Hoping that we’re more than a decade from transformative AGI now seems wildly optimistic to me. There could be dramatic roadblocks I haven’t foreseen, but most of those would just push it past three years.
Self-driving cars seem like a useful reference point. Back when cars got unexpectedly good performance at the 2005 and 2007 DARPA grand challenges, there was a lot of hype about how self-driving cars were just around the corner now that they had demonstrated having the basic capability. 17 years later, we’re only at this point (Wikipedia):
As of late 2024, no system has achieved full autonomy (SAE Level 5). In December 2020, Waymo was the first to offer rides in self-driving taxis to the public in limited geographic areas (SAE Level 4),[7] and as of April 2024 offers services in Arizona (Phoenix) and California (San Francisco and Los Angeles). [...] In July 2021, DeepRoute.ai started offering self-driving taxi rides in Shenzhen, China. Starting in February 2022, Cruise offered self-driving taxi service in San Francisco,[11] but suspended service in 2023. In 2021, Honda was the first manufacturer to sell an SAE Level 3 car,[12][13][14] followed by Mercedes-Benz in 2023.
I admit, I’d probably call self-driving cars at this point a solved or nearly-solved problem by Waymo, and the big reason why self-driving cars only now are taking off is basically because of regulatory and liability issues, and I consider a lot of the self-driving car slowdown as evidence that regulation can work to slow down a technology substantially.
Self-driving cars seem like a useful reference point. Back when cars got unexpectedly good performance at the 2005 and 2007 DARPA grand challenges, there was a lot of hype about how self-driving cars were just around the corner now that they had demonstrated having the basic capability. 17 years later, we’re only at this point (Wikipedia):
And self-driving capability should be vastly easier than general intelligence. Like self-driving, transformative AI also requires reliable worst-case performance rather than just good average-case performance, and there’s usually a surprising amount of detail involved that you need to sort out before you get to that point.
I admit, I’d probably call self-driving cars at this point a solved or nearly-solved problem by Waymo, and the big reason why self-driving cars only now are taking off is basically because of regulatory and liability issues, and I consider a lot of the self-driving car slowdown as evidence that regulation can work to slow down a technology substantially.