I've said this a lot but I'm going to say it again AGI has no technical definition. One day Sam Altman, Elon Musk, or some other business guy trying to meet their obligation for next quarter will declare they have built AGI and that will be that. We'll argue and debate, but eventually it will be just another marketing term, just like AI was.
Readit Newsjppope commented on AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem vincirufus.com/posts/agi-... · Posted by u/vincirufus
Seems to be similar to my experience. I used to go to track and follow interesting individuals - scientists, engineers, artists... then it all got washed away with flamebait. Bluesky doesn't feel like its there yet, but I'm hopeful
jppope commented on The Coming Robot Home Invasion andykessler.com/andy_kess... · Posted by u/walterbell
I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot in the next decade or two, priced at "car" kinda prices
I think this is going to be fairly transformational, at least for care scenarios.
I'm not talking about the sci-fi pipe-dream of a Star Trek Data style robot, but more like a basic humanoid robot that can reliably do mundane & basic things on-command. Like pick things up off of the floor, go fetch items from another room, open the curtains, do some basic food preparation (e.g. heat things up in a microwave levels of sophistication, or even just getting a glass of water), do the dishwasher, take out the trash and so on.
Even if it can only do 1hr of chores at a time before heading back to recharge, thats huge. It will help people live more independent lives for much longer before needing expensive care from humans (something that we have a bit of a ticking time-bomb of, at least in the UK where the population is aging rapidly). It doesn't need to be a fully fledged "robot-nurse" to be helpful.
Bonus points if it can monitor it's user(s) and call for help if there appears to be anything wrong (e.g. fallen and can't get up type monitoring), or intervene in situations before they escalate (e.g. turn the gas off if it is left on, remind to take medicines etc)
pretty sure we've already had products in the market that can do the things you are thinking of, the problem with products like baxter (or boston dynamics products) wasn't/isn't the capabilities it was/is the price point. the unit economics for robotics have always been the problem. Sure you can buy a robot for $45K but you can have a hell of a whole lot of days of cleaning with a cleaning service for that same money... the downstream effect of this is that it is very hard to get economies of scale so they never drop to the point where these things are normalized.
jppope commented on Ask HN: What economic reasoning is there that bigCos have an advantage post-AI? · Posted by u/jppope
I don't know exactly what you're referring to but if LLM is the thing that you're referring to as being the differentiator - then a company with a lot of capital can pay for a lot more LLM calls than one that is small.
Sure, but they still need to know what calls to make for new things. For old things someone can likely reproduce the things that they have built for less money, with less overhead now.
jppope commented on Ask HN: What economic reasoning is there that bigCos have an advantage post-AI? · Posted by u/jppope
People only mean that AI companies themselves (which are huge by necessity because of immense scale of compute required, and limited hyper-expensive, unique talent they use, although that is secondary). They are supposed to grab all the value from all the industries much like say, Google took out all profits and value from all traditional media, advertisers, retailers, virtually everything. So it will be like, 2-5 hyper large companies controlling majority of GDP. Which may be actually not that bad. Being in the driver seat, they may provide an alternative to 2 political parties - certainly a much saner alternative. Because they will be able to decide just about everything - and government won't be able to stop them because of their transnational nature, and very soon, will be unable to stop them by force as well - they may create a more sensible government by sidelining and/or co-opting traditional political system and make everyone happier. It might look a bit like Lebanon at times, though.
When people say that we are entering new Middle Ages, they might actually be cool.
Maybe but at this time it doesn't appear to be a "winner take all" market, its actually looking more and more like a commodity or utility market... There doesn't appear to be a moat or proprietary advantage to any providers (except at the hardware level) or anyone at the application layer. I've never once heard that someone would only use ChatGpt and could never use Claude. The improvements between model versions are minor at this point. How would someone win this market? I think its also a foregone conclusion that the only way to profitably monetize this market will be ads or to raise the price for inference in the future.
jppope commented on This thing is hard. 8 years in. 20 failed projects. Only 2 made it · Posted by u/leonagano
Just a recommendation, switch to the 37 signals model: do consulting and find a thing people keep asking for that isn't out there in the market. That is get paid to research your product, and have a prototype ready to go when you feel its in a good place
Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
jppope commented on The value of institutional memory timharford.com/2025/05/th... · Posted by u/leoc
jppope commented on Lidar-based GIS map of New Hampshire stone walls nhgranit.maps.arcgis.com/... · Posted by u/rob
very cool project and map. I've recently picked up stone masonry so this is super great to view