
Ask HN: Is General purpose AI going to sneak up on us? - elisharobinson
I have been following the ai space for a few years now and everyday there seems to be a breakthrough in fields people believed  impossible to solve by AI systems. Although the general consensus is that good AI is quite a bit far away ,could it be we are vastly underestimating the capabilities of self learning systems. from my view all the basic ingredients for some form of AGI already exist.So i fear that we might create AGI as in spontaneous combustion of gas in a hot day.
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alistproducer2
Nope. There's no single algorithm that will lead to General intelligence. As
long as the apex of our ML techniques is parameter optimization via gradient
decent, there will be no critical mass point. Currently, it's possible for
someone to take a modular approach to general intelligence. And someone may
very well be working on that and will spring such a system on the world but
because each subsystem is only as good as the state of the art, and if the
systems were that good the developers would try to capitalize on such a system
immediately rather than waiting for all the other subsystems to surpass the
state of the art, we would have some warning that the field was advancing;
hence no surprise general intelligence.

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mindcrime
It's pretty hard to say if it _will_ or not, but I don't think there's any
question that it _could_. What's even harder to guess is when that might
happen if it did.

All of that said, there are enough people working on AGI on a day-in / day-out
basis who would probably recognize the incipient stages of a real AGI, that I
don't worry a tremendous amount about being surprised by the emergence of AGI.
But on the flip-side, some "kid in a garage" operating outside of the
mainstream of industry and academia could be the one who makes The Big
Breakthrough, so there's no way to be totally sure...

