> However, the race to develop AGI is very real, and we also have no way of knowing how close anyone is to reaching it.
It seems pretty irresponsible for AI boosters to say it’ll happen within 5 years then.
There’s a pretty important engineering distinction between the Manhattan Project and current research towards AGI. At the time of the Manhattan Project scientists already had a pretty good idea of how to build the weapon. The fundamental research had already been done. Most of the budget was actually just spent refining uranium. Of course there were details to figure out like the specific design of the detonator, but the mechanism of a runaway chain reaction was understood. This is much more concrete than building AGI.
For AGI nobody knows how to do it in detail. There are proposals for building trillion dollar clusters but we don’t have any theoretical basis for believing we’ll get AGI afterwards. The “scaling laws” people talk about are not actual laws but just empirical observations of trends in flawed metrics.
Matt Garman said 2 years for all programming jobs.
And I think most relevant to this article, since SSI says they won’t release a product until they have superintelligence, I think the fact that VCs are giving them money means they’ve been pretty optimistic in statements about about their timelines.
It seems pretty irresponsible for AI boosters to say it’ll happen within 5 years then.
There’s a pretty important engineering distinction between the Manhattan Project and current research towards AGI. At the time of the Manhattan Project scientists already had a pretty good idea of how to build the weapon. The fundamental research had already been done. Most of the budget was actually just spent refining uranium. Of course there were details to figure out like the specific design of the detonator, but the mechanism of a runaway chain reaction was understood. This is much more concrete than building AGI.
For AGI nobody knows how to do it in detail. There are proposals for building trillion dollar clusters but we don’t have any theoretical basis for believing we’ll get AGI afterwards. The “scaling laws” people talk about are not actual laws but just empirical observations of trends in flawed metrics.