[hi_hi]

Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is. It's just here, accept it. Or vice versa.

Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not). Whats the magic thing thats happening with AGI that wasn't happening before?

<looks out of window> <checks news websites> <checks social media...briefly> <asks wife>

Right, so, not much has changed from 1-2 years ago that I can tell. The job markets a bit shit if you're in software...is that what we get for billions of dollars spent?

[hackyhacky]

Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.

The writing is on the wall. Even if there's no new advances in technology, the current state is upending jobs, education, media, etc

[themafia]

> It took decades

It took one September. Then as soon as you could take payments on the internet the rest was inevitable and in _clear_ demand. People got on long waiting lists just to get the technology in their homes.

> no new advances in technology

The reason the internet became so accessible is because Moore was generally correct. There was two corresponding exponential processes that vastly changed the available rate of adoption. This wasn't at all like cars being introduced into society. This was a monumental shift.

I see no advances in LLMs that suggest any form of the same exponential processes exist. In fact the inverse is true. They're not reducing power budgets fast enough to even imagine that they're anywhere near AGI, and even if they were, that they'd ever be able to sustainably power it.

> the current state is upending jobs

The difference is companies fought _against_ the internet because it was so disruptive to their business model. This is quite the opposite. We don't have a labor crisis, we have a retention crisis, because companies do not want to pay fair value for labor. We can wax on and off about technology, and perceptrons, and training techniques, or power budgets, but this fundamental fact seems the hardest to ignore.

If they're wrong this all collapses. If I'm wrong I can learn how to write prompts in a week.

[materielle]

I really think corporations are overplaying their hand if they think they can transform society once again in the next 10 years.

Rapid de industrialization followed by the internet and social media almost broke our society.

Also, I don’t think people necessarily realize how close we were to the cliff in 2007.

I think another transformation now would rip society apart rather than take us to the great beyond.

[otabdeveloper4]

> Cultural changes take time. It took decades for the internet to move from nerdy curiosity to an essential part of everyone's life.

99% of people only ever use proprietary networks from FAANG corporations. That's not "the internet", that's an evolution of CompuServe and AOL.

We got TCP/IP and the "web-browser" as a standard UI toolkit stack out of it, but the idea of the world wide web is completely dead.

[hi_hi]

yeah, this is a good point, transition and transformation to new technologies takes time. I'm not sure I agree the current state is upending things though. It's forcing some adaption for sure, but the status quo remains.

[webdoodle]

It also took years for the Internet to be usable by most folks. It was hard, expensive and unpractical for decades.

Just about the time it hit the mainstream coincidentally, is when the enshitification began to go exponential. Be careful what you wish for.

[tim333]

What's happening with AGI depends on what you mean by AGI so "can't even be bothered discussing what the definition" means you can't say what's happening.

My usual way of thinking about it is AGI means can do all the stuff humans do which means you'd probably after a while look out the window and see robots building houses and the like. I don't think that's happening for a while yet.

[danaris]

Indeed: particularly given that—just as a nonexhaustive "for instance"—one of the fairly common things expected in AGI is that it's sapient. Meaning, essentially, that we have created a new life form, that should be given its own rights.

Now, I do not in the least believe that we have created AGI, nor that we are actually close. But you're absolutely right that we can't just handwave away the definitions. They are crucial both to what it means to have AGI, and to whether we do (or soon will) or not.

[kjkjadksj]

Who would the robots build houses for? No one has a job and no one is having kids in that future.

[CamperBob2]

Before enlightenment^WAGI: chop wood, fetch water, prepare food

After enlightenment^WAGI: chop wood, fetch water, prepare food

[keernan]

One of the most impactful books I ever read was Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.

Its core thesis was: Every era doubled the amount of technological change of the prior era in one half the time.

At the time he wrote the book in 1970, he was making the point that the pace of technological change had, for the first time in human history, rendered the knowledge of society's elders - previously the holders of all valuable information - irrelevant.

The pace of change has continued to steadily increase in the ensuing 55 years.

