<story><title>Yann LeCun: Human-level artificial intelligence is going to take a long time</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-01-19/yann-lecun-chief-ai-scientist-at-meta-human-level-artificial-intelligence-is-going-to-take-a-long-time.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lerc</author><text>As a counterpoint,  I feel like the belief that we can&amp;#x27;t get to AGI comes off as religion.  It presupposes an ineffable quality that we posses that machines cannot.   The argument that we have to fully understand something to build it doesn&amp;#x27;t hold water for me.   I have made plenty of things where understanding the depths of what I had made took far more time and effort than building the thing in the first place.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s always hard to predict the rate of progress,  Most of the current optimism comes from how radically wrong predictions were for the capabilities of AI today.  10 years ago a lot of people would have put current AI capability as arriving well after 2050.  The jump in progress may not be sustained, but it definitely places doubt on people confidently predicting slow progress.</text></item><item><author>mckn1ght</author><text>I have a personal belief that I can’t quite articulate in rigorous scientific terms that there is some information-theoretic barrier for us to understand the “true nature” or “essence” of our own intelligence, and so if we can’t get to that, we’ll never be able to model it (notwithstanding “all models are wrong”).&lt;p&gt;The belief that we can get to AGI comes off as religion to me. It is a substitute for something we can’t really understand, and it will continue to shift the more we learn, yet always remain out of reach. There will be some true believers, and some people simply gunning for power.&lt;p&gt;Might as well call AGI Nirvana.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olalonde</author><text>&amp;gt; I have made plenty of things where understanding the depths of what I had made took far more time and effort than building the thing in the first place.&lt;p&gt;An example of this is electricity. The battery (1800), electric motor (1821) and telegraph (1832) were all invented before the discovery of the electron (1897).</text></comment>
<story><title>Yann LeCun: Human-level artificial intelligence is going to take a long time</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-01-19/yann-lecun-chief-ai-scientist-at-meta-human-level-artificial-intelligence-is-going-to-take-a-long-time.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lerc</author><text>As a counterpoint,  I feel like the belief that we can&amp;#x27;t get to AGI comes off as religion.  It presupposes an ineffable quality that we posses that machines cannot.   The argument that we have to fully understand something to build it doesn&amp;#x27;t hold water for me.   I have made plenty of things where understanding the depths of what I had made took far more time and effort than building the thing in the first place.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s always hard to predict the rate of progress,  Most of the current optimism comes from how radically wrong predictions were for the capabilities of AI today.  10 years ago a lot of people would have put current AI capability as arriving well after 2050.  The jump in progress may not be sustained, but it definitely places doubt on people confidently predicting slow progress.</text></item><item><author>mckn1ght</author><text>I have a personal belief that I can’t quite articulate in rigorous scientific terms that there is some information-theoretic barrier for us to understand the “true nature” or “essence” of our own intelligence, and so if we can’t get to that, we’ll never be able to model it (notwithstanding “all models are wrong”).&lt;p&gt;The belief that we can get to AGI comes off as religion to me. It is a substitute for something we can’t really understand, and it will continue to shift the more we learn, yet always remain out of reach. There will be some true believers, and some people simply gunning for power.&lt;p&gt;Might as well call AGI Nirvana.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotnet00</author><text>When people say we can&amp;#x27;t get to AGI, they&amp;#x27;re typically either in the camp that there&amp;#x27;s something intrinsically special about us that is incapable of being replicated, or various versions of the belief that it&amp;#x27;s too complex to be achieved within a timespan in which they would still recognize humanity.&lt;p&gt;The former can be seen as a religious belief, but the latter is simply saying that we do not understand anywhere near enough about intelligence to develop AGI.&lt;p&gt;You point to the unexpected leap in capability we&amp;#x27;ve had recently, but fundamentally it isn&amp;#x27;t that different from what we have had for decades. The same fundamental unsolved limitations exist, such as of being unable to learn the way we do (eg if a child is writing a specific letter wrong, we correct that specific mistake, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t overwrite the knowledge of how to write the other letters).&lt;p&gt;As a lecture I watched a while ago had put it, we&amp;#x27;ve gotten pretty good at making the icing of the AGI cake recently, but we still have no idea what the cake is supposed to even look&amp;#x2F;taste like, so we barely know what ingredients we might need to make it let alone the actual steps involved.</text></comment>