Real Engineering has a tone where - while I do think they usually keep a high standard - I don’t assume that they’re necessarily 100% correct or that the new technology they cover is necessarily viable. With both Spinlaunch and Helion I just came out of it with the feeling “cool, interesting, looks promising”

Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a calculator). We invented calculators exactly because humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.

> If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.

All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.

Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks. Adding a "few more intelligences" where they currently fall down does not at all seem far off.

This has been my experience so far: people underestimate the capabilities and rate of progress in machine intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate human capabilities to derive their estimates. Overestimating human specialness has a long history.

Every incremental improvement in utility of these tools requires exponentially more parameters and training data. Compare GPT4's 1.76 trillion params to GPT3.5's 175 million; nearly exactly 10x more. It's reasonable to say that getting the same relative improvement again will require another 10x parameters, and about 10x as much training data. GPT4 supposedly cost something like $20 million to train, so we're talking $200 million. We're talking entire data centers here. And the bigger problem is that GPT4 was already basically trained on the entire Internet (as far as we know). New information is being created all the time, but it will take many years -- decades, even -- before we have 10x as much useful information on the internet. And more and more of that information is regurgitated hallucinations from GPT4 itself and similar.

I'm not saying AI is ending -- there are lots of other avenues to explore. But I am saying we're hitting the limit of "just make it bigger" for LLMs.