Those who couldn’t tell you what AGI stands for—what did they say? Did they just say “I don’t know” or did they say e.g. “Artificial Generative Intelligence...?”
Is it possible that some of them totally HAD heard the term AGI a bunch, and basically know what it means, but are just being obstinate? I’m thinking of someone who is skeptical of all the hype and aware the lots of people define AGI differently. Such a person might respond to “Can you tell me what AGI means” with “No I can’t (because it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people)”
the specific thing i said to people was something like:
excuse me, can i ask you a question to help settle a bet? do you know what AGI stands for? [if they say yes] what does it stand for? [...] cool thanks for your time
i was careful not to say “what does AGI mean”.
most people who didn’t know just said “no” and didn’t try to guess. a few said something like “artificial generative intelligence”. one said “amazon general intelligence” (??). the people who answered incorrectly were obviously guessing / didn’t seem very confident in the answer.
if they seemed confused by the question, i would often repeat and say something like “the acronym AGI” or something.
several people said yes but then started walking away the moment i asked what it stood for. this was kind of confusing and i didn’t count those people.
not to be ‘i trust my priors more than your data’, but i have to say that i find the AGI thing quite implausible; my impression is that most AI researchers (way more than 60%), even ones working in like something very non-deep learning adjacent, have heard of the term AGI, but many of them are/were quite dismissive of it as an idea or associate it strongly (not entirely unfairly) with hype /bullshit, hence maybe walking away from you when you ask them about it.
e.g deepmind and openAI have been massive producers of neurips papers for years now (at least since I started a phd in 2016), and both organisations explictly talked about AGI fairly often for years.
maybe neurips has way more random attendees now (i didn’t go this year), but I still find this kind of hard to believe; I think I’ve read about AGI in the financial times now.
only 2 people walked away without answering (after saying yes initially); they were not counted as yes or no. another several people refused to even answer, but this was also quite rare. the no responders seemed genuinely confused, as opposed to dismissive.
feel free to replicate this experiment at ICML or ICLR or next neurips.
Very interesting!
Those who couldn’t tell you what AGI stands for—what did they say? Did they just say “I don’t know” or did they say e.g. “Artificial Generative Intelligence...?”
Is it possible that some of them totally HAD heard the term AGI a bunch, and basically know what it means, but are just being obstinate? I’m thinking of someone who is skeptical of all the hype and aware the lots of people define AGI differently. Such a person might respond to “Can you tell me what AGI means” with “No I can’t (because it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people)”
the specific thing i said to people was something like:
i was careful not to say “what does AGI mean”.
most people who didn’t know just said “no” and didn’t try to guess. a few said something like “artificial generative intelligence”. one said “amazon general intelligence” (??). the people who answered incorrectly were obviously guessing / didn’t seem very confident in the answer.
if they seemed confused by the question, i would often repeat and say something like “the acronym AGI” or something.
several people said yes but then started walking away the moment i asked what it stood for. this was kind of confusing and i didn’t count those people.
not to be ‘i trust my priors more than your data’, but i have to say that i find the AGI thing quite implausible; my impression is that most AI researchers (way more than 60%), even ones working in like something very non-deep learning adjacent, have heard of the term AGI, but many of them are/were quite dismissive of it as an idea or associate it strongly (not entirely unfairly) with hype /bullshit, hence maybe walking away from you when you ask them about it.
e.g deepmind and openAI have been massive producers of neurips papers for years now (at least since I started a phd in 2016), and both organisations explictly talked about AGI fairly often for years.
maybe neurips has way more random attendees now (i didn’t go this year), but I still find this kind of hard to believe; I think I’ve read about AGI in the financial times now.
only 2 people walked away without answering (after saying yes initially); they were not counted as yes or no. another several people refused to even answer, but this was also quite rare. the no responders seemed genuinely confused, as opposed to dismissive.
feel free to replicate this experiment at ICML or ICLR or next neurips.
i mean i think that its’ definitely an update (anything short of 95% i think would have been quite surprising to me)
Why not try out leogao’s survey yourself to corroborate/falsify your priors?