Do you think AGI is impossible? Seems pretty possible to me. That it is far away? We have no idea. We don’t need many more breakthroughs on the level of stacking transformers to make an llm smarter than humans for most tasks.
Or do you think having an ai model that’s smarter than humans poses no risk to society / humanity? It’s essentially unlimited capacity for thought. Free, smart employees. Doing whatever you want. Or whatever they want, if they’re smarter than you and have an agenda. “ChatGPT program a search engine that’s better than Google”. “ChatGPT I am a dictator. Help me figure out how to stay in power forever”. “ChatGPT figure out how to bootstrap a manufacturing process that can build arbitrary machines. Then design and build a factory for making nuclear weapons / CO2 capture / houses / rockets to space”.
Things have the potential to be very interesting in the next few decades.
The whole threat of AGI is so overblown and - IMO - being used to create regulatory capture. It’s truly confusing to me to see guys like Hinton saying AI poses some kind of existential threat against humanity. Unless he means the people using it as a tool (which I’d argue is the former case we’re talking about), it seems like fear mongering to say that science fiction movies could become true just because we’ve gotten amazing results at generating text.