P.S. if I’m wrong about the timeline―if it takes >15 years―my guess for how I’m wrong is (1) a major downturn in AGI/AI research investment and (2) executive misallocation of resources. I’ve been thinking that the brightest minds of the AI world are working on AGI, but maybe they’re just paid a lot because there are too few minds to go around. And when I think of my favorite MS developer tools, they have greatly improved over the years, but there are also fixable things that haven’t been fixed in 20 years, and good ideas they’ve never tried, and MS has created a surprising number of badly designed libraries (not to mention products) over the years. And I know people close to Google have a variety of their own pet peeves about Google.
Are AGI companies like this? Do they burn mountains cash to pay otherwise average engineers who happen to have AI skills? Do they tend to ignore promising research directions because the results are uncertain, or because results won’t materialize in the next year, or because they don’t need a supercomputer or aren’t based mainly on transformers? Are they bad at creating tools that would’ve made the company more efficient? Certainly I expect some companies to be like that.
As for (1), I’m no great fan of copyright law, but today’s companies are probably built on a foundation of rampant piracy, and litigation might kill investment. Or, investors may be scared away by a persistent lack of discoveries to increase reliability / curtail hallucinations.
P.S. if I’m wrong about the timeline―if it takes >15 years―my guess for how I’m wrong is (1) a major downturn in AGI/AI research investment and (2) executive misallocation of resources. I’ve been thinking that the brightest minds of the AI world are working on AGI, but maybe they’re just paid a lot because there are too few minds to go around. And when I think of my favorite MS developer tools, they have greatly improved over the years, but there are also fixable things that haven’t been fixed in 20 years, and good ideas they’ve never tried, and MS has created a surprising number of badly designed libraries (not to mention products) over the years. And I know people close to Google have a variety of their own pet peeves about Google.
Are AGI companies like this? Do they burn mountains cash to pay otherwise average engineers who happen to have AI skills? Do they tend to ignore promising research directions because the results are uncertain, or because results won’t materialize in the next year, or because they don’t need a supercomputer or aren’t based mainly on transformers? Are they bad at creating tools that would’ve made the company more efficient? Certainly I expect some companies to be like that.
As for (1), I’m no great fan of copyright law, but today’s companies are probably built on a foundation of rampant piracy, and litigation might kill investment. Or, investors may be scared away by a persistent lack of discoveries to increase reliability / curtail hallucinations.