[pocketarc]

When people imagined AI/AGI, they imagined something that can reason like we can, except at the speed of a computer, which we always envisioned would lead to the singularity. In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.

That's not what's happening here, and it's worth remembering: A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.

In Carolyn Porco's words: "These beings, with soaring imagination, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space."

When you think of it that way, it should be obvious that LLMs are not AGI. And that's OK! They're a remarkable piece of technology anyway! It turns out that LLMs are actually good enough for a lot of use cases that would otherwise have required human intelligence.

And I echo ArekDymalski's sentiment that it's good to have benchmarks to structure the discussions around the "intelligence level" of LLMs. That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better. But we're not on the way to AGI.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The amount of things LLMs can do is insane.

It's interesting to me how much effort the AI companies (and bloggers) put into claiming they can do things they can't, when there's almost an unlimited list of things they actually can do.

[imtringued]

This reminds me of "Devin". You know, the first "AI software engineer", which had the hype of the day but turned into a huge flop.

They had ridiculous demos of Devin e.g. working as a freelancer and supposedly earning money from it.

[roncesvalles]

We're waaay past the era when getting funded meant your idea had any promise at all.

[mlmonkey]

It looks like the company (Cognition) is actively hiring (20+ job openings last I checked). That doesn't sound like a "flop" to me...

[skeeter2020]

Think about: why would they be hiring actual human beings if Devin actually works? Seems like the purest example of "dogfooding"...

[jorvi]

This generally just keeps being the "the Emperor has no clothes" moment for all these AI bull companies.

Microsoft just replaced their native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. Highly ironic.

Obviously the native version should run much faster and will use less memory. If Copilot (via either GPT or Claude) is so godlike at either agentic or guided coding, why didn't they just improve or rewrite the native Copilot application to be blazing fast, with all known bugs fixed?

[notTooFarGone]

When you think about it, every job opening is a flop in that sense.

[paxys]

WeWork had 12,500 employees at its peak.

[beeflet]

And many of them so unexpected, given the unusual nature of their intellegence emerging from language prediction. They excel wherever you need to digest or produce massive amounts of text. They can synthesize some pretty impressive solutions from pre-existing stuff. Hell, I use it like a thesaurus to sus out words or phrases that are new or on the tip of my tounge. They have a great hold on the general corpus of information, much better than any search engine (even before the internet was cluttered with their output). It's much easier to find concrete words for what you're looking for through an indirect search via an LLM. The fact that, say, a 32GB model seemingly holds approximate knowlege of everything implies some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.

What they can't they do? Pretty much anything reliably or unsupervised. But then again, who can?

They also tend to fail creatively, given their synthesize existing ideas. And with things involving physical intuition. And tasks involving meta-knowlege of their tokens (like asking them how long a given word is). And they tend to yap too much for my liking (perhaps this could be fixed with an additional thinking stage to increase terseness before reporting to the user)

[saalweachter]

My current way of thinking about LLMs is "an echo of human intelligence embedded in language".

It's kind of like in those sci fi or fantasy stories where someone dies and what's left behind as a ghost in the ether or the machine isn't actually them; it's just an echo, an shallow, incomplete copy.

[Lwerewolf]

Just dust and echoes.

(:

[cgg23]

Residue ;)

[mikestorrent]

> some unexplored relationship between inteligence and compression.

I don't think it's unexplored at all, this is basically what information theory is all about. At some level, it becomes incompressible....

[gtowey]

Only because they have compressed and encoded the entire sum of human knowledge at their disposal. There are models for everything in there, but they can only do what has been done before.

What's more amazing to me is the average human, only able to hold a relatively small body on knowledge in their mind, can generate things that are completely novel.

[sharemywin]

People assume training on past data means no novelty, but novelty comes from recombination. No one has written your exact function, with your exact inputs, constraints, and edge cases, yet an LLM can generate a working version from a prompt. That’s new output. The real limitation isn’t novelty, it’s grounding.

[gtowey]

Synthesis is different than genesis.

Just because there are lots of tasks which can be accomplished without the need for anything novel doesn't mean LLMs can match a human. It just means humans spend a lot of time doing some really boring stuff.

[deadbabe]

That’s only part of it. The true intelligence is knowing what to recombine, and this is where AI falls short.

[cheevly]

I hear this constantly. Can you produce something novel, right here, demonstrably, that an LLM couldnt have produced? Nobody ever can, but it’s sure easy to claim.

