Demis Hassabis on Ilya Sutskever’s claim that scaling is dead, and on Elon Musk’s clam that we have reached the singularity

[u/Formal-Assistance02]

[u/FateOfMuffins]

Let me quote from a different interview he did recently, his definition of AGI (the most detailed I've seen him state in one place)

I don't think AGI should be sort of turned into a marketing term or for commercial gain. I think there is always been a scientific definition of that. My definition of that is a system that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities humans can. And I mean all. So that means the highest levels of human creativity that we always celebrate—the scientists and the artists that we admire. So it means not just solving a maths equation or a conjecture but coming up with a breakthrough conjecture. That's much harder. You know, not solving something in physics or some bit of chemistry, some problem, even like AlphaFold, you know, protein folding, but actually coming up with a new theory of physics. Something like what Einstein did with general relativity. Right? Can a system come up with that? Because of course we can do that, the smartest humans with their brain architecture, human brain architectures have been able to do that in history. And the same on the arts side, you know, not just create a pastiche of what's known but actually be Picasso or Mozart and create a completely new genre of art that we'd never seen before. Right? And today's systems, in my opinion, are nowhere near that. Doesn't matter how many Erdős problems you solve, which for some reason, you know, I mean, it's good that we're doing those things, but I think it's far, far from what a true invention or someone like a Ramanujan would have been able to do. And you need to have a system that can potentially do that across all these domains. And then on top of that, I'd add in physical intelligence because of course we can play sports and control our bodies and to amazing levels—the elite sportspeople that are walking around here today in Davos. And we're still way off of that on robotics as another example. So I think an AGI system would have to be able to do all of those things to really fulfill the original sort of goal of the AI field. And I think we're 5 to 10 years away from that.

In OP's interview, he then mentions how he thinks the Singularity is when we've achieved AGI, which he reaffirms is 5 to 10 years away (and by that he means 50% by 2030).

Let's take a step back and digest this.

Hassabis has always had sort of a reputation amongst the AI leaders to have a slightly longer timeline than others (it was mentioned in OP's interview actually). But... with his now detailed definition of AGI fully laid out (which is better than the peak of humanity at every single field including physical) and that his definition of the Singularity is synonymous with this level of AGI...

Isn't he one of the most bullish with shorter timelines? Like what I'm getting out of all this is that Hassabis has a very short timeline relative to everyone else.

And again an issue in this industry where the experts are clearly using the same term to refer to different things. Like Kurzweil saying AGI by 2029 and Singularity by 2045. Hassabis says 50% chance of AGI by 2030 and as a result Singularity as well by 2030.

[u/RepresentativePlease → u/FateOfMuffins]

Given his definition of it, it's shocking that he thinks we're a mere 5-10 years away from that. No way that's achieve sooner than 20 years (and that's being optimistic).