Vernor Vinge's Paper of the Technological Singularity

Submitted by understanding0 t3_1270wcn in singularity

Hi,

I just wanted to point out that almost exactly 30 years have passed since Vernor Vinge published this paper here:

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html

One can see in that paper that it was published on March 30-31, 1993. In that paper he makes the following claim:

>Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.

So, what do you think about this paper in general? We now have the benefit of hindsight and can thus compare the last 30 years of AI-development to Vernor Vinge's expectations.

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Comments

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zero_for_effort t1_jec7pvt wrote

Depending on the training for GPT5 or the latest iteration of GPT4 he may have just gotten it right at the last possible moment. Even if his prediction for the advent of greater than human AI was a little optimistic it feels close enough as to not make any real difference. Truly a visionary.

To anyone who hasn't read the paper; go for it! It's surprisingly accessible to casual readers.

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fastinguy11 t1_jecex37 wrote

right what difference does it make if it was 30 or 35 years lol ! Edit: Also we may have gpt 5 or equivalent this year that matches his description, it might not be public though.

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epSos-DE t1_jecvjs6 wrote

General AI just needs a goal generator and task coordinator at this point of time.

Understanding, text , audio, math, physics, language , video, etc.. is already solved by different parts of ai models out there

GPT4 silved the coding part , which makes general AI more easy to self- code itself into existence.

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DragonForg t1_jed03jd wrote

Already being made. People need to lay the framework with GPT 4. There will be large tasks managers that are ran by GPT 4 that can do low level tasks. Larger then the typical context window. Then they will be upgraded with GPT 5 which is essentially AGI at that point. So even if we don't get GPT 5 now, we will have the framework already set in place with GPT 4

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MrEloi t1_jee9tt8 wrote

The 32k version of GPT-4 - if ever made public - would/could allow outsiders to build an AGI or lookalike framework around GPT-4.

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vivehelpme t1_jeea32v wrote

>is already solved by different parts of ai models out there

Solved in an inconsistent manner, it's like having a collection of phone numbers to various sleeping individuals that you randomly call them in the middle of the night and get sleep drunken answers that they don't remember telling you.

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maskedpaki t1_jed0ok4 wrote

The paper may have been published then but his prediction was made on January 1 1993

Also he said it was a guess and his confidence interval was 2005 to 2030

2030 is looking realistic now.

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