I personally think LLMs will plateau around human level, but that they will be made agentic and self-teaching, and therefore and self-aware (in sum, “sapient”) and truly dangerous by scaffolding them into language model agents or language model cognitive architectures. See Capabilities and alignment of LLM cognitive for my logic in expecting that.
That would be a good outcome. We’d have agents with their own goals, capable enough to do useful and dangerous things, but probably not quite capable enough to self-exfiltrate, and probably initially under the control of relatively sane people. That would scare the pants off of the world, and we’d see some real efforts to align the things. Which is uniquely do-able, since they’d take top-level goals in natural language, and be readily interpretable by default (with real concerns still there aplenty, including waluigi effects and their utterances not reliably reflecting their real underlying cognition).
I think the scaling hypothesis is false, and we’ll get to AGI quite soon anyway, by other routes. The better scaling works, the faster we’ll get there, but that’s gravy. We have all of the components of a human-like mind today, putting them together is one route to AGI.
My hunch is that the scaling hypothesis is false and, therefore, AGI will take longer than many people in the LessWrong/EA Forum community expect.
I personally think LLMs will plateau around human level, but that they will be made agentic and self-teaching, and therefore and self-aware (in sum, “sapient”) and truly dangerous by scaffolding them into language model agents or language model cognitive architectures. See Capabilities and alignment of LLM cognitive for my logic in expecting that.
That would be a good outcome. We’d have agents with their own goals, capable enough to do useful and dangerous things, but probably not quite capable enough to self-exfiltrate, and probably initially under the control of relatively sane people. That would scare the pants off of the world, and we’d see some real efforts to align the things. Which is uniquely do-able, since they’d take top-level goals in natural language, and be readily interpretable by default (with real concerns still there aplenty, including waluigi effects and their utterances not reliably reflecting their real underlying cognition).
I think the scaling hypothesis is false, and we’ll get to AGI quite soon anyway, by other routes. The better scaling works, the faster we’ll get there, but that’s gravy. We have all of the components of a human-like mind today, putting them together is one route to AGI.