[Procrastes]

I'm going to assume you mean this seriously, so I will answer with that in mind.

Yes, I can. - I can build an unusual, but functional piece of furniture, not describe it, not design it. I can create a chair I can sit on it. An LLM is just an algorithm. I am a physically embodied intelligence in a physical world.

- I can write a good piece of fiction. LLMs have not demonstrated the ability to do that yet. They can write something similar, but it fails on multiple levels if you've been reading any of the most recent examples.

- I can produce a viable natural intelligence capable of doing anything human beings do (with a couple of decades of care, and training, and love). One of the perks of being a living organism, but that is an intrinsic part of what I am.

- I can have a novel thought, a feeling, based on qualia that arise from a system of hormones, physics, complex actions and inhibitors, outrageously diverse senses, memories, quirks. Few of which we've even begun to understand let alone simulate.

- And yes I can both count the 'r's in strawberry, and make you feel a reflection of the joy I feel when my granddaughter's eyes shine when she eats a fresh strawberry, and I think how close we came to losing her one night when someone put 90 rounds through the house next door, just a few feet from where her and her mother were sleeping.

So yeah, I'm sure I can create things an LLM can't.

[motoxpro]

So the only thing I am seeing here is physical or personal (I have no idea how you feel or what your emotions are. You are a black box just as an LLM is a black box.)

The only thing you mentioned is the fan fic and I would happily take the bet that an LLM could win out against a skilled person based on a blind vote.

[Cyph0n]

Me personally? No. Us collectively? Absolutely.

Was an individual mind responsible for us as humanity landing on the moon? No. Could an individual mind have achieved this feat? Also no.

Put differently, we should be comparing the compressed blob of human knowledge against humanity as a collective rather than as individuals.

Of course, if my individual mind could be scaled such that it could learn and retain all of human knowledge in a few years, then sure, that would be a fair comparison.

[UncleMeat]

I want to see an LLM create an entirely novel genre of music that synthesizes influences from many different other genres and then spreads that genre to other musicians. None of this insulated crap. Actual cultural spread of novel ideas.

[11101010010001]

take my pound of flesh.

[possibleworlds]

Highlife music

[SecretDreams]

The hype has gotta keep going or the money will dry up. And hype can be quantified by velocity and acceleration, rather than distance. They need to keep the innovation accelerating, or the money stops. This is of course completely unreasonable, but also why the odd claims keep happening.

[mikestorrent]

Why would the money dry up when we have companies willing to spend $1000/developer/month on AI tooling when they would have balked at $5/u/mo for some basic tooling 2-3 years ago?

[gls2ro]

First in some cases it is more than $1000/dev/month.

Those companies spending 1000+/developer are doing it with the same hope that at some point those $1000/month will replace the developer salary per month. Or because by doing so more investors will put more money into them.

Take away the promise of AI replacing developers and see how much a company is willing to pay for LLMs. It is not zero as there are very good cases for coding assisted by LLM or agentic engineering.

[lich_king]

Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.

[IAmGraydon]

>Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas.

That's right, but there's more. When you think about the cost of compute and power for these LLM companies, they have no choice. It MUST be a multi-trillion-dollar idea or it's completely uninvestable. That's the only way they can sucker more and more money into this scheme.

[jazz9k]

Perhaps not. But I find myself using LLMs instead ofba search engine like Google.

This does have value.

[IAmGraydon]

To you, yes, but the compute to return that search costs them far more than a simple search query and on top of that it's hard to monetize.

[faangguyindia]

It doesn't, most of research is cached and most of the inference which is returned is also cached unless you are always asking unique things

[IAmGraydon]

This is literally the first time I've heard this. What is your source? I can type the exact same query three times and though the general meaning may be the same, the actual output is unique every single time. How do you explain this if it's cached?

[reverius42]

I don't know about OpenAI, but Nvidia's valuation seems more justifiable based on their actually known revenue and profit, and because it's publicly traded.

Though if the bubble(?) bursts and Nvidia starts selling fewer units year-over-year, that could be problematic.

[NooneAtAll3]

for example?

[boca_honey]

Claiming they can be reliable lawyers.[1]

Claiming they can give safe, regulated financial advice. [2]

Claiming you can put your whole operation on autopilot with minimal oversight and no negative consequences. [3]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/generative-ai-exaggeration-o...

