Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NitpickLawyer 205 days ago
> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.

AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Super-human, ever improving, infinite growth - that's ASI.

If and when we reach AGI is left for everyone to decide. I sometimes like to think about it this way: how many decades would you have to go back, and ask people from that time if what we have today is "AGI".
2 comments
hagbarth 205 days ago
Sam Altman has been drumming[1] the ASI drum for a while now. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is the vision he is selling.

[1] - https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superint...

link
xeckr 205 days ago
Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.
link
HarHarVeryFunny 205 days ago
We already have AGI - it's called humans - and frankly it's no magic bullet for AI progress.

Meta just laid 600 of them off.

All this talk of AGI, ASI, super-intelligence, and recursive self-improvement etc is just undefined masturbatory pipe dreams.

For now it's all about LLMs and agents, and you will not see anything fundamentally new until this approach has been accepted as having reached the point of diminishing returns.

The snake oil salesmen will soon tell you that they've cracked continual learning, but it'll just be memory, and still won't be the AI intern that learns on the job.

Maybe in 5 years we'll see "AlphaThought" that does a better job of reasoning.

link
mitthrowaway2 205 days ago
Humans aren't really being put to work upgrading the underlying design of their own brains, though. And 5 years is a blink of an eye. My five-year-old will barely even be turning ten years old by then.
link
lizcall 205 days ago
Assuming the recursing self-improvement doesn't run into physical hardware limits.

Like we can theoretically build a spaceship that can accelerate to 99.9999% C - just a constant 1G accel engine with "enough fuel".

Of course the problem is that "enough fuel" = more mass than is available in our solar system.

ASI might have a similar problem.

link