I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.
Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
Has is been a net positive?
there are a bunch of ways to look at this (dynamite as a specific kind of explosive, dynamite as a stand in for explosives in general, dynamite in the context of what else we would use for similar purposes if dynamite specifically wasn't invented)
and most of them come out on top. It's main innovation is that its a more stable explosive, much safer to use. Without it, I think a lot more people would have died in mining and construction accidents. It's not typically the kind of thing used for warfare, but im sure it has been for some (but would they just use something else?)
certainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.
Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body.
It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.
Dynamite is ~20-60% nitro glycerine and the rest "dope" aka a stabilizer which could be sawdust for instance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite].
If you have heart issues, you're likely taking nitro daily for chest pain.
So saying it's bad is 40% wrong at least. Makes ya think.
loading story #49199496
Now think what ingesting a smartphone would do to your body. That's a very silly metric
loading story #49199397
I believe in AGI to the extent that if what's going on between your ears isn't happening on a network of neurons, it's magic. And I also believe the idea that AGI is near is based on the emergent capabilities of LLMs. There's a chance that AGI will emerge from bigger faster better LLMs. But without a theory of when and how that will happen, I'm not counting on it.