[3] https://www.answerconnect.com/blog/business-tips/ai-customer...

[orphea]

Claiming they will replace software engineers in 6-12 months, every 6 months [4]

[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ceo-predicts-ai-mod...

[NooneAtAll3]

so you're saying Ai can do all those things?

or that you can't read that GP was talking about what Ai CAN do?

[jacquesm]

Medical...

[next_xibalba]

Well, for starters, they definitively passed the Turing test a few years ago. The fact that many regard them as equivalent in skill to a junior dev is also, IMO, the stuff of science fiction.

[NooneAtAll3]

they passed, sure

how do you market that as a product that is needed by other people?

there are already companies that advertise Ai date partners, Ai therapists and Ai friends - and that gets a lot of flame about being manipulative and harmful

[SkyPuncher]

I've been pushing Opus pretty hard on my personal projects. While repeatability is very hard to do, I'm seeing glimpses of Opus being well beyond human capabilities.

I'm increasingly convinced that the core mechanism of AGI is already here. We just need to figure out how to tie it together.

[edgyquant]

Can you give an example of something beyond the human level you’ve experienced?

[cheevly]

Generating 3000 lines of esoteric rendering code within minutes, to raster generative graphics of anything you can imagine and it just works? From natural language instructions. Seriously think about that my dude.

[edgyquant]

That is amazing but this specific example doesn’t seem all that different from what a compiler does just another level of abstraction higher

[lifeformed]

But that's not what AGI is. Restructuring data the way they do is very impressive but it's fundamentally different from novel creativity.

[imetatroll]

This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective. At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now. Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air. Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.

[inerte]

Sure, but then basically whatever it was, it was not "us". "Us" and our intelligence had to appear at some point. It's 100% not "anti-evolutionary" to say some years ago humans became as mentally capable as a baby born today. We just have to figure out how many years ago that was. It wasn't last decade. As far as I know most anthropologists agree it was around ~70k years ago (not 200k).

[suddenlybananas]

LLMs are not AGI, something else may be in the future. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with evolution.

[freeboon]

I could gather that you disagreed with GP, but I don't see a salient point in your response? You are ostensibly challenging GP on the idea that a homo sapien baby from 200,000 years ago would have been capable of modern mental feats if raised in the present day.

> This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective.

Nice, seems like you have something meaningful to add.

> At some point in our past, we were something much less intelligent than we are now.

I agree with this, but "at some point in our past"? Is that the essence of this rebuttal?

> Our intelligence didn't spring out of thin air.

Again, I could not tell what this means, nor do I see the relevance.

> Whether or not AI can evolve is yet to be seen I think.

The OP is very pointedly talking about LLMs. Is that what you mean to reference here with "AI"?

I implore you to contribute more meaningfully. Especially when leading with statements like "This is a bit of an anti-evolutionary perspective", you ought to elaborate on them. However, your username suggests maybe you are just trolling?

[sinenomine]

If you think you are equipped to discuss the topic of evolution of general intelligence in homo, and you haven't read about GWAS and EDU PGS, then at this point you are either a naive layman, or a convinced discourse commando.

Because it is really hard and hopeless endeavor to make an objective case that the current human populations have similar PGS scores on key mental traits and diseases compared to 200k years ago.

[greazy]

The myth that humans remain unchanged for 200k years is forever parroted as truth.

What is the origin of this silly myth? Its come from either anatomical similarity of fossils to modern day human or a comparison to modern (5k ago) humans being conflated with 200k humans

> convinced discourse commando.

What is a convinced discourse commando?

[nurettin]

> caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language

There is evidence to the contrary. Not having language puts your mental faculties in a significant disadvantage. Specifically, left brain athropy. See the critical period hypothesis. Perhaps you mean lacking spoken language rather than having none at all?

https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/curtiss/1974%20-%20The%2...

[mhl47]

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

[technothrasher]

Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.

[Planktonne]

Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.

[mhl47]

The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.

[Jensson]

But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.

