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Ask HN: What would convince you to take AI seriously?

12 points by atleastoptimal ↗ HN
Recently OpenAI announced an AI model/system they had recently developed won a gold medal at the IMO. The IMO is a very difficult exam, and only the best high schoolers in the world even qualify, let alone win gold. Those who do often go on to cutting edge mathematical research, like Terence Tao, who won the Fields medal in 2006. It has also been rumored that DeepMind achieved the same result with a yet to be released model.

Now, success in a tough math exam isn't "automating all human labor" but it is certainly a benchmark many thought AI would not achieve easily. Even so, many are claiming it isn't really a big deal, and that humans will still be far smarter than AI's for the foreseeable future.

My question is, if you are in the aforementioned camp, what would it take you to adopt a frame of mind roughly analogous to "It is realistic that AI systems will become smarter than humans, and could automate all human labor and cognitive outputs within a single-digit number of years".

Would it require seeing a humanoid robot perform some difficult task? (the Metaculus definition of AGI requires that a robot be able to satisfactorily assemble a (or the equivalent of a) circa-2021 Ferrari 312 T4 1:8 scale automobile model.). Would it involve a Turing test of sufficient rigor? I'm curious what people's personal definition of "ok this is really real" is.

28 comments

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neximo64
Do you take it seriously? Why are you asking
bigyabai
Significantly cheaper labor. If it's displacing real thought work then the results should be self-evident.
alganet
In my opinion, that's a silly question.

Why do I even need to make up my mind about it?

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
saadn92
My thought is that some people don't want to adapt, but will be forced to adapt when AI is used everywhere. I'm not a fan of AI either, but it does have its uses and if you don't use it now, you'll have to learn later on.
noncoml
Convince me what? That it’s ready to replace thought work?

The moment it can do that is the moment we each singularity.

We are not there yet. Everyone will know when we hit that point.

For the now it’s a great tool for helping with thought work and that’s about it.

andy99
[Withdrawing my comment, I don't think the original post was in good faith]

From OP's other comments:

> A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.

al_borland
It isn’t about how well AI can answer solved problems. Can it invent the future?

And let’s say AI does automate all human labor… what’s the plan? That happening, will lead to chaos, without some massive changes in how society is organized and functions. That change itself with be chaotic and massively disruptive and painful for millions. If someone can’t answer that question, they have no business hyping up the end of human involvement in civilization.

exabrial
Have it admit it doesn’t know instead of sounding like a Reddit thread full of “experts” trying to one up each other
mcphage
For development work: something like DHH’s “build a blog in 15 minutes” demo.

For original work: solving some well known but unsolvable problem, like the Collatz conjecture.

rascul
To start with, AI should first exist.
ksherlock
When you ask it to do you something and it tells you to fuck off and do it yourself.
strken
Four things: do meaningful novel work, learn over the course of a long conversation without poisoning its context, handle lies and accidental untruths, and generally be able to onboard itself and begin doing useful work for a business given the same resources as a new hire.

This isn't an exhaustive list, it's just intended to illustrate when I'd start seriously thinking AGI was possible with incremental improvements.

I take AI seriously in the sense that it's useful, can solve problems, and represents a lot of value for a lot of businesses, but not in the sense that I think the current methods are headed for AGI without further breakthroughs. I'm also not an expert.

armchairhacker
I take it seriously, but I'd take it more seriously if I could use it to solve real problems without encountering issues, or see others use it solve real problems without issues.

There are many good tasks improved by AI, e.g. generic writing, brainstorming, research and simple tasks. However, I keep finding it struggle with more complicated or open-ended problems, making obvious mistakes. If it stops making obvious mistakes, or even if we simply discover automated ways to correct them, I'd take it more seriously.

AI is also not creative IMO: I find AI-generated art noticeably lower-quality than real art, even though it looks better on the surface, because it doesn't have as much semantic detail. If I find an AI-generated art that would be almost as good as the human-talent equivalent, or an especially impressive AI-generated art that would be very hard to generate without AI, I'd also take it more seriously.

brandonmenc
I use LLMs daily as a software engineer and they save me dozens of hours a week and I can’t imagine going back to a time without them.

But call me when you can load all human knowledge circa 1905 and have them spit out the Theory of Relativity.

And even then I might shift my goalposts.

agersant
I will take AI seriously when the data used for training is gathered with consent from its authors.
saagarjha
Other people taking it seriously, honestly. It's hard to take it seriously when everyone is thinking it will dethrone God or put everyone out of a job and if you're not using it you are going back to the Stone Age while it embarrasses them repeatedly.
heavyset_go
I would start worrying if AI models can understand, reason, learn and incorporate new information on-the-fly without retraining or just stuffing information in context windows, RAG, etc. The worry would also depend on the economics of the entire model lifecycle, as well as the current state of mechanical automation.

We aren't getting that with next-token generators. I don't think we'll get there by throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, either, I think we'll need a deeper understanding of the mind and what intelligence actually is before we can implement it on our own, virtually or otherwise.

Similarly, we're pretty good at creating purpose-built machines, but when it comes to general/universal purpose, it's still in its infancy. The hand is still the most useful universal tool we have. It's hard to compete with the human mind + body when it comes to adapting to and manipulating the environment with purpose. There's quite literally billions of them, they create themselves and their labor is really cheap, too.

There's my serious answer.

queenkjuul
Write something fictional that doesn't suck and doesn't sound like it was written by a computer.

Idk though, I'm not sure you could ever convince me to agree that anything can replace all human labor and cognitive output

disambiguation
Once it stops making obvious mistakes on a regular basis, then I'll take it seriously.
johnnienaked
That's like asking what I want to hear in a song.

You just know when it's good.

devn0ll
When it starts curing disease for real, like one or two sessions: done.

Because then I know: they have been using it for real human benefit without trying to get humans hooked on re-occurring costs.

When it starts solving actual human problems like climate or start filling in our gaps of knowledge in science. When it starts lifting humans up to higher grounds instead of replacing them to make a buck.

xigoi
It is not a big deal because OpenAI has been known to cheat on LLM benchmarks before and I have no reason to believe that the AI actually solved the problems by itself without training on the solutions. I’ll be more impressed if a similar performance is obtained by an open-source model that can be independently verified.