I wish I had a nickel for every time an AI hypester complained about goalposts. I thought it was clear that I was talking about AGI, or a general purpose intelligence on the level of humans. You know, what the hypesters have been saying is just around the corner if only they can have another trillion dollars. Sorry for the confusion

> That only demonstrates the possibilities yet to be explored. biology has millions-of-years head start; what's possible today could be balked out a few centuries ago by the same argument as yours.

Yes, we may only have a few centuries left to go before AGI. I was going with a few decades, but now that you mention it, a few centuries is more likely given we are running into Moore's Law limits with transistor technology.

> At a fundemental level, what holds back biology is all the other things it does (ala staying alive) and the limits imposed (e.g. heat etc) that a purpose-made device can optimise on.

You don't honestly believe that AGI will not have to deal with continuity, reliability, and heat dissipation issues that living things have to deal with, do you? All the more reason megawatts vs handful of watts is relevant. You just pointed out that it's not just an algorithmic optimization problem, but a much more complex problem of which we are barely scratching the surface.

> Seems we are arguing different things. I went back through the thread, and believe the proposition is: "us, humanity, being able to build AI or something being very close to that", which I translate as a comment on our literal species. I took your statement "From the energy efficiency perspective human brain is very, very effective computational machine" as being in that scope, and not just a reference to the current era (or Decade!).

I was replying to a literal statement about increased mechanical efficiency over biological efficiency. Which, in the case of AGI is completely inverted. Biological systems are so much more efficient that the comparison is embarrassing.

Also, I was saying our species is at least 3 decades from in-silico AGI. That doesn't mean we'll have some wild new tech that no one thought of next year. But the chances are so slim you might as well be saying we will genetically engineer flying pigs.