this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 54 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

five minutes earlier: "hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you'll get a huge golden parachute".

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it's anywhere near AGI material?

Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it's good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it's much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.

[–] abc@suppo.fi 0 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Have you looked at the current state of LLMs? The list of things that it's missing to be an AGI is growing smaller every month. What do you think it should be able to do?

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

[–] abc@suppo.fi 1 points 49 minutes ago* (last edited 49 minutes ago)

What do you seriously think the result of that would be? I know it's a hard ask for a lemmy.ml account to be serious, but are you capable of that?

[–] TheVoiceOfRaison@thelemmy.club 10 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Mankind created the atomic bomb, used it twice, then turned the science into power for people all over the world. Let's hope we can harness AI in a similar way.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 21 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Yeah, let's forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom's day, twice.

But it's OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

They're still using nuclear fear to rationalize war. The entire premise of the Iran war was to keep them from having a nuclear weapon.

[–] BottleBoardBakon@lemmy.ml 7 points 17 hours ago

And ironically, if they did have a nuclear weapon, we probably wouldn't have gone to war

[–] Shindo66@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

And so much has come out that Russia never really had the capabilities they said they had. They were just saying it so they could laugh as we poured all of our money into giant useless defense projects instead of social services and infrastructure. The result, $40 trillion in debt and no bullet trains. In a way, they kinda won the cold war.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I think you meant the USSR. They most certainly had a lot of destructive capability regardless of inflating their numbers.

Most of US debt came long after the USSR was dissolved.

Considering that Russia is attempting USSR 2.0, you may have a point about them winning in the long run.

[–] Shindo66@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

Of course the ussr. Im definitely not saying they didnt have destructive capabilities, they just were never going to try to use them on the US or Europe. It sure seems that Russia is trying ussr 2 and the us is trying for the fourth reich

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

The US created the atomic bomb and tested not knowing if it would cause a chain reaction destroying the atmosphere and all life on Earth. It was a risk they were willing to take.

They then used nuclear weapons on two of the largest civilians massacares ever recorded. The proliferation of nuclear arms lead to the cold war and to this day still threatens to end all of humanity. It's cool though, nothing like knowing the world can end at any moment, no stress.

Are you seriously suggesting AI should be used in a similar way!?

[–] im_fine_sandy@nord.pub 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Indeed. Nothing I've seen thus far gives me the impression LLMs will ever be truly useful outside of a few niche tasks.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of "locally intelligent for text manipulation". They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

  1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
  2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the "companion" chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will "pretend" to be good at things they really are not, and if you don't know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.
[–] RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 hours ago

This might be one of the best summaries of LLMs in their current state I've seen here. People claiming they're useless are stuck in 23' but to say they're at AGI/ASI is accelerationist techo-paganism.

Based and levelheaded take

[–] Shindo66@lemmy.world 0 points 16 hours ago

Good ducking point. We really can't trust anyone.