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0 pointsdavebren1mo ago0 comments

Yeah the whole fearmongering is clearly just marketing at this point. Your LLM isn't going to suddenly gain sentience and destroy humanity if it has 10x more parameters or trains on 10x more reddit threads.

I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much more difficult to get funding for anything that's not a transformer model.

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arcfour1mo ago

> I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs.

I mean this is very obviously untrue. It'd be like saying we aren't any closer to space flight after watching a demonstration of the Wright Flyer. Before 2022-2023 AI could barely write coherent paragraphs; now it can one-shot an entire letter or program or blog post (even if it's full of LLM tropes).

Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean you have to be dismissive of it.

jcgrillo1mo ago

In hindsight there's an obvious evolutionary pathway from the Wright Flyer to Gemeni/Apollo/Soyuz.. but at the time in 1903 there absolutely was not, and anyone telling you so would be a crank of the highest degree. So it may turn out that LLMs have some place on the evolutionary path to AGI, or it could turn out they're a dead end like Cayley's ornithopters. Show me AGI first, then we can discuss whether LLMs had something to do with it.

arcfour1mo ago

In order to get to space, you must first be capable of flight through the atmosphere. That should be apparent to anyone even then because the atmosphere is in between space and the ground.

Regardless of whether spaceflight is still 1000 or 100 or 50 years away, you are still closer than you were before you demonstrated the ability to fly.

davebrenOP1mo ago

Point is that LLMs could be a local minima we are now economically stuck in until the hype wears off.

jcgrillo1mo ago

Or we could be stuck here for decades pending a breakthrough nobody alive today can even conceive of, or we could be compute limited by a half dozen orders of magnitude. Or it could happen next week. That's the nature of breakthroughs--you just can't have any idea when or how (or if) they'll happen.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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arcfour1mo ago

> I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs.

Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean you have to be dismissive of it.

jcgrillo1mo ago

arcfour1mo ago

In order to get to space, you must first be capable of flight through the atmosphere. That should be apparent to anyone even then because the atmosphere is in between space and the ground.

Regardless of whether spaceflight is still 1000 or 100 or 50 years away, you are still closer than you were before you demonstrated the ability to fly.

davebrenOP1mo ago

Point is that LLMs could be a local minima we are now economically stuck in until the hype wears off.

jcgrillo1mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse