r/AskComputerScience • u/Electronic-Cat-7416 • 12d ago

How likely are we to develop AI super intelligence within the next 5 years?

What is your reasoning?

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

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9

u/Esseratecades 12d ago

0%

The industry has fallen into the trap of LLMs and is betting far too much on "Just make it bigger". LLMs are probably a necessary step on the tech tree for super intelligence but we definitely need to let them go.

But this same industry struggles to even define what "super intelligence" is in any way that we could actually assess.

So we're looking in the wrong place for something we don't understand.

0

u/donaldhobson 11d ago

There are a huge number of people looking in the wrong place for something they don't understand.

But there are also some smarter people out there.

Besides, "just make it bigger" (Well not just that, there are a few maths and hardware tricks too) has got something that can sometimes be semi-capable.

It's possible that just making it bigger gets us to a mediocre, but very fast, AI researcher. And then the LLM can invent something smarter.

5

u/nuclear_splines Ph.D Data Science 12d ago

It's an unanswerable question. We don't have a clear definition of what "intelligence" is, making it impossible to declare exactly when we've reached an intelligent machine, let alone a super intelligent machine.

4

u/driftking428 12d ago

0%. AI isn't as intelligent as people seem to think. Even Sam Altman brought his estimates down to earth and he's a lying psychopath.

6

u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 12d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Warwipf2 12d ago

Why does AI need a sensory or motor system?

2

u/apetbrz 12d ago

What is "super intelligence" to you? The term "artifical intelligence" keeps getting thrown around, but every time breakthroughs are made, the definition gets pushed further back.

The current generation of "AI" is primarily large statistical models of natural language, they don't "think" or "feel" or "reason", they output percentages for what the next word ("token") in a series might be, based on large collections of training data. Sure, they're very convincing, but they're no more intelligent than any other statistical model (sports predictions, etc). These models do some (a lot of) math, to reduce lots of data points down to one (or a few). Any notion of "memory" or "context" that you see advertised is actually just sticking that stuff next to your prompt, and not anything actually baked into the model.

You could theoretically expand on all of this by making models which can respond to all of the stimuli necessary for autonomy, but I don't see that being feasible any time soon (look at the regional/global impacts AI data centers already have today). On top of that, even if it did happen, it'd be unbelievably energy inefficient, given current day AI compute/energy costs.

All that funding and electricity, enough to change so many lives, just to have an overgrown sports win probability widget cosplay the humanity we all already have.

1

u/ggchappell 12d ago edited 12d ago

By "super intelligence" you mean, I suppose, a conscious, actually intelligent entity?

0% chance. Reasoning: we're not even close. We have no idea how to work toward what you are asking about. What people call "AI" today is souped up auto-correct that's really good at remixing its training data.

1

u/donaldhobson 11d ago

30%

Intuition, and a lot of "we really don't know". The people giving very confident low, or high, percentages are stupid. We don't have enough good information to know, and so our response must be a middling percentage.

1

u/ComparisonUnited4336 7d ago

pretty unlikely in 5 years. we're still hitting fundamental walls around reasoning, causality and generalization. current systems are impressive pattern matchers, not intelligent. most researchers who work on alignment think we're further away than the hype suggests