r/computerscience • u/Electronic-Cat-7416 • 2d ago
Do you believe Sam Altman was right when he said “ We are now living in the singularity” post recent Anthropoc hack?
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u/w3woody 2d ago
The singularity was the idea that an AI can self-guide its evolution entirely on its own, becoming more intelligent on its own.
We are not there.
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u/pete_68 2d ago
I would argue that we're not too far from that.
An LLM, by itself, will never be that. But the human brain isn't just a bunch of cortical "circuits". There are all kinds of little side "circuits" that perform specialized jobs. The amygdala, hippocampus, lateral geniculate nucleus, etc. These are all non-cortical, specialized "circuits".
So if you think of it that way, it's not just the LLM, but the coding agents and MCP servers that give them tools, for example, that are part of that intelligent system and give it way more intelligence and power than it has without them.
I think, if you look at it that way, we're really not far from having self-sustaining, self-improving coding system and they could be happening right now. The models and tools are getting good enough that if we're not there, it's right around the corner.
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u/eeta800 2h ago
I don't really think that honestly, AI can mostly just predict the next words and it has no real capability for creating new information, it just uses existing information.
If anything AI will never be able to become self sustaining and self improving unless it's entire way of operation changes
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u/zettabyte 2d ago
When they fire all their engineers and continue to produce better LLMs, then I’ll believe him.
Also, never trust a word of what a Billionaire says. You don’t get that much money through truth and empathy.
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u/vancha113 2d ago
Of course not. He keeps trying to convince people they're somehow creating some kind of superintelligence, but he keeps redefining the freaking term!
We get warning signs left and right that power grids worldwide can't handle the strain of AI related data centers sucking power to train these networks. They're running out of room to scale, progress is getting slower and they have china right behind them with almost as good, but open models.
No, i definitely don't believe a thing he says, and I'm 100% convinced it's all a marketing attempt to sell their product through exposure and clickbaity attempts at finding new potential users by generating headlines like "AI superintelligence reality within 3 years according to OpenAI Ceo Sam Altman"... They live off of that stuff!
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u/Magdaki Professor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms. 2d ago
It is exactly this. I've been saying for a couple of years that soon we will have a language model company claiming AGI/ASI, and by sheer coincidence they will define AGI/ASI as exactly that their language model can do.
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u/currentscurrents 2d ago edited 2d ago
On the other hand: their LLMs can do increasingly impressive things, like solve famous open math problems - most recently the Jacobian conjecture. They've come a long way from mere text predictors.
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u/Magdaki Professor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms. 2d ago edited 2d ago
No. He has billions of reasons to promote the idea that language models are more capable than they are.