We could currently be at the phase of trying to imitate birds to produce human flight. Eventually one person will figure it out when all the pieces are there. When? I don't know.

But I'm sure that it is possible to create machines with strong AI. We are living proof of it, it doesn't matter that we are made of molecular machines, we are still machines.

[landryraccoon]

> The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong AI is possible.

That took about a billion years. If you're saying that we will achieve AGI in no more than a billion years of trying, I would generally agree.

But let's be optimists. Let's suppose that artificial intelligences can evolve on the order of a 1,000,000 times faster than biological intelligence; i.e. about 1 generation per hour.

That means we'd expect AGI in about 1000 years. Okay, lets up the scale : ten million times faster? One generation every 6 minutes? (Even at Google compute scale I doubt they can retrain GPT in less than 6 minutes). That would mean we still have about 100 years.

Also, evolution had quite a bit of parallelism going for it - basically the entire planet was a laboratory for evolving biological intelligence. I appreciate the scale of modern internet companies, but they don't consume the same amount of energy as combined photosynthesis of the entire planet. Evolution used a LOT of energy to get where it is.

[cmsj]

Point of order, evolution took a lot more than a billion years to arrive at generalised intelligence if you start it from first principals (ie abiogenesis), which seems like the most apt comparison to us starting from some sand and teaching it to count, then somehow inventing AGI.

Unicellular life emerged about 4 billion years ago.

FWIW, it then took about 2 billion years to come up with sexual reproduction, and then another half billion years to invent multicellular life, and then about 1.5 billion years to discover us.

[amelius]

Also: perhaps not every planet like Earth would have developed intelligence; we could have been lucky.