This just shifts the question to how you slotted FinalState into such a promising reference class? Conservatively, tens of academic research programs, tens of PhD dissertations, hundreds of hobbyist projects, hundreds of undergraduate term projects, and tens of business ventures have attempted something similar to AGI and none have succeeded.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of academic projects (particularly those of undergrads) have worked on narrow AI, which this is supposedly not.
However, reading the post again, it doesn’t sound as though they have the support of any academic institution; I misread the bit around “academic network”. It sounds more as though this is a homebrew project, in which case I need to go two or three orders of magnitude lower.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of academic projects (particularly those of undergrads) have worked on narrow AI, which this is supposedly not.
That’s definitely a reasonable assessment. I dialed all those estimates down by about an order of magnitude from when I started writing that point as I thought through just how unusual attempting general AI is. But over sixty years and hundreds of institutions where one might get a sufficiently solid background in CS to implement something big, there are going to be lots of unusual people trying things out.
This just shifts the question to how you slotted FinalState into such a promising reference class? Conservatively, tens of academic research programs, tens of PhD dissertations, hundreds of hobbyist projects, hundreds of undergraduate term projects, and tens of business ventures have attempted something similar to AGI and none have succeeded.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of academic projects (particularly those of undergrads) have worked on narrow AI, which this is supposedly not.
However, reading the post again, it doesn’t sound as though they have the support of any academic institution; I misread the bit around “academic network”. It sounds more as though this is a homebrew project, in which case I need to go two or three orders of magnitude lower.
That’s definitely a reasonable assessment. I dialed all those estimates down by about an order of magnitude from when I started writing that point as I thought through just how unusual attempting general AI is. But over sixty years and hundreds of institutions where one might get a sufficiently solid background in CS to implement something big, there are going to be lots of unusual people trying things out.
Of those who attempted, fewer thought they were close, but fifty still seems very generous.