If I understand correctly, you’re envisioning that we will be able to construct AGIs that have human-level capability, and far greater than human speed, in order to bootstrap superhuman AGI? What makes you confident that this speed advantage will exist early on?
What I’m trying to say is that even at human speed, being able to mix-and-match human-level capabilities at will, in arbitrary combinations, not an ideal omnimath but in larger numbers than a single human can accumulate, is already a superhuman ability and one I expect AGI to trivially possess. Then on top of that you get, for free, things like being able to coordinate multiple instances of a single entity that don’t have their own other agendas, and that never lose focus or get tired.
Since you did mention genius coming from “precisely the right combination of knowledge, without a lot of other superfluous considerations to distract them,” I have to ask… doesn’t AGI seem perfectly positioned to be just that, for any combination of knowledge you can train it on?
I also don’t find the biological anchors argument convincing, for somewhat the same reason: an AI doesn’t need all of the superfluous knowledge a human has. Some of it, yes, but not all of it. To put it another way, in terms of data and parameters, how much knowledge of physics does a physicist actually have after a long career? A basic world model like all humans acquire in childhood, plus a few hundred books, a few thousand hours of lectures, and maybe 40k hours of sensory data acquired and thinking completed on-the-job?
And you’re right, I agree an early AGI won’t be an omnimath, but I think polymath is very much within reach.
What I’m trying to say is that even at human speed, being able to mix-and-match human-level capabilities at will, in arbitrary combinations, not an ideal omnimath but in larger numbers than a single human can accumulate, is already a superhuman ability and one I expect AGI to trivially possess. Then on top of that you get, for free, things like being able to coordinate multiple instances of a single entity that don’t have their own other agendas, and that never lose focus or get tired.
Since you did mention genius coming from “precisely the right combination of knowledge, without a lot of other superfluous considerations to distract them,” I have to ask… doesn’t AGI seem perfectly positioned to be just that, for any combination of knowledge you can train it on?
I also don’t find the biological anchors argument convincing, for somewhat the same reason: an AI doesn’t need all of the superfluous knowledge a human has. Some of it, yes, but not all of it. To put it another way, in terms of data and parameters, how much knowledge of physics does a physicist actually have after a long career? A basic world model like all humans acquire in childhood, plus a few hundred books, a few thousand hours of lectures, and maybe 40k hours of sensory data acquired and thinking completed on-the-job?
And you’re right, I agree an early AGI won’t be an omnimath, but I think polymath is very much within reach.