The author defines AGI ambitiously and doubts current progress towards it, while speculating on the likelihood of governments spending significant GDP if a clear path to AGI were established.
And by AGI, I mean actual AGI, not just increasingly capable LLMs. My definition is really ambitious, if humans can do something intellectually, AGI should be able to do it at machine speed and at least at the level of the best humans or organizations. By that definition, I don’t think we’re even close. We don’t have a known architecture for it, we don’t know what breakthroughs are still required, or even whether this kind of AGI is theoretically possible. So claims like “AGI in less than 5 years” seem crazy to me in this subreddit, we will have really strong LLMs but nothing even close to actual AGI. No joke but I feel like we know more about the theoretical possibility of time travel than we do about how to build real AGI. For example, give it one frame of a movie and ask it to make the entire thing: animation, lighting, voices, music, etc., with Pixar level quality. Rendering would obviously still take however long the hardware needs, but the actual work would happen at machine speed. I mean literally giving AGI agents access to PCs and having them do the work the same way humans do today, not generating the movie the way current generative AI creates videos, but actually using the tools, creating the assets, animating, editing, and putting everything together themselves. Ask it to build something comparable to Windows, a modern AAA game, or an entire Moon/Mars landing program, and it should be able to produce the code, designs, simulations, equations, papers, documentation, testing, etc. that currently require thousands of specialists and years of work. The same goes for research: work that takes world class teams years could potentially be compressed into hours or minutes where physical experiments aren’t the bottleneck. Basically, I mean the intellectual work of organizations like Pixar, Microsoft, Rockstar, or NASA compressed into software operating at machine speed across essentially any field. That’s what I mean by AGI, not just a much better chatbot.
A user asks about realistic AGI timelines, expressing skepticism about 2027-2031 estimates and discussing potential impacts on white-collar jobs like accounting and teaching.
An interview with economists Alex Imas and Phil Trammell discussing the economic implications of AGI, including what will remain scarce, how to tax and redistribute AI-generated wealth, and potential inequality scenarios.