[snaking0776]

There’s a lot of research out there about the general flexibility of the brain to adapt to whatever stimulus you pump into it. For example taxi cab drivers have larger areas in their hippocampus dedicated to place cells relative to the general population [1]. There’s also all kinds of work studying general flexibility of the brain in response to novel stimulus like the visual cortex of blind people being dedicated to auditory processing [2 is a broad review]. I guess you could argue that the ability to be flexible is intelligence but the timescales over which a brain functionally changes is longer than a general day to day flexibility. Maybe some brains come into an initial state that’s more predisposed to the set of properties that we deem as “intelligence” but development is so stimulus dependent that I think this definition of a fixed intelligence is functionally meaningless. There are definitely differences in what you can learn as you age but anyone stating we have any causal measure of innate intelligence is claiming far more than we actually have evidence for. We have far more evidence to suggest that we can train at least the appearance and usage of “intelligence”. After all no one is born capable of formal logical reasoning and it must be taught [3,4 kind of weak citations foe this claim but there’s a lot to suggest this that I don’t feel like digging up]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... [3] https://psychologyfor.com/wason-selection-task-what-it-is-an... [4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794802.2021.1...

[Bewelge]

Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence?

I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle".

There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power) either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral children (ie humans growing up among animals with no human contact). Apparently they are unable or have trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that there's a critical period after which we are unable to learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore consider a young child more intelligent than any adult?

And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge that most humans would not figure out on their own. By basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it does improve your intelligence.

[jbverschoor]

And by that definition, large language models are intelligent. They have connections where they draw upon

[Gud]

Yes, intelligence can be influenced by training(and other things).

[paganel]

Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.

[Jensson]

You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.

[cess11]

The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over.

Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?

[Jensson]

> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me

I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.

For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.

[darkwater]

I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.

[wang_li]

It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.

[Traubenfuchs]

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.

Doubt. If we would teleport cavemen babies right out of the womb to our times, I don't think they'd turn into high IQ individuals. People knowledgeable on human history / human evolution might now the correct answer.

[komali2]

From what I understand, in terms of genetic changes to intellectual abilities, there's not much evidence to suggest we're so much smarter that your proposed teleported baby would be noticeably stupider - at best they'd be on the tail of the bell curve, well within a normal distribution. Maybe if we teleported ten thousand babies, their bell curve would be slightly behind ours. Take a look at "wild children" for the very few examples we can find of modern humans developed without culture. Seems like above everything, our culture, society, and thus education is what makes us smart. And our incredibly high calorie food, of course.

[pferde]

That is exactly what civilization is about - for new generations to start not from scratch, but from some baseline their parents achieved (accumulated knowledge and culture). This allows new generations to push forward instead of retreading the same path.

[m_mueller]

it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?

[adrian_b]

The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.

The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.

Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.

The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.

The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.

There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.

[m_mueller]

I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there was enough specialization during neolithic era to have bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).

I see your point about agriculture at first degrading quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?

[adrian_b]

It is known that 200k years ago human brain sizes were actually greater than today, even if this does not necessarily correlate with a lower IQ in the present, because it is more likely that the parts of the brain that have reduced may have been related with things like fine motor skills and spatial orientation, which are no longer important today for most people.

[21asdffdsa12]

Its complicated. It depends.

A human being has the potential for intelligence. For that to get realized, you need circumstances, you need culture aka "societal" software and the resources to suspend the grind of work in formative years and allow for the speed-running of the process of knowledge preloading before the brain gets stable.

The parents then must support this endeavor under sacrifices.

There is also a ton of chicken-egg catch22s buried in this whole thing.

If the society is not rich then no school, instead childlabour. If child-labour society is pre-industrial ineffective and thus, no riches to support and redistribute.

Also is your societies culture root-hardened. Means - on a collapse of complexity in bad times, can it recover even powering through the usual "redistribute the nuts and bolts from the bakery" sentiments rampant in bad times. Can it stay organize and organize centralizing of funds for new endeavors. Organizing a sailing ship in a medieval society, means in every village 1 person starves to death. Can your society accomplish that without riots?

Thus.

[Traubenfuchs]

> A human being has the potential for intelligence.

Were we "human" 200.000 years ago the way we are now?

Was the required brain and vocal hardware present?

[applfanboysbgon]

Of course they were. A human from 200,000 years ago would be almost genetically identical to one from today. That's what makes us homo sapiens. 200,000 years is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary timescale with generations as long as ours and reproduction rates as low as ours.

[tmoravec]

Yes. Some important parts of the software, like complex tools, art, or the use of symbols only appeared between 100.000 and 50.000 years ago, however.

[21asdffdsa12]

A human is more then the hardware. A human is hardware with cultural software. A human is decorated with parental education. A human is decorated with local cultural influences. A human inherits his economic circumstances and behavior.

