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The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of "papers" is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the possibility that LLMs and Diffusion models won't lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they're foisting upon the populace.

If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we're still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual "intelligence" of any real sort.

Show me a paper that doesn't merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI/ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we're likely to encounter with any "world changing technology":

* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)

* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out

* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate those existential risks?

I'm just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints potentialities instead.

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Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck. It's a fancier set of makeup for the same shitty western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.

Nah, I'm done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, I'm not one of them.

 help



One of the authors talks about this here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a

> It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.

> ...

> Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.

> ...

> If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.

I think their position is: "it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn't get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that's scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here's our plan".

The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it's a political necessity: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2075261194978640096


So it's a fan-fiction?

A policy paper is intended to change policy. That means appealing to the party currently in power.



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