I'd argue we've had more progress towards fusion than AGI.
Yet at the same time "towards" does not equate to "nearing". Relative terms for relative statements. Until there's a light at the end of the tunnel, we don't know how far we've got.
Readit NewsFiniteIntegral commented on Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-kar... · Posted by u/ctoth
It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).
As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.
Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?
I think part of this is due to the AI craze no longer being in the wildest west possible. Investors, or at least heads of companies believe in this as a viable economic engine so they are properly investing in what's there. Or at least, the hype hasn't slapped them in the face just yet.
At the moment, I would call "writing secure code that can be put on the internet" to be a super-human task. That is, even our most highly skilled human beings currently can't be blindly trusted to accomplish it; it requires review by teams of experts. We already don't even trust humans, so trusting AIs for the forseeable future (as much as "the forseeable future" may be contracting on us) is not something we should be doing.
And so as to avoid the reader binning this post into "oh just some human triumphalist AI denier", remember I just said I don't trust individual humans on this point either. Everyone, even experts at coding secure code, should be reviewed by other experts at this point.
I suspect this is going to prove to be something that LLMs can't do reliably, by their architecture. It's going to be a next-generation AI thing, whatever that may prove to be.
Agreed. Security is a task that not even a group of humans can perform with upmost scrutiny or perfection. 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty' and such. People want to move fast and break things without the backing infrastructure/maintenance (like... actually checking what the AI wrote).
This seems cherry picked and oddly fetishistic.
I have also worked with Japanese developers and found them resistant to new ideas because seniority often trumps knowledge in Japanese work culture. But I did not assume that meant that all Japanese developers are stuck in the past because that would be silly.
Agreed, it's cherry picked and strange since a lot of western developers already profess a lot of these practices -- especially the "extensive comments" and "descriptive naming" points.
It reminds me a lot about "innovative Japanese management solutions" which consists of MBAs learning what a bottleneck is and that DevOps is just sensible basic business practice.
I think you need to spend some more time testing this service if you are advertising this as a service that inherently interfaces with humans. I see that others in this thread like the applications for scambaiting, but I don't fully understand the use case you have here. If it's AI on both ends of the phone... whats the point of the call in the first place? It's not that hard to get a human on the other line who is able to help me far better than any robotic agent could.
If the agent has trouble solving "complex verification or (providing) documents" I doubt that a monthly fee for simple tasks doesn't sound like a viable and sustainable business model. It sounds like the anti-social bunch would like it but past that it's going to be hard drumming up a lot of support.
The fact that it verifies by ID scan is also not safe at all for a million different reasons.
A better way would have been to charge a small subscription fee - like $2/month or something. The fee filters out 99% of the trolls out there (who wants to pay to troll) and also gives the app/website admins access to billing info - name, mailing address, phone number, etc - without the need for a full ID scan. So the tiny amount of trolls that do pay to troll would have to enter accurate deanonymizing payment information to even get on the system in the first place.
And it can be made so only admins know peoples' true identities. For the user facing parts, pseudonyms and usernames are still very possible - again so long as everyone understands up front that such a platform would ultimately not be anonymous on the back end.
But oh no, that won't hypergrow the company and dominate the internet! Think of all the people in India and China you're missing out on! /sarcasm
I think you underestimate the willingness of people to pay to troll, it may filter out people but an app that was (in theory) meant to be secure shouldn't think of a problem as filtering rather than securing. Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins. I think an app like this was doomed from the start and 4chan simply pulled the plug on an already leaking bathtub.
FiniteIntegral commented on Context Engineering for Agents rlancemartin.github.io/20... · Posted by u/0x79de
Another article handwaving or underselling the effects of hallucination. I can't help but draw parallels to layer 2 attempts from crypto.
Apple released a paper showing the diminishing returns of "deep learning" specifically when it comes to math. For example, it has a hard time solving the Tower of Hanoi problem past 6-7 discs, and that's not even giving it the restriction of optimal solutions. The agents they tested would hallucinate steps and couldn't follow simple instructions.
On top of that -- rebranding "prompt engineering" as "context engineering" and pretending it's anything different is ignorant at best and destructively dumb at worst.
It really says something when the instability of the dollar is (relatively) as bad as when Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1973. Trump's policies certainly have caused a large amount of instability.
FiniteIntegral commented on Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit lesswrong.com/posts/4mvph... · Posted by u/paulpauper
This is a bit of a meta-comment, but reading through the responses to a post like this is really interesting because it demonstrates how our collective response to this stuff is (a) wildly divergent and (b) entirely anecdote-driven.
I have my own opinions, but I can't really say that they're not also based on anecdotes and personal decision-making heuristics.
But some of us are going to end up right and some of us are going to end up wrong and I'm really curious what features signal an ability to make "better choices" w/r/t AI, even if we don't know (or can't prove) what "better" is yet.
It's not surprising that responses are anecdotal. An easy way to communicate a generic sentiment often requires being brief.
A majority of what makes a "better AI" can be condensed to how effective the slope-gradient algorithms are at getting the local maxima we want it to get to. Until a generative model shows actual progress of "making decisions" it will forever be seen as a glorified linear algebra solver. Generative machine learning is all about giving a pleasing answer to the end user, not about creating something that is on the level of human decision making.
FiniteIntegral commented on New funding to build towards AGI openai.com/index/march-fu... · Posted by u/pelcg
SoftBank is usually a precursor to the bubble bursting. I’m more worried about the AI bubble bursting now than I was an hour ago.
SoftBank Group is not always known for the most sound funding, they did invest in the "Stargate" program that hasn't seen a whole lot of action.