A modern human is a complex artifact and can not be produced everywhere. The ability to cooperate, form institutions and build complex tools may be severely restricted even today. Of course its also restricted in the past.

[21asdffdsa12]

A human is more then the hardware.

A human is hardware with cultural software.

A human is decorated with parental education.

A human is decorated with local cultural influences.

A human inherits his economic circumstances and behavior.

A modern human is a complex artifact and can not be produced everywhere. The ability to cooperate, form institutions and build complex tools may be severely restricted even today. Of course its also restricted in the past.

[lucianbr]

Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.

[Traubenfuchs]

Evolutionary brain development.

We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so.

What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago?

ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn spoken language if brought up by modern parents.

But I prefer human answers over AI slop.

[adrian_b]

The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached its peak long before 200k years ago.

Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of big animals.

[seiferteric]

How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.

[rl3]

>In a short period of time, AI would be so far ahead of us and our existing ideas, that the world would become unrecognizable.

>That's not what's happening here ...

On the contrary, it very much is.

I'd argue AGI is already achieved via LLMs today, provided they've excellent external cognitive infrastructure supporting.

However, the gap from AGI to ASI is perhaps longer than anticipated such that we're not seeing a hard takeoff immediately after arriving at the first.

Just, you know—potential mass unemployment on a scale never seen before. When you frame it that way, whether LLMs qualify as AGI is largely semantics.

That said, I really hope you're right and I'm wrong.

[112233]

Ah yes, the 0.50$/h support infrastructure from the places that cannot refuse the deal. "frontier" LLMs currently cosplay a dunk with google and late alzheimer's. Surely, they speed up brute-forcing correct answer a lot by trying more likely texts. And? This overfed markov chain doesn't need supporing infrastructure — it IS supporting infastructure, for the cognitive something that is not being worked on prominently, because all resources are needed to feed the markov chain.

The silence surrounding new LLM architectures is so loud that an abomination like "claw" gets prime airtime. Meanwhile models keep being released. Maybe the next one will be the lucky draw. It was pure luck, finding out how well LLMs scale, in the first place. Why shouldn't the rest of progress be luck driven too?

Kerbal AGI program...

[rl3]

Pretty much, it's just that these overfed Markov chains when given a proper harness and agentic framework are able to produce entire software projects in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Kerbel AGI program hits the nail on the head.

[112233]

Sorry, I tought you meant "support infrastructure" in a much wider sense — yeah, LLMs are frighteningly good at lockpicking tests using source code shaped inputs. It's just that they are also frighteningly good at finding insane ways to game the tests, too. I wouldn't say that LLMs are very "G" in the AI they do — present them with confusing semantics, and they fall off the self-contradiction cliff. No capability of developing theory systematically from observations.

[reverius42]

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today, despite not having language or technology, or any knowledge.

Source? This does not sound possibly true to me (by any common way we might measure intelligence).

[mxkopy]

The phrase you’re looking for is “anatomically modern human”, which has been around for 200,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human

[reverius42]

I'm not disagreeing that humans 200,000 years ago were approximately anatomically equivalent to humans today; I'm disagreeing that they would be just as intelligent without today's language, technology, or knowledge. I don't think you can define or measure intelligence in a way that ignores those things.

[mxkopy]

Eh I don’t think it’s something we can ever discount. Some cavewoman could’ve daydreamed the entire theory of general relativity in her own private language while weaving a basket and we would never know because she never felt the need to talk about it. On the other hand there are people today who will emit novels of profound nothingness.

Technology and language is sort of like speaking in this sense, it’s evidence of mind but it’s not mind. And the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence and all that

[orangebread]

I posted my own comment but I agree with you. Our modern society likes to claim we are somehow "more intelligent" than our predecessors/ancestors. I couldn't disagree more. We have not changed in terms of intelligence for thousands of years. This is a matter that's beyond just engineering, it's also a matter of philosophy and perspective.

[jacquesm]

> That _is_ useful, and the more progress we make, the better.

I would be happy to agree if we had the solutions for the societal problems that will create in hand.

[raincole]

> A caveman from 200K years ago would have been just as intelligent as any of us here today

In other words, intelligence offers zero evolutionary advantage?

[komali2]

200k years just isn't much time for significant evolutionary changes considering the human population "reset" a couple times to very very small numbers.

