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by efficax 4 days ago
I feel like i've seen less hype about "the next model will be agi". GPT-6 is supposed to be coming this summer, and nobody is expecting AGI now. Not sure how they're going to keep the hype cycle going
3 comments

Or another way to see it is that current models are AGI as it was defined before, and the goal post is being moved.
they are definitely not agi as it was ever defined. they’re only a bit more capable than they were a year ago. they crossed over from interesting crap to useful tool recently but really only for software
You have short memory if you think we've not blown past at least 5 different AGI goalposts. They're being moved every time and we're hitting them every time.

Or maybe you just don't know exactly how capable these models are. Most people's experience of AI is a stupid chatbot, it's no wonder they don't understand how these things are coming for their jobs.

On my end, I have a software that is designed and built by Claude, that I did a strategy session on (with claude), and prepared a fundraise for (with claude). My only role, other than "knowing what to aim for", has been to feed the AI some fairly basic english prompts for a few weeks... which is also easily automatable.

Everyone's job is fucked. Devs, CEOs, everyone.

We’re had the ability to make coffee with a machine for decades yet you still pay $5 for a barista made Java, I think we’ll be okay.
Which barista? The one that uses the machine to do 90% of the work, or the one that isn't a barista and uses the machine to do 100% of the work?

How do you know I don't have said machine at home?

And what bug bit you to make you think this is a good comparison anyway?

The one that uses the machine to do 90% of the work and is one of half a million employed to do so in the US alone[1]

It doesn’t matter what you’ve got at home; I can bet my left kidney you’ve paid a barista for a coffee once in your life even though you could have produced it yourself at home. I also bet my right kidney you’ll do so again in the future.

[1] https://www.zippia.com/barista-jobs/demographics/

The simple fact is that economy can’t be 100% services. Who is going to pay these baristas if nobody else earns anything?
Why would no one else earn anything?
> Everyone's job is fucked. Devs, CEOs, everyone.

It’s curious to me that there are two distinct factions here. People like parent commenter who has no discernment and others who see llms for what they are. I just talked to opus 5 and in it’s first response caught some well disguise BS. These things are bullshit machines. There are indeed a lot of bullshit jobs around so maybe parent does discern something I don’t?

If you're saying I don't see LLMs for what they are, you are wrong. I have worked in the AI sector for over a decade and I know exactly how the sausage is made. As of today, I run an AI lab (ingram.tech), and we see daily not just the theoretical of what's possible, but how these systems get deployed and who's really at risk. We're head to head with the reality of the terrain.

But it's completely irrelevant. The emergent properties of LLMs, what was built on top of those emergent properties, and the emergent properties of that, are all together building a world nobody is ready for.

If you don't think this, you haven't seen what these things are truly capable of yet. Either that, or you have a romanticized view of what humans actually do in 99% of non-manual jobs.

I'm blown away by how so many people on HN are just... idk, "blind" is the politically correct way to say it, I think. With zero ability to understand the transitive aspects of what they are looking at. For example, these HN threads are so often polluted with comments claiming some random use case cannot possibly be automated.

Sometimes I feel like I'm showing somebody how a spreadsheet can calculate 1+1, and they ask "Yes, but can it do 1+2?".

...chartered accountants whose job is to deal with the 100s of pages of jargon for you. LLMs are the like smartphones. They do everything so you don't need your ipod, flashlight, alarm clock, game console, computer, that handheld clicking counter thing, map, camera anymore. Llms will do that to a lot of professions.
LLM labs dumbed down the definition of AGI as much as possible, yet their models haven't reached it still. We are nowhere near the original definition of AGI. Not even 1% of the way there.
Oh yeah? Who even talks about the Turing Test anymore? Half a decade ago,that was the informal benchmark.
Not at all.

The Turing test was never about AGI, just about being able to discern a chatbot from a human in a casual conversation...

I would also say that funnily enough it's extremely easy to detect if you're talking to a human or an LLM after a few messages.

in 2023 i wouldve said gpt could pass the turing test. today i could figure out it was an llm in a few turns no problem. llms cannot pass the turing test now that we’re accustomed to them
The only reason you can figure it out is because of the system prompt which is designed to make model “useful”, safe and compliant.

Raw modern LLM with different pre-prompt will easily fool anyone.

We wouldn't be having any talk about AI Slop if it was impossible to tell AI apart from people.
Uhuh, but if it was so easy, we also wouldn't be funding billions of euros and dollars in anti-AI-disinformation systems, holding entire conferences about deepfakes and hybrid attacks on civilians, and have dozens of governments opening entirely new defense departments to study and counter the capabilities of AI to disseminate human-like disinformation at scale (which has been affecting elections across the world).

But yeah, your AI slop take about the local burger joint that used free chatgpt to generate a menu filled with typos and bad images is A+.

Yes 18 months ago it seemed like AGI was being promised every other week, and now I don't see any of those headlines.
It's already happened but no one wants to admit it
We can start having this conversation when it's able to do at least 20% of the work that I have to do.