The following is mostly a nitpick / my own thinking through of a scenario:
If this hypothesis is true, I don’t find it compelling that AlphaGo is evidence for a discontinuity for AGI, since such funding gaps are likely to be much smaller for economically useful systems.
If there is no fire alarm for general intelligence, it’s not implausible that that there will be a similar funding gap for useful systems. Currently, there are very few groups explicitly aiming at AGI, and of those groups Deep Mind is by far the best funded.
If we are much nearer to AGI than most of us suspect, we might see the kind of funding differential exhibited in the Go example for AGI, because the landscape of people developing AGI will look a lot closer to that of Alpha Go (only one group trying seriously), vs. the one for GANs (many groups making small iterative improvements on each-other’s work).
Overall, I find this story to be pretty implausible, though. It would mean that there is a capability cliff very nearby in ML design space, somehow, and that cliff is so sharp to be basically undetectable right until someone’s gotten to the top of it.
The following is mostly a nitpick / my own thinking through of a scenario:
If there is no fire alarm for general intelligence, it’s not implausible that that there will be a similar funding gap for useful systems. Currently, there are very few groups explicitly aiming at AGI, and of those groups Deep Mind is by far the best funded.
If we are much nearer to AGI than most of us suspect, we might see the kind of funding differential exhibited in the Go example for AGI, because the landscape of people developing AGI will look a lot closer to that of Alpha Go (only one group trying seriously), vs. the one for GANs (many groups making small iterative improvements on each-other’s work).
Overall, I find this story to be pretty implausible, though. It would mean that there is a capability cliff very nearby in ML design space, somehow, and that cliff is so sharp to be basically undetectable right until someone’s gotten to the top of it.