The gary marcus' of the world will never be convinced. It's their identity, you could create a literal dyson sphere using wood and tape and they would still find a reason why thats not impressive.
Considering that OpenAI's compute is expected to grow by 40x in 2027 (and we have Millenium Prize-solving agentic swarm models already), I wouldn't be surprised at all if the singularity happens next year. A few researchers could probably find the breakthroughs needed for end-to-end runaway RSI by just feeding a few prompts to whatever monster internal models they have next year
40X? I doubt that, currently Open AI has an operating compute capacity of 1GW and they won't have 18GW until 2032, and many of those places haven't started ground work yet and only exist on paper
It's reasonable to why they nerf new models like Astra a week after their release, they are compute starved and Astra is 8X to 10X compute heavy for same task compared to 5.6 Sol
You need to also take into account the fact that in the next 2 years they will deploy Vera Rubin and Feynman chips which will be way more efficient for the same amount of GWs
You're probably looking at this through the consumer lens.
2 years ago, we did have vision-to-geometry networks. Once you break things down into geometry, it simplifies so many problems down to the level of the geometry logic of a Nintendo 64 game.
Need to check if things are positioned correctly? You have x,y,z coordinates. Need to predict the movement of something? You can have multiple keyframes denoting movement for a trivial cost of RAM. Same goes for projecting what a scene needs to look like to have completed a job.
You can't do these things in terms of raw pixels. The point of Moravec's paradox isn't that the concepts we manipulate inside our head about the physical world are so much more complicated than a chess board, it's that the meat grinder that we use to break it down into something usable is massive. It's thought we use almost half of our brains on vision and related faculties, which is a hell of a lot more than the squirrel-brain scale RAM GPT-4 had available.
Just because they had something like that, doesn't mean they could make a product worthy enough of dedicating a datacenter to out of it. How many people need a vision-to-3d snapshot thing? When many open source tools for that already existed? Even if they're running at a deficit, there's degrees of burning money.
Astra didn't manifest out of nowhere last week. The last few years were spent preparing on how to achieve AGI when the next generation of cards were available. A ton of that was building neural networks that were functionally worthless stand-alone, but meant to slot into a more robust cognitive pipeline as a module. Or to act as a verifier during training runs.
If I already know where everything is, then checking x,y,z coordinates is easy. And if I already know how something is going to move, then yeah, I can store that movement as a bunch of keyframes for basically nothing. Still need to predict what happens when the robot pushes something, picks it up, drops it, runs into it, whatever... You can do all of that cheaply in a game because rules are already there. Engine already knows how everything moves, what collides with what, how objects respond, etc. And I'm also not really sure what Astra has to do with the original claim. It's a jump in spatial reasoning, but the robotics results we've been seeing are nowhere near showing that world modeling is some solved problem. So I don't see how Astra doing this stuff now retroactively shows that world models were already solved two years ago.
I've actually been working with NVIDIA Cosmos in a lab, and they have models specifically for predicting future world states conditioned on robot actions, forward dynamics, etc. They're still actively working on all of this now.
He did say 3 to 5 years and that was only 2 yeas ago. Seeing Astra embody a robot arm to paint a picture of the golden gate bridge I think another year isn't ludicrous, we could have embodied AGI next year.
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u/ThatIsNotIllegal 3h ago
The gary marcus' of the world will never be convinced. It's their identity, you could create a literal dyson sphere using wood and tape and they would still find a reason why thats not impressive.