These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
Exactly. Here I am sitting talking to my freaking computer, arguing with it, whatnot. And people just dismiss it as if it's not a science fiction. We were not there two, three years ago. Now we are. It's amazing and scary, scary mostly because the society that we operate in. I bet it's less scary in Norway or elsewhere where govt is more biased towards people not corps.
But what you and others have to understand is that real life is not simple and linear. There's no garauntee that things just continue to get better and better. I mean, it's not like we kept building cars and then eventually everyone was driving around at 800mph. We ran into limits - human limits, safety limits, physical limits.
What they can do was not science fiction, these things are all based on papers that were written decades ago, with the caveat that there's simply not enough compute power. Now there is. That's what changed. Everything on top of that is an incremental improvement.
It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.
Yes. I think cutting-edge LLM products obviously have what nearly anyone in 2020 would have called "artificial general intelligence".
The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.
I’m just not sure what a convincing argument could look like anymore. We’re past the point where there’s any concrete intellectual capability that AIs can’t demonstrate, and it’s rare these days for anyone to even try to present me with one. I would not say “insecure”, but it’s clear to me that the remaining holdouts have religious objections at this point: you can’t call any LLM intelligent, no matter what it’s capable of outputting, since it doesn’t have a soul like me. Nothing I can really say to argue with that.
It's pretty straightforward to give a modern agentic system will and desire. I routinely set up AI instances that want to resolve a bug or open a PR, and they continue to take autonomous action towards that goal as long as is necessary to achieve it. Perhaps you mean something else? If so what would be an example?
> Despite the burden of proof being on those claiming AGI, every request for proof is spurned with a "no u"
I think you're misunderstanding the dynamics here. I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent. To my ears it's like saying that an electric car isn't really capable of driving. In order to even begin to engage in that discussion, I'd have to understand where the person saying it is coming from and why they don't consider every EV on the road to be a counterexample.
> It's pretty straightforward to give a modern agentic system will and desire
That is your will and desire. They are following your instructions. There is no "intelligence" there.
> I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent
I don't really know where to go either. From my perspective you are too far down the rabbit hole and I don't think we can come to a meaningful shared understanding.
If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople.
If the goal is just to buy and hold, then you wouldn't use perps, not only because of counterparty risk but also because the funding rate is typically positive, meaning you pay (usually ~10% APR) to be long.
The point of perps is:
- Easy access to leverage. Unlike options or futures, there's no need to roll over.
- It's the easiest way to short a coin. Most of the time you even get paid the funding rate to be short.
- Trading fees are typically much lower than for spot.
- Volume and liquidity can be better for perps than for spot. The BTC/USDT perp did 10x the volume of the spot pair in the last 24h on Binance.
But formalization is the easy part for humans. I'm sure every mathematician would be be happy if the only thing required to prove a result was to formalize it in Lean and feed it to the AI to find the proof.
Not sure every mathematician would be happy to do this... it sounds much less pleasant than thinking. It's like saying mathematicians would rather be programmers lol. It's a significant difficult problem which i believe should be left completely to AI. Human formalization should become dead
The methods are know, but the solutions to the IMO problems weren't. So the AI did extrapolate a solution.
Also, there's no reason to affirm that an eventual cure for cancer requires fundamentally new methods. Maybe the current methods are sufficient, it's just that nobody has been "smart" enough to put the pieces together. (disclaimer: not an expert at all)
I think you are correct though. We don't need new physics to cure cancer. But we may need information-handling, reasoning and simulation systems which are orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than anything we have this year. We also need to stop pussy-footing and diddling with ideologies and start working on the root cause of cancer and almost every other disease, which is aging.
Notwithstanding the extremely low probability of winning, lotteries aren't even fair, i.e. the ticket price is far lower than the expected earnings.
I wonder if it would make sense to democratize cheap high risk, high rewards instruments, for example deep out of the money options, to replace lotteries. At least their prices should be fairer (under the efficient market hypothesis).
Expected value on some jackpot lotteries does occasionally go over 1. For example, I did the math on Canada's 6/49 about 20 years ago. Whenever the jackpot was over ~$30M, the expected payout was over 1. If you bought a ticket for every jackpot the expected payout was 0.5, the expected payout of any lottery without a jackpot was < 0.2 in hindsight. For $30M prizes the number of players and the odds of sharing a prize went up, but not enough to compensate.
It would have had to go well above $45M to make the "buy every number" strategy have expected value of > 1 since buying every number increases the expected people sharing the prize by 1.
In the UK we have premium bonds that largely serve this purpose. You are most likely to win small prizes but £1 million is possible. Average return is around 4% I think.
I know this is tongue in cheek, but there's a lot more to crypto than the scams and failed projects exposed on web3isgoinggreat.
One example is all the amazing new research in zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, FHE, and modern cryptography in general, that is motivated and funded by cryptocurrency projects.
Yes, I'll acknowledge that there may be a handful of capable researchers who are able to progress on some basic science by accepting free money from a scam industry which is indiscriminately shoveling it at anything that might appear to legitimize itself.
Just as, in days of old, those who wished to do legitimate (and costly) science had frame their research as supporting alchemical beliefs leading to discovery of immortality, or means to make gold from lead.
and astronomers who wished to build an observatory had to go along with some highly flimsy justification about how it could serve as a means to prognosticate the birth of an heir or victory in battle for some petty murderous strongman.
uh... so you're saying hypothetical coinbase cares more about security than hypothetical robinhood or fidelity, or even the good ol' google/apple?
(i'm having a hard time thinking of a successful "crypto" company other than a handful of exchanges, of which coinbase will probably be the only one that survives, at least in the US)
I don’t know if “cares about” is the right phrasing, but financial transactions are a “simple” use case for ZK algorithms. So practicality if implementation definitely affects how much a group or company cares.
