[sph]

Yes, become a terrorist. I believe in the supremacy of biological life, and find anyone seeking to create God out of the machine to be a blaspheme upon Nature.

The good thing is that LLMs will not bring forth AGI. True AGI effectively means ASI, and you will get recycled into biofuel like me and everybody else before you have time to cry ‘spare me please, I used to be an AI booster’

[kypro]

> The good thing is that LLMs will not bring forth AGI.

Even if this were true you'd be silly not to see the larger trend.

LLMs and the transformer model were just a step function in AI capabilities upon the last generation of AI.

Whether it's LLMs or not is irrelevent. Major algorithmic improvements in AI have happened every 5-10 years over the last 50 or so years, and now they're happening maybe every 3-5.

The question you should be asking is what happens when the next step function in AI capabilities occurs?

Arguably people worrying about job loses are not worried enough.

[sph]

Yes, that’s like claiming the invention of the wheel is a step towards landing on the moon. Eventually the boffins will crack the problem of consciousness, what I am saying is that LLM technology itself has nothing to do with general (human-like) intelligence.

> Arguably people worrying about job loses are not worried enough.

Do you people get off by fantasizing about people losing their job, or worse? (whatever you are implying)

[kypro]

I don't think your wheel analogy holds. Wheels and rockets are fundamentally different technologies.

> LLM technology itself has nothing to do with general (human-like) intelligence.

Neural nets to the brain are like a plane to a bird. Saying LLMs have nothing to do with human-like intelligence is fundamentally ignorant of the field and the inspiration behind many of the algorithmic experiments.

LLMs clearly do things differently, but that doesn't mean they can't be generally intelligent, or they can't produce output that's remarkably similar to a human.

And to be clear, I have studied AI, published on AI and work in AI.

> Do you people get off by fantasizing about people losing their job, or worse? (whatever you are implying)

I'm the exact opposite. I've been terrified about AI for decades. I had nightmares last night as I do most nights about AI. I think humanity is years away from a disaster and I'm pleading for people to see.

But what I've learnt is that every step closer we get the goal posts just move a little more. I'll note just a few years ago HN was saying ChatGPT and LLMs were just stochastic parrots or advanced autocompletes. I pushed back against this and said within years they'll be raising PRs on their own from tickets. But everyone told me, "nooo, they couldn't even do basic maths!!"

Remember this comment when the time comes. We could have acted, but we didn't because every advancement people dismissed and seem to think that further improvements would not be made. You will be wrong.