this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025

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137

Another OpenAI researcher quits—claims AI labs are taking a ‘very risky gamble’ with humanity amid the race toward AGI (fortune.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The comments come amid increased attention on a global AI race between the U.S. and China.

all 38 comments

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

the race toward AGI

lol

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Right?

If I was OpenAI, this exactly the kind of thing I’d want written about me, especially the day after the deepseek thing….just saying.

[–] jrs100000 12 points 1 day ago

Its probably part of the standard severance package. Hand in your laptop, sign an NDA, take your COBRA paperwork, and fill out the AGI terror press release.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Are we not heading towards AGI then?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In the same way that if you start digging a hole in northwestern Spain you are heading towards New Zealand.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

The difference here is that you're never going to reach New Zealand that way but incremental improvements in AI will eventually get you to AGI*

*Unless intelligence is substrate dependent and cannot be replicated in silica or that we destroy ourselves before we get there

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's very easy with an incremental improvement tactic to get stuck in a local maximum. You've then hit a dead end, every available option leads to a degredation and thus isn't viable. It isn't a sure thing incremental improvements lead to the desired outcome.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I simply cannot imagine a situation where we reach a local maximum and get stuck in it for the rest of human history. There's always someone else trying a new approach. We will not stop trying to improve our technology. Even just simply knowing what doesn't work is a step in the right direction.

We already know that General Intelligence is possible. The question that remains is wether it can be replicated artificially.

[–] davidgro 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I can imagine it really easily for the foreseeable future, all that would need to happen is for the big corporations and well funded researchers to stick to optimizing LLMs and for that to be a dead end.

Yeah that's not the rest of human history (unless the rest of it isn't very much) but enough to make concerns about AGI into someone else's problem.

(Edit, clarified)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Like I said; I've made no claims about the timeline. All I've said is that incremental improvements will lead to us getting there eventually.

[–] davidgro 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In this scenario reaching the goal would require an entirely different base technology, and incremental improvements to what we have now do not eventually lead to AGI.

Kinda like incremental improvements to cars or even trains won't eventually get us to Mars.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Firstly, I’ve been talking about improvements in AI technology broadly, not any specific subfield. Secondly, you can’t know that. While I doubt LLMs will directly lead to AGI, I wouldn’t claim this with absolute certainty - there’s always a chance they do, or at the very least, that they help us discover what the next step should be.

[–] davidgro 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's true that I can't know for sure that they won't lead to AGI (or like you say give clues) - however it's definitely a scenario I can imagine, and that's what I was responding to: The idea that incremental improvements Must lead to a given goal. I don't think that's the case. Here in particular I think it's not only possible that it won't, it's even somewhat likely.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This doesn't just apply to AGI, same could be said about any technology. If it can be created and there's value in creating it, then it'll just be a matter of time untill someone invents it unless we go extinct before that.

[–] davidgro 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It also applies to technologies that don't in fact exist but could. Those are much harder to name (besides sci-fi) since almost by definition we don't know about most of them. Nor how many, compared to existing tech.

I'm not actually saying it's impossible, just saying that local maximums (as described by the other users here) are a thing and it's possible to be trapped for a very long time by them. Potentially forever, but you're right that odds of breaking out do increase over time.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah, I agree with all of this. What I’m pushing back against is the absolute, dismissive tone some people take whenever the potential dangers of AGI are brought up. Once someone is at least willing to accept the likely reality that we’ll have AGI at some point, then we can move on to debating the timescale.

If an asteroid impact were predicted 100 years from now, at what point should we start taking steps to prevent it? Framing it this way makes it feel more urgent - at least to me.

[–] jrs100000 0 points 1 day ago

Just like incremental improvements in the bicycle will eventually allow for hypersonic peddling.

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

By saying this aren’t you assuming that human civilization will last long enough to get there?

Look at the timeline of other species on this planet. Vast numbers of them are long extinct. They never evolved intelligence to our level. Only we did. Yet we know our intelligence is quite limited.

What took biology billions of years we’re attempting to do in a few generations (the project for AI began in the 1950s). Meanwhile the amount of non-renewable energy resources we’re consuming has hit exponential takeoff. Our political systems are straining and stretching to the breaking point.

And of course progress towards AI has not been steady with the project. There was an initial burst of success in the ‘50s followed by a long AI winter when researchers got stuck in a local maximum. It’s not at all clear to me that we haven’t entered a new local maximum with LLMs.

Do we even have a few more generations left to work on this?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm talking about AI development broadly, not just LLMs.

I also listed human extinction as one of the two possible scenarios in which we never reach AGI, the other being that there's something unique about biological brains that cannot be replicated artificially.

[–] chonglibloodsport 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We could witness a collapse of our high tech civilization that effectively ends AI research without necessarily leading to extinction. Think of a global warming supercharged Mad Max post-apocalyptic future. People still survive but the population has crashed and there’s a lot of fighting for survival and scavenging among the ruins of civilization.

There’s gotta be countless other variations on this theme. Global dystopian techno-feudalism perhaps?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, but that's still just a speedbump. In a few hundred or thousand years the civilization would rebound and we'd continue from where we left.

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 1 day ago

I don’t think there’s any guarantee that civilization would rebound. Fossil fuels were a one-shot deal in the geological history of the planet. For all of our efforts to build a sustainable future with renewable energy, fossil fuels remain critical for a lot of non-energy uses: food production (fertilizers), plastics, steel, and even cements for construction.

Another major issue is critical minerals for building renewable energy infrastructure. These minerals are being mined at an incredible rate, processed and turned into technology (think circuit boards full of components), aging out, and ending up as e-waste. Unfortunately our e-waste recycling infrastructure is a total nightmare involving the shipping of this stuff across the ocean to 3rd world countries where it gets picked over, scavenged for valuables, and the rest turned into toxic landfill.

All of that technology lifecycle creates huge amounts of toxic pollution and consumes huge amounts of fossil fuels (in particular for the mining, processing, and shipping). So in fact without fossil fuels we don’t even know how to build any technology, let alone renewable energy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

AI in general yes. LLMs in particular, I very much doubt it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That assumes that whatever we have now is a precursor to AGI. There's no evidence of that.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

No, it doesn't assume that at all. This statement would've been true even before electricity was invented and AI was just an idea.

[–] SkunkWorkz 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah not with LLMs though.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago

You can't know that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is a common misconception that incremental improvements must equate to eventually achieving the goal, but it is perfectly possible that progress could be asymptotic and we never reach AGI even with constant “advancements”

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Incremental improvements by definition mean that you're moving towards something. It might take a long time but my comment made no claims about the timescale. There's only two plausible scenarios that I can think of in which we don't reach AGI and they're mentioned in my comment.

[–] then_three_more 1 points 1 day ago

That relies on the increments being the same. It's much easier to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph than it is from 670,999,940 mph to C.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Would we know it if we saw it? Draw two eye spots on a wooden spoon amd people will anthromorphise it. I suspect we'll have dozens of false starts and breathless announcements of AGI, but we may never get there.

More interestingly, would we want it if we got it? How long will its creators rally to its side if we throw yottabytes of data at our civilization-scale problems and the mavhine comes back with "build trains and eat the rich instead of cows?"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

Would we know it if we saw it?

That seems besides the point when the question is about wether we're getting closer to it or not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

good decision, imo. sometimes i also get annoyed if the one i am watching becomes too sweaty completionists.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I happily welcome our merciful and benevolent machine overlords.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I’d take Skynet over what’s currently going on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I think about this. Boy to bad we don't have a general ai to run things given what we have gotten or maybe a nice interstellar race that got past the great filter can upload us and leave the planet to recover.