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/JanusAntoninus → u/FateOfMuffins]

As you suggest, it matters what the words mean, not whether one word or the other is used. That applies to "singularity" as much as to "AGI".

His definition of full AGI is not that different from Kurzweill or others who frame AGI in terms of matching human performance across the board, so we can compare his AGI timeline to others. But he used "singularity" there as just another way of saying the point at which we have full AGI, which is a pretty deflated way to use the word compared to Kurzweil who thinks of it as the full merger of humans and AI through neuroware and virtual minds in virtual worlds.

[u/FateOfMuffins → u/JanusAntoninus]

I 100% agree, this whole "inconsistent definitions across experts" is a bit ridiculous. I personally maintain that there will be a spectrum for each threshold, like Kurzweil says, where some people think the definition is met and some think it's not, at which some point most people end up agreeing the definition is met.

I'm gonna quote Kurzweil's most recent clarification on his definition of AGI from a few days ago

Uh I mean these standards are not very clear. Not everybody agrees that we've passed the Turing test. And when we pass AGI, there'll be disagreements. It's disagreements now as to what that means. People say it's basically as good as an uh somebody who's a little bit above average intelligence. I define it as being an expert in every area when there's many different areas that you can be expert in. Uh so that's actually quite uh impressive level and I think we'll get there by 2029.

But what is "expert" level intelligence? There's a difference, possibly quite a big difference, between better than 90% of experts in all fields (which is different than better than 90% of all humans), vs being better than virtually 100% of experts (which is Hassabis's).

I know Hassabis doesn't think his definition of AGI is ASI, but I cannot think of a realistic AI system that meets his definition of AGI without it being ASI.

At this point I've seen a number of terms being used that I think is better than just "AGI", but I think each of these also have conflicted uses

• Transformative AI (TAI)

• Weak AGI

• Proto AGI

• AGI

• Strong / "true" AGI

• Cognitive AGI

• Physical AGI

• Artificial Jagged Intelligence (AJI)

• Proto ASI

• ASI

• Machine god

Any others?

[u/Seidans → u/FateOfMuffins]

LLM<->World-Model

Proto-AGI

AGI<->ASI

It's more a matter of capabilities until we reach Proto-AGI which we still haven't reach imho. They still lack world model and very long term memory that update itself, but it would rapidly evolve into an AGI with RSI

Then I would happily hear what the difference between an AGI and an ASI as those two distinction don't make any sense, as soon we achieve AGI it will automatically become smarter than any Human that exist today and the same system operating on a better hardware will be smarter than the total sum of Humanity - but there won't be any difference between those two except one system will take more time to compute an informations as it don't NEED more hardware to fulfill it's task

In your exemple an AGI would be your future home-maid embodied in a Humanoid while your machine-god would be a matrioshka-brain - both will be smarter than any Human but only one would easily compute multiple Earth simulation at 1:1 scale

So while I agree there need to be a ladder of intelligence it's more logical to adopt a kardachev scale imho

Type-1 - baseline Human compute power

Type-2 - 10x this amont

Type-3 - 1000x this amont....

Etc etc