Edit: grammar

[jwilliams]

> Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here.

A slightly different angle on this - perhaps AGI doesn't matter (or perhaps not in the ways that we think).

LLMs have changed a lot in software in the last 1-2 years (indeed, the last 1-2 months); I don't think it's a wild extrapolation to see that'll come to many domains very soon.

[nradov]

Which domains? Will we see a lot of changes in plumbing?

[rstuart4133]

> Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here. I can't even be bothered discussing what the definition of AGI is.

There is a definition of AGI the AI companies are using to justify their valuation. It's not what most people would call AGI but it does that job well enough, and you will care when it arrives.

They define it as an AI that can develop other AI's faster than the best team of human engineers. Once they build one of those in house they outpace the competition and become the winner that takes all. Personally I think it's more likely they will all achieve it at a similar time. That would mean the the race will continues, accelerating as fast as they can build data centres and power plants to feed them.

It will impact everyone, because the already dizzying pace of the current advances will accelerate. I don't know about you, but I'm having trouble figuring out what my job will be next year as it is.

An AI that just develops other AI's could hardly be called "general" in my book, but my opinion doesn't count for much.

[hi_hi]

May I ask, what experiences are you personally having with LLMs right now that is leading you to the conclusion that they will become "intelligent" enough to identify, organise, and build advancing improvements to themselves, without any human interaction in the near future (1 - 2 years lets say)?

[hshdhdhj4444]

If AGI is already here actions would be so greatly accelerated humans wouldn’t have time to respond.

Remember that weather balloon the US found a few years ago that for days was on the news as a Chinese spy balloon?

Well whether it was a spy balloon or a weather balloon but the first hint of its existence could have triggered a nuclear war that could have already been the end of the world as we know it because AGI will almost certainly be deployed to control the U.S. and Chinese military systems and it would have acted well before any human would have time to intercept its actions.

That’s the apocalyptic nuclear winter scenario.

There are many other scenarios.

An AGI which has been infused with a tremendous amount of ethics so the above doesn’t happen, may also lead to terrible outcomes for a human. An AGI would essentially be a different species (although a non biological one). If it replicated human ethics even when we apply them inconsistently, it would learn that treating other species brutally (we breed, enslave, imprison, torture, and then kill over 80 billion land animals annually in animal agriculture, and possibly trillions of water animals). There’s no reason it wouldn’t do that to us.

Finally, if we infuse it with our ethics but it’s smart enough to apply them consistently (even a basic application of our ethics would have us end animal agriculture immediately), so it realizes that humans are wrong and doesn’t do the same thing to humans, it might still create an existential crisis for humans as our entire identity is based on thinking we are smarter and intellectually superior to all other species, which wouldn’t be true anymore. Further it would erode beliefs in gods and other supernatural BS we believe which might at the very least lead humans to stop reproducing due to the existential despair this might cause.

[armoredkitten]

You're talking about superintelligence. AGI is just...an AI that's roughly on par with humans on most things. There's no inherent reason why AGI will lead to ASI.

[nradov]

What a silly comment. You're literally describing the plot of several sci-fi movies. Nuclear command and control systems are not taken so lightly.

And as for the Chinese spy balloon, there was never any risk of a war (at least not from that specific cause). The US, China, Russia, and other countries routinely spy on each other through a variety of unarmed technical means. Occasionally it gets exposed and turns into a diplomatic incident but that's about it. Everyone knows how the game is played.

[deafpolygon]

AGI is not a death sentence for humanity. It all depends on who leverages the tool. And in any case, AGI won’t be here for decades to come.

[koakuma-chan]

Sounds fun let's do it.

