There’s not a single mention of LLMs in my post. Not one.

There’s not a single mention of LLM’s in my entire post. The argument I’m making there isn’t even mine. I heard it from Sam Harris way before LLMs were even a thing.

But I wasn’t talking about LLMs

I didn’t say we need to improve on what we have. We just need to keep making better technology which we will keep doing unless we destroy ourselves first.

I get what you’re saying but to me, that still just sounds like a timescale issue. I can’t think of a scenario where we’ve improved something so much that there’s just absolutely nothing we could improve on further. With AI we only need to reach the point of making it have human-level cognitive capabilities and from there on it can improve itself.

You seem to be talking about LLMs now and I’m not. LLMs being a dead end is perfectly compatible with what I just said. We’ll just try a different approach next then. Even the fact of realising they’re a dead end is yet another step towards AGI.

Then you need to give me an explanation for why it’s a dead end

A chess engine is intelligent in one thing: playing chess. That narrow intelligence doesn’t translate to any other skill, even if it’s sometimes superhuman at that one task, like a calculator.

Humans, on the other hand, are generally intelligent. We can perform a variety of cognitive tasks that are unrelated to each other, with our only limitations being the physical ones of our “meat computer.”

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the artificial version of human cognitive capabilities, but without the brain’s limitations. It should be noted that AGI is not synonymous with AI. AGI is a type of AI, but not all AI is generally intelligent. The next step from AGI would be Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which would not only be generally intelligent but also superhumanly so. This is what the “AI doomers” are concerned about.

The fact that human brain is capable of general intelligence tells us everything we need to know about the processing power needed to run one.

If there were a giant asteroid hurling toward Earth, set to impact sometime in the next 20 to 200 years, I’d say there’s definitely a need for urgency. A true AGI is somewhat of an asteroidal impact in itself.

AGI is inevitable unless:

1. General intelligence is substrate independent and what the brain does cannot be replicated in silica. However, since both are made of matter, and matter obeys the laws of physics, I see no reason to assume this.

2. We destroy ourselves before we reach AGI.

Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.

Replace “AI” with “humans” and this rant is still perfectly coherent.