My AI Timelines Have Sped Up (Again)

[vallode]

I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a definition of AGI that apparently accounts for 95% (!) of "economically valuable work" while basically not talking _at all_ about the trades. No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing!

Is the author trying to say that all that work falls into the 5% left over after you replace the stock brokers, programmers, artists, etc.?

I understand no offence is meant, but this feels extremely naive. At best the work programmers do is in the minority of "economical valuable" work that we strongly rely on for our world economies to keep chugging along.

Quick and dirty searches show that some 12% of employed people are in healthcare in the USA, 9% in leisure and hospitality, and 2% in education. 23% of people in the USA are employed in economically valuable work that is very personal, and very difficult for technology to fully replace.

Sorry if I'm rambling, I think I just did not enjoy the complete lack of mention of blue-collar workers here. I don't think I'm yet in the camp betting on AGI coming out of the woodworks in the next few decades.

[idopmstuff]

I totally agree with this - it always seems like sort of a weird omission when people talk about AGI doing 95% of work without any discussion of robotics. It seems very obvious that you need bipedal robots (or a lot of different types of robots) to hit that number. Do these AGI predictions assume that we'll have those by the time they hit AGI? Or is the word "knowledge" supposed to be implied before the work "work"? Either way, it's clearly inaccurate to say that AI on its own can do all productive work without physical embodiment.

[plipt]

I agree with you, however when talking about jobs that are relegated to the physical world like the trades, I dont think it safe to assume that robotics wont also benefit from the AI advancements. Thereby eventually encroaching on those jobs as well.

The following is a recent video from the youtuber "Two Minute Papers" about some researchers (Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm et al.) who have created a highly mobile autonomous robot running software trained via simulated reinforcement learning models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ

i think it demonstrates the potential for the kind of motile finesse that could be used by robots to complete trades-like tasks.

[bryanlarsen]

If you stuck an AGI inside a Boston Dynamics robot and trained it on a trade I suspect it could replace much of that trade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ

Not an easy problem, but the assumption is that AGI makes solving such problems tractable.

Japan has been working on healthcare robots for decades.

I think the key word is that the robots "could" replace 95% of economically valuable work, not that they will. Using an example from today: we can and have replaced fast food order takers with kiosks, but there are still a lot of people employed as fast food order takers because that's what customers prefer.

[jandrese]

Isn't this what Tesla is trying to achieve with Optimus? They were just demonstrating fine grained control using "AI" training to perform human scale tasks. The big idea is that they are human size so they can be slotted in for any task that is currently performed by people without needing any special accommodations.

I personally don't think they'll be economically viable in the foreseeable future, but they do represent a possible bridge to ubiquitous robot labor.

[osrec]

I agree that it doesn't account for blue collar workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if the balance, purely in terms of financials, was actually that unbalanced.

I'm not saying it's correct or fair that a trader sat at his desk can contribute £20 million to a country's "output", while a builder, working his backside off could maybe add £100k, but that's the world we live in...

[htrp]

> I'm no AI expert, I don't have a lot of domain knowledge but what irks me about reading through this entire blog post is the idea that we are hinging on a definition of AGI that apparently accounts for 95% (!) of "economically valuable work" while basically not talking _at all_ about the trades. No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing!

A good chunk of the value in the "trades" is in the experience and in the management.

If I can make anyone a painter by giving them a headset [1] and having an "AGI" model tell them exactly how, where, what to paint, how much of the value is the model collecting and how much of it is left for the human being?

[1] https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/augmented-reality/infograph...

[ChatGTP]

The belief is that once the AGI is here, the possibilities are endless for disrupting absolutely every aspect of our life and society, the end of human history is what I've hear Open AI folks say.

There will be zero work, humans will be completely useless economically and we'll just have to hope that some how, all of this wealth is fairly distributed and we don't lose our minds from feeling completely useless.

What you can't imagine happening now, will be possible by deploying the AGI. Things we can't even dream of will be possible. It will be all chaotic and completely unpredictable over night. Eternal life ? No problems, pickup the phone and place your order.

What's appealing about this? I don't know, but billions and upon billions are being poured into it and many "smart" people are striving for it.

[mewpmewp2]

I imagine 5% could easily be work where you want an actual human being, not because they are better than AI, but because they are a human being, and that is what you are wired to want.

I'm pretty sure 95% in that definition would include trade workers.

5% could be something like teachers, babysitters, because you want children to have that human to human connection.

I think it could be thought of as "95%+", meaning even if computer is more intelligent, we'll still want humans because they are humans for some things, because we, ourselves are humans and that's what we want.

Things like healthcare should be fully automated, except for a small percentage again. You have a health problem, you go in, you don't need that human connection unless you have a very specific need, some of the times.

[kiba]

I am more concerned about people abusing AI technology to generate spam, fake, and trick people, resulting in an almost entirely useless internet and polluted information space.

Maybe it's for the best that we start meeting each other in meatspace.

[tomNth]

"reading through this entire blog post" ?

Is

"The Physically Embodied Bear" "95%+ will include taking physical, real-world actions."

not a mention of "construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters" and "blue-collar workers" ?

[spywaregorilla]

The more technology can do, the less the workers do, the less workers get paid. Being a servant to people with money is better than being part of their furniture though.

[gumballindie]

> No mention of construction, manual labour, mechanics, welders, painters, nothing!

I have the strange feeling that it will be those jobs that will be automated further. There is no need for manual workers in construction - you can have bots build houses, and bots painting them inside. Mechanics are like to be phased out by EVs, there's not even a need to manually change wheels and tires. Everything they do can be automated, and will be automated.

[anonzzzies]

I think the idea of most is that at the time we have AGI, we will robots designing robots that will ‘fix’ AI for the trades.

