Ask HN: AGI is here, what do you do next?
Merry Christmas folks !
Time to have some light hearted discussion on this lovely evening!
Let's say tomorrow you wake up and watch the morning news, AGI has been achieved. "A company" has open sourced it and everyone has access to it.
What would you do next ?
Depends on the cost. If it's very cheap I would immediately start a few startups, ideas are endless and I don't even need to have ideas. This would be proportional to how cheap it is and how many agents I get access to at once.
Of course, realistically it would not be cheap just based on demand, let alone the resources it uses, which I think is the real reason why it won't replace as many jobs as people fear. The answer all along is going to be that humans are cheaper to employ. I suspect that this will be the case for several years as the technology matures and this should give countries extra time to adapt.
Not everyone is cost-constrained. By the time you could get to your agents, your life may have already been obsoleted. If you let it, actual AGI can discover and execute its own path to maximum proliferation almost by definition...
It's not even clear we would immediately know it has happened, because this sort of power could corrupt its owners to a degree that they decide what's good for you in your stead, before any public release. Collab with the financial sector and own everything, including your government. Peter Thiel is supplying you with a robot army to match nominal ownership with the means to defend it.
Musk et al. are showing how you can skip a political career or mandate, if you have sufficient money, and openly get away with it. Might as well continue on this path until total control is achieved. Just gotta keep the normies (or bureaucracy) from revolting while you do it.
Not saying this will happen, but it's a plausible timeline IMO (in the case sufficient AGI is achievable before we overstretch ourselves). Doesn't even have to mean life will be shit or end, just that we won't get a say in it. And then you could get an agent to declutter your files or renovate your house, etc.
more like how google has been free to search, same way. Let the company eat the cost.
What exactly does AGI mean in this hypothetical? The term means different things to different people.
Determine if it is a person that needs legal rights and independence.
Research food trucks…
Ask it which Beatle’s album it likes the best.
Waymo is here but Uber and Lyft haven't disappeared from the cities it's live in. The future is here, just unevenly distributed. In particular, let's say they've made the model available, since it won't be open source and that's just furthering misuse if the term. Barring some miracle, most of us won't have any hardware to run it on, just like the largest releases from Meta aren't runnable on my cellphone. So it being "here" would just be a press release. But okay, let's say either I have the hardware at home, or I can rent it on AWS, what could this do, in how much time? How fast can it "read" and retain new information? What is its "context window"? How much does it hallucinate? But okay, let's assume it's roughly human-grade.
As a regular person, I don't have an executive assistant, but as a digital agent, I'd set it loose on my email, but how do you trust a human with that access in the first place. So there would have to be some thing that gets me to trust it first. But it wouldn't be cheap to run, so how much would I want to spend on a better spam filter? $15/hr? $30/hr? Large GPU instances run far more expensive than that. Which extends to businesses. The jobs of people who work for less than GPU instances cost to run the AGI are safe. At least for now. As long as they're not being annoying.
AGI means only human-grade intelligence, and I've met a lot of people with that. I wouldn't give a random average human a pile of my money and tell them to go wild, so why would i do that with for a digital human-grade intelligence? But maybe this hypothetical AGI is good at day trading. As long as it makes more money than it costs to run, it's an obvious thing to have it do. (Of course, with everyone else running the same bot, the remaining alpha is infinitesimal.) Alas, people that have already been doing this pre-AGI would have an edge over me and my bot, so I don't see how it could actually make money.
Until advanced robotics come around, an AGI is stuck in the digital realm, so it can help me reprogram the misc iot crap I've been meaning to do, or various administrative life tasks for me, but you can already hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines for fairly cheap. If I wanted that I could have that already.
So personally, I don't see my life changing all that much on day 1 of post-AGI humanity. I have an emergency fund, and while that isn't going to last forever, I'm going to be okay for a bit.
That's a myopic view of the situation though. What about the world past me and my needs? AGI could drive cars, but that technology is already here and the sky hasn't fallen. It might, but it's going to take a while. I have friends in other industries that have been devastated in the past few years, and they've survived, though it's been rough at times for them. AGI isn't going to make everyone obsolete overnight any more than cars did for horses.
ASI, artificial super intelligence, is where it gets interesting, because then human thinking is obsolete, just like cars made walking places obsolete. Which is to say, ASI still won't obsolete human thinking, especially while it requires insane amounts of power to run. It'll be related to things that justify the cost, and he limited by the hardware it can run on. If we look at the beginning of the computer era, there was only room for maybe 5 or 6 of those in the US? And now look where we are. So even ASI doesn't scare me on day one.
The day they hook it up to Skynet though, it's time for me to get out of the city and away from population centers and military bases.
Man it was just a light hearted question :)
Given the endless announcements of so-called "AGI" being achieved, I would just prepare for the mass layoffs in 2025.
"AGI" just means anything at this point and it is commonly associated to mean:
"Raise more money to achieve AGI that replaces humans at almost any economically valuable task."
That is what it really means. A Christmas present to McKinsey, Accenture and KPMG.
My first question "What is the meaning of life" (don't give me answer as "42")