[naasking]

Reich's lab actually found evidence of meaningful genetic changes that improved intelligence over the past 10,000 years, but not so much prior to that:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1

The advent of agriculture and civilization had many powerful selection effects.

[sinenomine]

If you read the papers and analyze the historical DNA, you can make case for significant PGS shifts in populations across a few centuries.

People really haven't processed this fact and its implications just yet.

[Fricken]

Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully field tested. They seem like more of a liability than anything, they've created more existential risks for us than they've put to rest.

[guerrilla]

It looks like quite the disadvantage, in fact. We're killing ourselves and a lot of other stuff in the process.

[danielbln]

Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter.

With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.

[applfanboysbgon]

You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.

In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.

[mrkstu]

We also live in an era we can create hydrocarbon fuel DIRECTLY from the atmosphere and desalinate fresh water in unlimited supply, from power derived directly from the sun or atomics.

We also live in a time where the human population, where it is most concentrated, is declining rather than growing, so far without too disastrous consequences.

Greening of the earth has been happening since the 1980s- i.e. about a .3% coverage increase per year in recent decades.

Places that were miserable and poor, like China, have been lifted to prosperity and leading out in renewable tech.

There is much to celebrate and after the recent passing of Paul Ehrlich, we should pause and consider just how wrong pretty much every prediction he made was.

[sinenomine]

You lost me when you started narrating the fossil doom visage.

With the current progress in solar, as well as the remaining coal, gas and uranium reserves, energy is not going to be what finishes our civilization.

While I don't think we are going to get true collapse, I think we are going to get a lot of technical progress compensating for biosocial deterioration.

The demographics, mental health and dysgenics are all real, quantified trends, and we are going to face the reality of less capable, less taxable population for the rest of this century. It's baked in at this point.

[next_xibalba]

Doomerism is a kind of religion that goes back as far as they eye can see. What's interesting about it is that in spite of being perpetually incorrect in its myriad predictions, it continues to adapt and attract new adherents.

See also (recent only):

- Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)

- The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource exhaustion)

- Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle

- James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions

- Hubbert's (et al) Peak oil economic disaster

- Molina & Rowland's Ozone catastrophe

- Metcalfe's internet collapse

[applfanboysbgon]

I am not a doomer, nor a Malthusian, merely a realist. There are a few points I could make briefly:

- Everything lasts forever, until it doesn't. Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years, until it didn't. Any Egyptian could point to thousands of years of their heritage and say it hasn't ended yet, therefore any prediction that it will end is clearly bad and dumb. Then it was conquered by Romans, and then by Islam, with its language, culture, and religion extinguished, extant only in monuments, artifacts and history books.

- We have nuclear weapons now. Any prediction of an imminent end of human civilization before then would be purely religious, but there is a real reason to believe things have changed. We are currently in a time of relative peace secured by burning resources for prosperity, but what happens when those resources run out and world conflict for increasingly scarce resources is renewed with greater vigor?

- Note that I did not outright predict the end of human civilization, merely noted it as a plausible worst-case scenario. If civilization continues on more-or-less as it is, in the next couple of hundred years, we will drive countless more species to extinction. We will destroy so much more of our environment with climate change, deforestation, strip mining, overfishing, pollution, etc. We will deplete water reservoirs and we will deplete oil, helium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, and various rare earth elements. Not a complete depletion, but they will become so scarce as to not be widely available or wasted for the general population's benefit. If billions of people are still alive then, which I explicitly suggested was a possibility, they will as a simple matter-of-fact live much less comfortably prosperous lives than us. It will not take a great catastrophe to result in a massive reduction in living standards, because our current living standards are inherently unsustainable.

[danielbln]

That seems both fatalistic and doomerist to me, but time will tell. I would assume germ theory would survive regardless, as would immunology, so I'd hold on to those two at least.

[guerrilla]

None of that matters if it's not sustainable. We're talking about the end of our species here or maybe you missed the memo.

[next_xibalba]

Human population is at an all time (and growing) and the global mean life expectancy is double if not triple what it was in the time of cave men.

[cjbgkagh]

Humans, like all animals, have not stopped evolving. A random caveman from 200K years ago would have very different genetics to that of a typical HN reader and even more so of the best of the HN readers.

Around 3,200 years ago there was a notable uptick in alleles associated with intelligence.

[gos9]

Having met cavemen, and Australians, I disagree