Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross

Alex, take it away.

I chatted with Demis 10 plus years ago at this point.

And at the time, he thought it was five plus major breakthroughs that would be needed to achieve AGI.

Now we're down to zero or one.

And I don't disagree with Demis.

I've argued in the past that we achieved AGI in the summer of 2020, no later than with

the discovery of, or the publication rather, of large language models or few-shot learners, which was the GPT-3 paper, we know, I would argue, what AGI is, and we know how... Please define it for me.

That's an insane statement.

I would make maybe even a slightly stronger statement, which is the notion that general intelligence is capable of carrying out a variety of human level or near human level tasks based on the fundamental discovery, again, discovered no later than summer of 2020, that you can achieve general intelligence by taking general human knowledge and compressing it.

That was the fundamental discovery underneath large language models.

We realized as a civilization, certainly no later than 2020, that you could carry out a diverse and general range of tasks with models that had compressed human knowledge.

That's all that we needed.

Everything else, the discovery of refinements of transformers and everything, it's just incremental improvements to that fundamental discovery.

I think there's a broader program here that we're just seeing the very beginning of.

If you look back at the... There were strains, I've spoken about this on the pod in the past, of Russian cosmism.

The Russian cosmist philosophers like Tsiolkovsky spoke about humanity's common task of taking...

every human who's ever lived and finding ways using technology to bring them back to life.

And I think starting with extinct species is just a special case of what technology, I do think, will enable us to do, which is to reach back into our past light cone, take every species that's ever lived,

bring it back in whatever form, even if it's as a hybrid or as a computer simulation, and also reach back in time to our past light cone and take every human who's ever lived, not just at the species level, at the individual level, and computationally or using other advanced techniques, reconstruct them.

I think that's a far more exotic and interesting future than just Jurassic Park petting zoo for dinosaurs.