I was never on board with it. It feels like the same step change google was - there was a time when it was just miles ahead of everything else out there around 1998. The first time you used it, it was like "geez, you got it right, didn't know that was possible". It's big, changed things, but wasn't an end of history event a bunch of people are utterly convinced this is.

We just need a little more of your (not mine) money to get there. Would I lie to you for $100 billion?

Depends what you mean by evolve. I don't think we'll get general AI by simply scaling LLMs, but I think general AI, if it arrives, will be able to trace its lineage very much back to LLMs. Journeys through the embedding space very much feel like the way forward to me, and that's what LLMs are.

Embedding spaces are one thing, LLMs are quite another.

I believe the former are understandable and likely a part of true AGI but the latter a series of hacks, at worst a red herring leading us off the proper track into a deadend.

Is there a resource I can use to understand the difference between embedding space and latent space?

I mean it’s been a couple of years!

It may or may not happen but “scam” means intentional deceit. I don’t think anyone actually knows where LLMs are going with enough certainty to use that pejorative.

Is it intentional deceit to tell everyone it's leading to something when, as you correctly point out, nobody actually knows if it will?

when their stock price rises because of their words, yes.

>“scam” means intentional deceit.

Yes. I'm pretty sure any engineer working on this knows it's not "a few years away". But it doesn't stop product teams from taking adcvantadge of the hype cycle. Hence, "use deception to deprive (someone) of money or possessions.".

I'm equally sure there are true believers who've drunk the Kool-aid and really believe AGI is right around the corner, just need to fix a few bugs and wait just a few more generations of Moore's law. What difference does the beliefs of a nameless engineer at an AI company make?

>What difference does the beliefs of a nameless engineer at an AI company make?

Hopefully a manager and proper task scheduling. If I made these promises every sprint and kept saying "yea the task is only a week away from completion!" I'd be fired unless I fell down the rabbit hole to Alice in Wonderland. I'm using good faith to assume a lot of those AI engineers are smarter and better schedulers than I am.

But that's what managers and proper scoping and perspective is for. Maybe they're okay with that, but I'd wager any profit motivated company would not keep exploring unless the gains are enormous.

but we're laymen with no attempts to define what AGI means in concrete terms, nevermind remotely come to any agreement over it, so the manager and proper task scheduling is gonna have much more concrete and discreet task in the sprint in jira. it's not like there's just one ticket with a billion points or umptuple XL that says AGI. That's not even gonna be an epic with a million tickets. (or maybe it is. I don't work there, lol)

The people in the trenches there are working on tactical specific things and aren't going to be fired for meeting their internal KPIs which aren't nebulously AGI.

>so the manager and proper task scheduling is gonna have much more concrete and discreet task in the sprint in jira

Yes, that's the true meaning behind my words. The marketing is saying "were working on AGI as we speak!" and that's only bare bones true in the same way that someone is buying a house... While baeeot starting their savings, and unsure or where they are buying and what they want in it. It's barely an idea, per alone "around the corner".

Meanwhile, they are given small, unexciting, but important stepping stones to experiment. Nothing that makes line go up, because that means being truthful. Thars why I hate hype culture. It obscures true progress and honesty towards progress. A distraction because talking about a "thing" in a blue sky is more profitable than talking about the actual stepping stones.