If you want to give your agents a DB for their own work as a scratchpad or something that’s great. They can not only go to town, but also analyze their own work and iterate on it.

If you are talking about a production base, agents should not be hitting it directly under any circumstances. There needs to be an API layer with defined usage patterns, rate limits, etc.

This is basically the same as saying “databases weren’t designed for interns to run live inline migrations in prod”. Yeah of course they aren’t.

But the reality is that global unemployment levels are as of yet unaffected.

This is clearly the hardest bar to meet, but it’s also the most important.

If AI fully automates 5% of global jobs (or pick your number), I think it would be fair to say that this specific definition of AGI is achieved.

As a SWE, I feel immensely augmented by AI. But you can’t yet fully deploy an AI to do a job end to end without any human involvement.

I use like ~1b input tokens per week on codex or something like that, and while it does an insane amount of work, you have to have a skilled hand guide it.

This might not be the case for long, but it’s not here yet (in that narrow definition at least).

Not that this is my definition or anything, just pointing out that this is the one people actually care about, even if the acronym doesn’t say anything about economics or social change.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355258

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I think the overall percentage is the wrong approach here.

It’s easy to say a lot of things that are factually true or predictions that are inevitably true.

However the more salient point with Gary Marcus is the one unforgivable thing he was wrong about and continues to double down on which is that deep learning is hitting a wall.

Starting in early 2022 and going through today, there is still so much low hanging fruit with deep learning.

Today’s LLM progress is mostly being made in RL. But world models are also still so early and they’re deep learning all the way down.

It would be nice if he would just admit he was wrong.

Good - all of them have a horrible developer experience.

Final straw for me was trying to put GHA runners in my Azure virtual net and spent 2 weeks on it.