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by muzani 1138 days ago
I found it useful to define terms like "startup". Because some people would ask why Uber is a startup, but not some restaurant. That leads to questions like why Uber loses more money than a restaurant or why VCs put money into Uber but not restaurants.

One current example on AI is that people like to make the argument that AGI is a pointless goal because LLMs can't be sentient. Well, my definition of AGI doesn't need to be sentient, why does this matter? It just has to do my job better than me; I don't expect it to be sentient any more than I would of Stockfish.

When you break it down, it turns out we have very different core specs.

If I buy an AGI, I fully expect it to be able to cook for me and do my taxes. For someone else, AGI means it can give me recipes and how to do my taxes, but not actually filing them.

A lot of it is political too, like being the first to hit AGI, or some charlatan selling GPT-4 labeled as AGI. Which might be the reason why some don't like definitions.

2 comments

Also just came across this thread which is a good example of when definitions are unclear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882914

The answers suddenly become useless because it's unclear if they're even talking about the same thing.

> When you break it down, it turns out we have very different core specs.

Right, my point is that you care about the specs, not the label. If something meets the specs, you will buy it even if whoever is selling it doesn't call it AGI, and vice versa.