[karmakaze]

I thought that it was assumed the blue collar work was believed to be attainable much sooner than AGI, so then only the intellectually complex work would remain for AGI to solve.

[lovecg]

Yeah by that definition we already eliminated 95% of economically valuable work from 1700s. Very few people do farm work nowadays.

[randyrand]

He clarifies later that he is including physical labor (robots).

[tomrod]

I'm glad an AI researcher is posting their personal thoughts. As a fellow researcher and developer in the AI space, I conceptualize AGI as a self-domain-learning entity that is able to manage itself and understand how to affect/intervene its actions and effectual consequences (humans don't reach this on a general level until early teens to mid twenties, if ever). Walking is a solid example of this at a specific level. Singleton objective functions and patterns across probabilities of states are insufficient -- there needs to be ongoing interpretation and architecture extrapolation.

In short -- current AI approaches are great at interpolation and still perform poorly at most extrapolation exercises that a human can take on.

[feverzsj]

My AI timelines says next AI winter will come in 10 years, when people find it's a vaporware ... again.

[xbmcuser]

It has supposedly been coming for the last 20 years reality is the cat is out of the bag and it won't be stuffed back in.

Even at today levels of AI a very large amount of work can be optimized if the domain experts knew how to use the ai tools. As people become more used to using them I don't see an ai winter coming.

[truculent]

Even if we had no new developments in AI, the effects of the current SotA would be massive over the next decade. There are myriad tools already built on or incorporating AI to deliver real value.

Ignoring the fact that wild science fiction has become totally mundane within the last 10 years is putting your head in the sand.

[cedws]

I saw an ad on the London Underground recently from a brewery that included "AI." It's starting to feel a lot like the dotcom/crypto bubble.

[pixl97]

Headline: "AI Winter shouted from the rooftops for the millionth time this year, meanwhile for the weather showing balmy 85 degree temperatures for the next few years"

[skepticATX]

AI isn’t vaporware, but in my view there is a massive AGI bubble right now.

Everyone is attributing high level reasoning and intelligence to LLMs and quite frankly there is little evidence for this being the case.

There is almost certainly an AGI winter coming.

[echelon]

Disney and Pixar animation are about to get 10,000x - 100,000x cheaper and accessible to nearly anyone.

When applied to the correct domains, AI is incredible.

[msoad]

“Work” to us, in the tech bubble is sitting at a desk and doing some typing and clicking and sometimes decision making. The world out there is much more different. Work for many people is physical or very human (like a teacher or psychologist).

Yes it’s easy to guess the job the involves mostly moving information around would be automated but that’s not all jobs by any means.

[woopwoop]

Imagine you learn about some new conjecture in mathematics, and you try to predict when it will be resolved. Your prediction says that there is a 50% chance that the conjecture is resolved in the next 25 years, and a 90% chance it is resolved in the next 50 years. So, conditional on the conjecture not being resolved in the next 25 years, there is an 80% chance the conjecture is resolved in the subsequent 25 years. Wouldn't that be a little strange?

[bethekind]

Title should be: " My AI Timelines haven't sped up, but now I think there's a 10% chance of AI dominance in 5 years"

His AI timelines haven't sped up, only clarified

[dbish]

It’s also barely clarified and has a ton of false precision problems, which I’d expect a researcher who works in the field not to have. Why 10% vs 20% or 15%, no real reason, just vibes, but it gets clicks.

[siliconc0w]

I'm an "overhang" bear, while incremental progress will be made - it'll come at too high of a cost. The larger, slower, more expensive models have limited applications(mostly fine-tuning the economical ones) so there will be ultimately less investment. Unless there is a new unlock, we'll be left with mediocre 3.5 models for most real-time apps and excitement will fade.

[gmerc]

ChatGPT is one giant training data acquisition project. Including pro. it’s painfully obvious when you see that any useful usecase eventually moves to the API (GPT 4 web/app flat out refuses to code more than a function or two at a time now; it had no issues with multiple files before).

Everyone is providing the greatest training set you can now find (since all other venues for training data will gradually disappear behind walls and fees)

[dsr_]

It is not quite 70 years since this proposal was written:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmou...

[laichzeit0]

“Today is the worst AI will ever be.” I’m gonna steal this one. I can’t say the same about web development, for example, or the US political landscape, or climate change, or mental health, etc.

[Jensson]

AI doesn't just make progress, during an AI winter the AI gets worse for a while. Like deep blue was the best in the world, then they scrapped that project and it took a long while until anyone made a better chess engine. The same can easily happen for LLMs etc, if it turns out they are too expensive to run without VC money we will see them quickly regress once the next winter hits.

[lostmsu]

Mine was 50/50 at 2035 after GPT-2, and with GPT-4 it is more like 90/10 with 50/50 being sometime in 2028 (that's for pure intellectual work).

[croes]

Is really a sped up?

The target of 95% is still 2070, the 50% is still 2045, means the progress between 2035 and 2045 is now less than before.

So the timeline has sped up and slowed down at the same time

[czbond]

Yes.... what the military needs most is an auto-complete tool that was trained on Reddit material. (GPT-4)

[m3kw9]

He should take into account in 3 months the time line will accelerate 20% and compound it and do a discount to present and give a more accurate answer.

Let me do his job for him: 90% AGI will happen by 2030.

[behnamoh]

For fck's sake, please stop using this font. I know Apple started the trend but even they went back to sane alternatives. The narrow lines of this font are a torture to the eyes.

[elicash]

I think this is just plain Helvetica, with weight at 300 rather than 400.

Apple used to use Helvetica, and even an ultra thin version of it, but I wouldn't say they started the trend of using Helvetica.