logoalt Hacker News

boshalfoshal • today at 5:39 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

It always seems smart to be a contrarian/bear, but historically, betting against technology and technological progress is dumb.

Not only is he not a shareholder, but based on his opinions, he clearly isn't a user of modern models either. Somehow he still thinks they are party tricks and that "They will never be AGI," with no elaboration on _why_ they _can't_ be AGI, and why that actually matters for these companies (hint: it doesn't really matter much. As it turns out, you could replace a lot of humans with a modern LLM and have a reasonable comparative advantage in doing so, even though the models are ostensibly not "AGI.").

His predictions have also historically just been bad (https://danluu.com/zitron/). Even AI 2027, which is basically semi-fictional, is more accurate and worth paying more attention to than this guy. And the superforecaseters which actually made AI 2027 and actual futurists are generally higher signal.


Replies

Insanity • today at 5:48 PM

Not being a 'party trick' and being 'AGI' are wildly different assumptions. Apart from AGI being a poorly defined term, I don't see any reason why the LLM methodology has the potential to scale to AGI.

There's other avenues which are probably needed to make the cohesive AGI picture come true, such as World Models. Simply learning from text and being able to generate language is not, in my mind, the end-all-be-all for intelligence.

gizmo686 • today at 7:37 PM

You would have made a lot of money betting against technology back in 2000 ... assuming you got the timing right.

There are a bunch of ways that AI the technology could be massivly successful, while AI the industry crashes.

nancyminusone • today at 6:25 PM

They are a party trick, provided the party is software development. If your job does not have you sit behind a computer all day, their utility is minimal.