Cost of Agi Delusion:chasing Superintelligence Us Falling Behind in Real AI Race

I’m not sure about the legitimacy of these claims but trying to clarify what some people are concerned about with the US’s vs China’s approach

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/25/09/47859358/us-coul...

The issue is, a large subset of American "AI" startups are founded by people who are ideologically driven by an almost religious fervor around unlocking AGI and superintelligence.

On the other hand, most Chinese startups in the space are highly application driven and practical in nature - they aren't chasing "AGI" or "Superintelligence" but building a monetizable product and outcompeting American players. (P.S. Immigrant founded startups in the US approach the problem in the same manner)

I've said this a ton of times on here, but most American MLEs are basically SKLearn wrapper monkeys with a penchant for bad philosophy. It's hard to find MLEs at scale in the US who understand both how to derive a Restricted Boltzmann Machine as well as tune and optimize the Linux Kernel to optimize Infiniband interconnects in a GPU cluster.

Most CS and CE majors in the US who graduated in the past 7-10 years think less like engineers (let's build shit that works, and then build it at scale) and more like liberal arts majors but wanted to learn enough coding to pass leetcode medium and get a job - I've had new grad SWEs who are alumni of MIT caliber schools ask me about how to become a VC or PM and how I did the SWE-PM-VC transition because "they don't want to code". I was gobsmacked.

The same mindset occurs abroad as well in China, India, Eastern Europe, Israel, etc but at least they force students to actually learn foundations.

And if you look at most of the teams who lead or develop either GPU architecture, high performance networking, RL research, Ensemble learning research, etc - most did their undergrad abroad in China, India, or the CEE but their PhD in the US. The pipeline and skill at the junior level in the US is almost nonexistent outside a handful of good programs that are oversubscribed.

When (picking a random T10 CS program) Cal and UIUC CS tenure track professors are starting to take up faculty positions in China and India's equivalent of those CS departments, that means you have a problem.

CS is a god damn engineering disciple. Engineering is predicated on bridging the gap between theoretical research and practical applications, but I do not see any backing for this kind of mindset in most American programs.

And yes, the work ethic in the US leaves much to be desired. If Polish, Czech, and Israeli engineers will be fine working 50-60 hour weeks during crunch time, asking you to work earlier hours in order to accommodate your private commitments after 3PM is not some form of egregious abuse.

The American tech industry has become lazy, the same way the American automotive industry became lazy in the 90s and 2000s. The lack of vision and the pettiness amongst management and the lack of motivation amongst ICs who are amongst the highest paid in the world is not conducive if we want to retain a domestic tech industry.

And unlike the automotive industry of ye olde days, the tech industry being a services industry can and has begun moving P/L and product roadmap responsibilities along with the execs who own said responsibilities abroad. If the HQ is in the US, but all the decisions are made abroad, are you really an American company?

>"Although the United States and China are very different and the latter’s approach has its limits, China is moving faster at scaling robots in society, and its AI Plus Initiative emphasizes achieving widespread industry-specific adoption by 2027. The government wants AI to essentially become a part of the country’s infrastructure by 2030. China is also investing in AGI, but Beijing’s emphasis is clearly on quickly scaling, integrating, and applying current and near-term AI capabilities."

> launch a large-scale AI literacy initiative across the government

> invest billions of dollars in procurement over the next few years

> expand support for the National AI Research Resource

The article exists to convince someone with the power to direct those billions of dollars to direct them this way. Claiming that the US is falling behind is a popular trick to make that happen.

Presumably the holders of purse strings know that policy papers must not be taken at face value, but if they're unaware that the robots in Chinese factories are far from the AI-driven humanoids of popular imagination, or that the AI Plus Initiative is full of lofty goals with nothing concrete on how to achieve them, they might be fooled nonetheless.

Now this happens with a pretty complex game I'm working on but it really shows the limits. It can't handle large amounts of indentation. It completely breaks.

2. Robotics should not be bundled with LLMs, but it is absolutely an AI/ML subfield - and in fact, the kind of subfield that is the best example of AI/ML having tangible real world impact. Autonomous UAS was a sci-fi concept 20 years ago, but is an engineering problem that has become a reality today.

Improving technology is easy. "Just fix everything that's wrong with the society and the problem will go away" isn't.

It's way, way easier to improve solar panel and battery storage tech until fossil fuels are completely uneconomical than to get the entire world to abandon fossil fuels while fossil fuels are the most economical source of energy by far.

I'm not an AI zealot at all but I don't see why AGI wouldn't be able to address thos e deficiencies.

To say nothing of how ubiquitous manufacturing automation would make material goods accessible to a much broader range of people (though, you could argue that material goods are today effectively universally accessible, and I wouldn't disagree).

Not really, but you're right in that A(G)I probably won't solve the problems you're referring to. You need to get back to the true cause of all these problems which is that Homo Sapiens is a belligerent species which likes to congregate in groups united by familiar, religious or ideological ties which then consider those outside those groups as suspect and less worthy.

But that is now how I think, I only want the best for all our fellow humans, we are all world citizens after all

That 'western enlightened liberal' sentiment won't help you when you're confronted with a member of some group or clan who craves what you have or dislikes what you do or represent or say or dress like.

There have been attempts to 'right' this 'wrong' and all of them ended in dismal failure. From the 'Homo Sovieticus' in the Soviet Union - 'socialism works, all we need is a need Soviet Man' to the 'Übermensch' in Nazi-Germany, from the many examples of oppressive Islamic regimes like those in Afghanistan, those pushing Salafism and Wahhabism and as far as I'm concerned also the relentless onslaught of consumerism to turn Homo Sapiens into Homo Stultus Consumptrix.

Realise what you're saying when you claim we lack the social and political tools to bring about the changes you consider to be needed. How will you convince the aformentioned groups to accede to your demands for change? What makes you believe your attempt at creating the New Man will succeed where all others ended in dismal failure? What will you do with those who refuse to change? Is it a Brave New World you're after? Books have been written about the subject which you may have read, if not they're both entertaining as well as instructive.

Nobody is releasing their training scripts. Unfortunately.