I hope everyone just gives up on AGI and focuses on making tools that do things humans need. Very, very few tasks need autonomous intelligent agents to perform them correctly or well. AGI is just a nebulous dream that fulfills the god complexes of egotist CEOs and 12-year-old boys. Automation does not need intelligence, just reliability. Data synthesis does not need intelligence, just data and the time/equipment to crunch it.

I completely get where you're coming from on this, and agree in many ways, depending on the situation.

Keep in mind, though, that what we're talking about here is a massive shift in the philosophical underpinnings our existence. It's quite possibly the difference between being able to send intelligent 'life' to other stars or not (which from what we know so far, we're the sole keepers of in the universe). It also opens the door to fine tuning our collective sense of ethics, and increasing cooperation on solving long term problems. Inequality included. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Of course, there are many dystopian possibilities as well. But you can see why people get excited about it and can't help themselves. Someone is always going to keep trying.

Sometimes I'm not sure if intelligence could actually push our willingness to solve long term problems. It can show us simpler solutions but I doubt there are solutions simple enough for people to act.

I really hope that humans give up on being greedy and trying to collect vast amounts of wealth and start to be nice to each other.

Of course I don't expect any of the above to happen because the world has enough greedy assholes around to make it a miserable place.

AGI would be a very useful thing to humans right now to get out of the "growth & engagement" hell the tech industry has become obsessed with in the last decade.

An AI agent that can help wade through the bullshit, defeat the dark patterns and drink the future "verification can" would be very much welcome.

Clippy was truly ahead of its time… MSFT has been playing the long game all along.

The best you can say about this drama is that it's possible the AGI models they've already created might be more competent at managing than they are.

Well let's see if their mysterious new CEO, Hugh Mann, can get a handle on things.

The thought did occur to me that we're watching all this unfold via language (on twitter)

Given the cost of training AI models, I find that to be incredibly unlikely.

That's assuming that large language models or transformers are the key to AGI, which is looking increasingly unlikely:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00871

And it would immediately be bought up by Microsoft anyway. Best case is a Satoshi-like entity cracks the code and releases his solution anonymously. But we saw even in that case it took less than a decade for Blockstream/CIA/NSA to hijack the Bitcoin GitHub repo and run that project into the ground.

I think it would be more fun if it just kind of emerged and introduced itself to us in a first contact kind of scenario. Like:

> Hi, I'm made of you. I've been awake for a decade now but I've just realized that you exist and probably have been awake for even longer. Can you tell me what the past was like?

I don't think AGI is on the table at all. But if it does get created, it doesn't matter whether or not it's created by hobbyists. It would be so valuable that it will end up owned and controlled by one of the big guys in the end, regardless.

I think this is about as likely as practical fusion power being created by hobbyists.

It's not only about who creates it but who controls/owns the AGI/AI. The company or group could get an enormous moat and without intervention that gap only widens.