You could argue from a “flash of insight” and scientific paradigm shifts generally giving rise to sudden progress. We certainly know contemporary techniques are vastly less sample and compute efficient than the human brain—so there does exist some learning algorithm much better than what we have today. Moreover there probably exists some learning algorithm that would give rise to AGI on contemporary (albeit expensive) hardware. For example, ACX notes there’s a supercomputer than can do $10^17$ FLOPS vs the estimated $10^16 needed for a human brain. These kinds of comparisons are always a bit apples to oranges, but it does seem like compute is probably not the bottleneck (or won’t be in 10 years) for a maximally-efficient algorithm.
The nub of course is whether such an algorithm is plausibly reachable by human flash of insight (and not via e.g. detailed empirical study and refinement of a less efficient but working AGI). It’s hard to rule out. How simple/universal we think the algorithm the human brain implements is one piece of evidence here—the more complex and laden with inductive bias (e.g. innate behavior), the less likely we are to come up with it. But even if the human brain is a Rube Goldberg machine, perhaps there does exist some more straightforward algorithm evolution did not happen upon.
Personally I’d put little weight on this. I have <10% probability on AGI in next 10 years, and think I put no more than 15% on AGI being developed ever by something that looks like a sudden insight than more continuous progress. Notably even if such an insight does happen soon, I’d expect it to take at least 3-5 years for it to gain recognition and be sufficiently scaled up to work. I do think it’s probable enough for us to actively keep an eye out for promising new ideas that could lead to AGI so we can be ahead of the game. I think it’s good for example that a lot of people working on AI safety were working on language models “before it was cool” (I was not one of these people), for example, although we’ve maybe now piled too much into that area.
You could argue from a “flash of insight” and scientific paradigm shifts generally giving rise to sudden progress. We certainly know contemporary techniques are vastly less sample and compute efficient than the human brain—so there does exist some learning algorithm much better than what we have today. Moreover there probably exists some learning algorithm that would give rise to AGI on contemporary (albeit expensive) hardware. For example, ACX notes there’s a supercomputer than can do $10^17$ FLOPS vs the estimated $10^16 needed for a human brain. These kinds of comparisons are always a bit apples to oranges, but it does seem like compute is probably not the bottleneck (or won’t be in 10 years) for a maximally-efficient algorithm.
The nub of course is whether such an algorithm is plausibly reachable by human flash of insight (and not via e.g. detailed empirical study and refinement of a less efficient but working AGI). It’s hard to rule out. How simple/universal we think the algorithm the human brain implements is one piece of evidence here—the more complex and laden with inductive bias (e.g. innate behavior), the less likely we are to come up with it. But even if the human brain is a Rube Goldberg machine, perhaps there does exist some more straightforward algorithm evolution did not happen upon.
Personally I’d put little weight on this. I have <10% probability on AGI in next 10 years, and think I put no more than 15% on AGI being developed ever by something that looks like a sudden insight than more continuous progress. Notably even if such an insight does happen soon, I’d expect it to take at least 3-5 years for it to gain recognition and be sufficiently scaled up to work. I do think it’s probable enough for us to actively keep an eye out for promising new ideas that could lead to AGI so we can be ahead of the game. I think it’s good for example that a lot of people working on AI safety were working on language models “before it was cool” (I was not one of these people), for example, although we’ve maybe now piled too much into that area.