Yes, the experts that got PHD's in the stuff, people that spent 30 years studying the field. John Carmack, Andrej Karpathy, Demis Hassabis, all the people in ops post. What do they say? 10 years or less? Oh... Well they aren't real experts because they don't agree with me.

At this point I'd really like to hear what experts these people are talking about. We seem to be able to name and cite sources from dozens of experts yet anytime you ask pessimists its always "Well you know... Most people. I can't name one. But most experts say I am right."

I literally responded to someone with this exact attitude. I said I based my expectations based on what the best researchers working on the problem say and the response I got was "That's just selection bias" which for sure it could be. But if we assume even the best researchers in a field don't know what they are talking about then why tf are they there?

This is true and here's the thing. It happens when it happens. None of us are divination wizards or prophets. We can only try to make guesses based on existing evidence.

What I do see very consistently across the board is people bringing AI timelines down. That makes me more optimistic I think.

This is true. But if we scrutinize and doubt every single thing we hear then we wouldn't believe anything is true. There is a fallacy for every possible argument that can be made.

Do I think it will happen in 10-15 years? Based on what researchers are currently saying, yes. Could that change when new information is brought to light? Yes. We should base expectations on existing evidence and change them when that evidence shifts. Hopeless optimism and hopeless pessimism helps no one.

Regardless we should continue to accelerate the coming of AGI as much as possible in my opinion. It's potential uses far outweigh its potential downsides.

I just go off of what the best experts in the field are saying. Listening too a lot of Lex podcasts and reading articles on it a lot of experts seem to be saying 10-15 years. It's an appeal to authority argument, but I think if anyone knows what they are talking about its the people working on it.

I don't think many people think we just need to scale. All of these things are giving us an idea of how to make AGI. So now we know how to get it to self improve. We can simulate a thinking process. When these things are combined it could get us closer.

If we can give it some kind of long term memory that it can use to retrieve and act upon that information and have some kind of common sense reasoning that that's very close to AGI.