genuinely curious to hear your reasoning for why this is the case. i'm always somewhere between bemused and annoyed opening the daily HN thread about AGI and seeing everyone's totally unfounded confidence in their predictions.
my position is I have no idea what is going to happen.
its incredibly stupid to believe general intelligence is just a series of computations that can be done by a computer. The stemlords on the west coast need to take philosophy classes.
I don't think it's stupid to believe that the brain is somehow beyond turing computable considering how easy it is to create a system exactly as capable as a turing machine. I also don't think that anything in philosophy can provide empirical evidence that the brain is categorically special as opposed to emergently special. The sum total of the epistemology I've studied boiled down to people saying "I think human consciousness / the brain works like this" with varying degrees of complexity.
what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research?
Even if you don't understand the technicals, surely you understand if any party was on the verge of AGI they wouldn't behave as these companies behave?
What does that tell you about AI in 100 years though? We could have another AI winter and then a breakthrough and maybe the same cycle a few times more and could still somehow get AGI at the end. I’m not saying it’s likely but you can’t predict the far future from current companies.
> what about the fact frontier labs are spending more compute on viral AI video slop and soon-to-be-obsoleted workplace usecases than research?
That's a bold claim, please cite your sources.
It's hard to find super precise sources on this for 2025, but epochAI has a pretty good summary for 2024. (with core estimates drawn from the Information and NYT
The most relevant quote: "These reports indicate that OpenAI spent $3 billion on training compute, $1.8 billion on inference compute, and $1 billion on research compute amortized over “multiple years”. For the purpose of this visualization, we estimate that the amortization schedule for research compute was two years, for $2 billion in research compute expenses incurred in 2024."
Unless you think that this rough breakdown has completely changed, I find it implausible that Sora and workplace usecases constitute ~42% of total training and inference spend (and I think you could probably argue a fair bit of that training spend is still "research" of a sort, which makes your statement even more implausible).
makotech221|4 months ago
KylerAce|4 months ago
tokioyoyo|4 months ago
BoorishBears|4 months ago
Even if you don't understand the technicals, surely you understand if any party was on the verge of AGI they wouldn't behave as these companies behave?
echoangle|4 months ago
Rudybega|4 months ago
That's a bold claim, please cite your sources.
It's hard to find super precise sources on this for 2025, but epochAI has a pretty good summary for 2024. (with core estimates drawn from the Information and NYT
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-compute-spend
The most relevant quote: "These reports indicate that OpenAI spent $3 billion on training compute, $1.8 billion on inference compute, and $1 billion on research compute amortized over “multiple years”. For the purpose of this visualization, we estimate that the amortization schedule for research compute was two years, for $2 billion in research compute expenses incurred in 2024."
Unless you think that this rough breakdown has completely changed, I find it implausible that Sora and workplace usecases constitute ~42% of total training and inference spend (and I think you could probably argue a fair bit of that training spend is still "research" of a sort, which makes your statement even more implausible).
dwaltrip|4 months ago