[snapplebobapple]

Depends on the cost to run it.say it costs 5k to do a years worth of something intellectual with it. That means the price ceiling on 90% of lawyer/accountant/radiologist/low to middle management is 5k now. It will be epic and temporarily terrible when it happens as long as reasonably competent models are opensource. I also don't think we are near that at all though

[generallyjosh]

I do strongly agree on the framing, but I'd argue with the conclusion

Yeah, it really doesn't matter if AGI has happened, is going to happen, will never happen, whatever. No matter what sort of definition we make for it, someone's always doing to disagree anyway. For a looong time, we thought the Turing test was the standard, and that only a truly intelligent computer could beat it. It's been blown out of the water for years now, and now we're all arguing about new definitions for AGI

At the end of the day, like you say, it doesn't matter a bit how we define terms. We can label it whatever we want, but the label doesn't change what it can DO

What it can DO is the important part. I think a lot of software devs are coming to terms with the idea that AI will be able to replace vast chunks of our jobs in the very near future.

If you use these things heavily, you can see the trajectory.

6 months ago I'd only trust them for boiler plate code generation and writing/reviewing short in-line documentation.

Today, with the latest models and tools, I'm trusting them with short/low impact tasks (go implement this UI fix, then redeploy the app locally, navigate to it, and verify the fix looks correct).

6 months from now, my best guess is that they'll continue to become more capable of handling longer + more complex tasks on their own.

5 years from now, I'm seeing a real possibility that they'll be handling all the code, end to end.

Doesn't matter if we call that AGI or not. It very much will matter whose jobs get cut, because one person with AI can do the work of 20 developers

[copx]

AGI would render humans obsolete and eradicate us sooner or later.

[Havoc]

Pretty sure marketing team s are already working on AGI v2

[tsukurimashou]

AGI is a pipe dream and will never exist

[joquarky]

Odd to see someone so adamantly insist that we have souls on a forum like HN.

[munchler]

I think you are missing the point: If we assume that AGI is *not* yet here, but may be here soon, what will change when it arrives? Those changes could be big enough to affect you.

[hi_hi]

I'm missing the point? I literally asked the same thing you did.

>Now what....? Whats happening right now that should make me care that AGI is here (or not).

Do you have any insight into what those changes might concretely be? Or are you just trying to instil fear in people who lack critical thinking skills?

[m463]

people are taking actions based on its advice.

[dyauspitr]

The economy is shit if you’re anything except a nurse or providing care to old people.

[nradov]

Electricians are also doing pretty well. Someone has to wire up those new data centers.

[otabdeveloper4]

> The job markets a bit shit if you're in software

That's Trump's economy, not LLMs.

[skeptic_ai]

Many devs don’t write code anymore. Can really deliver a lot more per dev.

Many people slowly losing jobs and can’t find new ones. You’ll see effects in a few years

[reactordev]

Deliver a lot more tech debt

[znnajdla]

I've been writing code for 20 years. AI has completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business. Nothing is the same anymore, and I feel I will be saying that again by the end of 2026. My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x *compounding monthly*.

[myegorov]

>My productive output as a programmer in software and business have expanded 3x compounding monthly.

In what units?

[hi_hi]

Going from punch cards to terminals also "completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business"

Firefox introducing their dev debugger many years ago "completely changed my life and the way I write code and run my business"

You get the idea. Yes, the day to day job of software engineering has changed. The world at large cares not one jot.

[UncleMeat]

Okay. So software engineers are vastly more efficient. Good I guess. "Revolutionize the entire world such that we rethink society down to its very basics like money and ownership" doesn't follow from that.

[waterTanuki]

Are you working for 3x less the time compounding monthly?

Are you making 3x the money compounding monthly ?

No?

Then what's the point?

[hackable_sand]

It's weird that you guys keep posting the same comments with the exact same formatting

You're not fooling anyone

[xhcuvuvyc]

I actually think it is here. Singularity happened. We're just playing catch up at this point.

Has it runaway yet? Not sure, but is it currently in the process of increasing intelligence with little input from us? Yes.

Exponential graphs always have a slow curve in the beginning.

[hi_hi]

Didn't you get the memo? Tuesday. Tuesday is when the Singularity happens.

Will there still be ice cream after Tuesday? General societal collapse would be hard to bare without ice cream.