I agree it looks like the combination of multimodal learning and memory may be enough to reach AGI, and there’s an existing paper with a solution for memory. Human-level is such a hard thing to judge and so my threshold is basically human-level coding ability because that’s what allows recursive self-improvement which is where I predict at least 90% of the capability gain toward superhuman AGI will happen. I assume all the pieces are running in data centers now, presumably just not hooked together in precisely the right way (but an AGI model being trained by DeepMind right now would not surprise me much). I will probably update to a year sooner from median ~2026 to ~2025 for human-level coding ability and from there it’s almost certainly a fast takeoff (months to a few years) given how many orders of magnitude faster current LLMs are than humans at generating tokens which tightens the iteration loop on serial tasks. Someone is going to want to see how intelligent the AGI is and ask it to “fix a few bugs” even if it’s not given an explicit goal of self improvement. I hedge that median both because I am not sure if the next few multimodal models will have enough goal stability to pursue a long research program (memory will probably help but isn’t the whole picture of an agent) and because I’m not sure the big companies won’t balk somewhere along the path, but Llama 65B is out in the open now and close enough to GPT-3 and PaLM to give (rich) nerds in their basements the ability to do significant capability research.
I agree it looks like the combination of multimodal learning and memory may be enough to reach AGI, and there’s an existing paper with a solution for memory. Human-level is such a hard thing to judge and so my threshold is basically human-level coding ability because that’s what allows recursive self-improvement which is where I predict at least 90% of the capability gain toward superhuman AGI will happen. I assume all the pieces are running in data centers now, presumably just not hooked together in precisely the right way (but an AGI model being trained by DeepMind right now would not surprise me much). I will probably update to a year sooner from median ~2026 to ~2025 for human-level coding ability and from there it’s almost certainly a fast takeoff (months to a few years) given how many orders of magnitude faster current LLMs are than humans at generating tokens which tightens the iteration loop on serial tasks. Someone is going to want to see how intelligent the AGI is and ask it to “fix a few bugs” even if it’s not given an explicit goal of self improvement. I hedge that median both because I am not sure if the next few multimodal models will have enough goal stability to pursue a long research program (memory will probably help but isn’t the whole picture of an agent) and because I’m not sure the big companies won’t balk somewhere along the path, but Llama 65B is out in the open now and close enough to GPT-3 and PaLM to give (rich) nerds in their basements the ability to do significant capability research.
Could you link this?