[Mistletoe]

>If they can build such a thing (which may or may not be possible, or may not happen soon), then they can immediately use it to make itself better.

This sounds like a perpetual motion machine or what we heard over and over in the 3d printing fad.

We have natural general intelligence in 8 billion people on earth and it hasn't solved all of these problems in this sort of instant way, I don't see how a synthetic one without rights, arms, legs, eyes, ability to move around, start companies, etc. changes that.

[sysmax]

LLMs are a very good tool for a particular class of problems. They can sift through endless amounts of data and follow reasonably ambiguous instructions to extract relevant parts without getting bored. So, if you use them well, you can dramatically cut down the routine part of your work, and focus on more creative part.

So if you had that great idea that takes a full day to prototype, hence you never bothered, an LLM can whip out something reasonably usable under an hour. So, it will make idea-driven people more productive. The problem is, you don't become a high-level thinking without doing some monkey work first, and if we delegate it all to LLMs, where will the next generation of big thinkers come from?

[AtlasBarfed]

AGI is only coming with huge amounts of good data.

Unfortunately for AI in general, LLMs are forcing data moats, either passive or due to aggressive legal attack, or generating so much crud data that the good data will get drowned out.

In fact, I'm not sure why I continue to uh, contribute, my OBVIOUSLY BRILLIANT commentary on this site knowing it is fodder for AI training.

The internet has always been bad news for the "subject expert" and I think AI will start forcing people to create secret data or libraries.

[tim333]

Current LLMs need huge amounts of data but before we get AGI we'll probably get better algorithms that are less limited by that.

[kbenson]

> This sounds like a perpetual motion machine or what we heard over and over in the 3d printing fad.

Except that it is actually what humanity and these 8 billion people are doing, making each successive generation "better", for some definition of better that is constantly in flux based on what it believed at the current time.

It's not guaranteed though, it's possible to regress. Also, it's not humanity as a whole, but a bunch of subgroups that have slightly differing ideas of what better means at the edges, but that also share results for future candidate changes (whether explicitly through the international scientific community or implicitly through memes and propaganda at a national or group level).

It took a long time to hit on strategies that worked well, but we've found a a bunch over time, from centralized government (we used to be small tribes on plains in in caves) to the scientific method to capitalism (and whether it's what we'll consider the best choice in the future or not it's been invaluable for the last several centuries), they've all moved us forward, which is simple to see if you sample every 100 years or so going into the past.

The difference between what we've actually got in reality with the uman race and what's being promised with GAI is speed of iteration. If a areal GAI can indeed emulate what we have currently with the advancement of the human race but at a faster cycle, then it makes sense it would surpass us at some point, whether very quickly or eventually. That's a big if though, so who knows.