Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…My estimate is sort of 50% chance by in the next five years, so by 2030 let’s say. So I think there’s a good chance that that could happen. Part of it is what is your definition of AGI? Of course people arguing about that now and mind’s quite a high bar and always has been of can we match the cognitive functions that the brain has? So we know our brains are pretty much general Turing machines approximate, and of course we created incredible modern civilization with our minds. So that also speaks to how general the brain is. And for us to know we have a true AGI, we would have to make sure that it has all those capabilities. It isn’t kind of a jagged intelligence where some things, it’s really good at, like today’s systems, but other things it’s really flawed at. And that’s what we currently have with today’s systems. They’re not consistent. So you’d want that consistency of intelligence across the board. And then we have some missing, I think, capabilities like the true invention capabilities and creativity that we were talking about earlier. So you’d want to see those. How you test that? I think you just test it. One way to do it would be kind of brute force test of tens of thousands of cognitive tasks that we know that humans can do. And maybe also make the system available to a few hundred of the world’s top experts, the Terence Taos of each subject area and give them a month or two and see if they can find an obvious flaw in the system. And if they can’t, then I think you can be pretty confident we have a fully general system. Maybe to push back a little bit, it seems like humans are really incredible as the intelligence improves across all domains to take it for granted, like you mentioned, Terence Tao, these brilliant experts. They might quickly in a span of weeks, take for granted all the incredible things it can do and then focus in on, well, aha, right there. I consider myself, first of all, human. I identify as human. Some people listen to me talk and they’re like, “That guy is not good at talking the stuttering.” So even humans have obvious across domains limits, even just outside of calc, mathematics and physics and so on. I wonder if it will take something like a Move 37, so on the positive side versus a barrage of 10,000 cognitive tasks where it’ll be one or two where it’s like, holy shit, this is special. So I think that. Exactly. So I think there’s the sort of blanket testing to just make sure you’ve got the consistency. But I think there are the sort of lighthouse moments like the Move 37 that I would be looking for. So one would be inventing a new conjecture or a new hypothesis about physics like Einstein did. So maybe you could even run the back test of that very rigorously, have a cut-off of 1900 and then give the system everything that was written up to 1900 and then see if it could come up with special relativity and general relativity, right? Like Einstein did. That would be an interesting test. Another one would be can it invent a game like Go? Go not just come up with Move 37, a new strategy, but can it invent a game that’s as deep as aesthetically beautiful, as elegant as Go? And those are the sorts of things I would be looking out for. And probably a system being able to do several of those things for it to be very general, not just one domain. And so I think that would be the signs at least that I would be looking for, that we’ve got a system that’s AGI level and then maybe to fill that out, you would also check their consistency, make sure there’s no holes in that system either.…

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