I agree. I don’t believe ai being able to self code will lead to AGI. I had similar conversation with the core engineers that worked on Chinese LLMs and that seems to be the only argument they are using. In reality everyone knows this is not a guarantee, it just means it’s a non-zero chance.
As a matter of fact we’ve seen a lot more World Model pitches and products betting on major LLMs not hitting AGI in the next 3 years over the past month. For me, this means there has been a lot more doubt.
For the past 3 years my elite friends that are either working in AI or living in San Francisco have been telling me adamantly we are 1-2 years from AGI/ASI singularity and absolutely everything is about to change.
Meanwhile my intuition has been that no we’re not close to anything like humans not needed for intelligence. Like nowhere near I dont even see any whites on the eyes of this digital high IQ terminator, this dude is far on the horizon with the little mountains over there.
Stark division of opinions throughout. My intuition Ive learned to train and listen to it, its my most powerful weapon. But I am a humble weaponholder, I recognize the achievements and abilities of these friends, in some cases of the most elite of them, far outweighs what I have achieved. If my opinion clashes so much with people of this caliber I also sit my ass down and listen.
Its been enough time now that we’ve gone through their initial timelines. And somehow it feels like we have both been right?
Clearly something revolutionary is going on, the digital/software world is being terraformed in front of our eyes and taking huge swaths of the economy with it.
But I have been, so far, clearly correct. These things are still closer to a tool rather than replacing the tool holder. I still dont see it on the horizon. I dont know if its what Ilya S says that the data is gonna be the constraint. That feels right to me. There are only so many non linear intelligence vectors to train upon. There are still humans finding new ideas and innovating above and beyond what is available to train on online. I like to believe I am one of them and I dont feel like I am anywhere near saturation or that it will happen anytime in my lifetime.
Yan LC has his belief that LLMs are capped which was well articulated, now though combined with world models I don’t know if thats the constraint.
Data might be the boundary that will saturate first and the innovation needed for the next stage might be creating useful artificial data, much like for a long time financial model training has involved creating fake training data that has the attributes needed to program alpha.
Ultimately this is all a pursuit for more alpha. Its a bit unnerving that even though I have been correct that the timelines on us being replaceable meat boxes arent correct, its impossible for me disprove the notion that its at the next corner we are about to reach. I feel like we will just keep going one block down the street at a time with baited breath because clearly something is getting closer though holding your breath for how long its actually gonna take is gonna asfixiate us.
So lets take a breath. Theres a lot of trauma under the surface from the rate of change accelerating. Every single one of us feels it. The fascia are being pulled and we are emotionally masking it under our skin. We know something is under way. But those of us with strong awareness and with the lights switched on aren’t going to stop being needed anytime soon- I don’t care how many Elons, Darios, and Leopolds say otherwise.