My prediction of AGI in 2021-2023
In 2020 I made a prediction on Facebook that AGI was only 1-3 years away. Probably time to follow up on that. At the time, Gwern’s “You can only prove the presence of an ability, not the absence of it” seemed solid. Someone would say “GPT-3 can’t do X”, and then later someone would find a prompt where it could reliably do X! There was a lot of talk about becoming a good “prompt engineer”: being good at wording things in a way that cause language models to reliably do what you want. Relatedly, these days my favorite way to think about language models is as a Simulator (Janus popularized this framing here https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/ ). Inside them is all these different persons/personalities, each with different abilities (try character.ai to experience this). Prompt engineering pulls out a specific simulated person and inhibits many others. If you get the wrong person, it’ll fail at things other simulated people are very capable of! But honestly, I think ChatGPT proved...