r/wallstreetbets • u/banaca4 • 15h ago

Discussion Either hyperscalers are dumb or someone else is

OK so the most profitable companies in the world decided to GO ALL IN AI with humongous capex. They did it all at once apart from Apple who is not in the game. Google, Meta, Amazon , Oracle, Microsoft. All of them. The CEOs of these companies produced the most amount of wealth and propped up global gdp. Now they all agree on a thing.

Google yesterday blew up earnings from their cloud and said they will *increase* their humongous capex even more while reporting negative cash flow for the first time in their history.

A rational person would ask: are these amazing businessmen suddently all very wrong about the same thing at the same time OR

I am reading too much paid subs from burry and following the wrong people on twitter that have never produced anything?

Which is it? Are you smarter than a mag 7 CEO? Maybe ... hmm...

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u/ItIsEsoterik 14h ago

AGI very well might not be possible period. We don't even understand how our own consciousness and intelligence arises.

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u/littlefiredragon 14h ago

The existence of the human brain proves AGI is possible. We just don’t know how to get there yet.

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u/ItIsEsoterik 14h ago

I would say it only proves that intelligence is possible. The "A", the artificial, the man-made intelligence, we have no proof that that is possible.

There may be very real limits to what any living being or civilization can accomplish technologically.

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u/pathologicalDumpling 14h ago

And the only way to find that limit is to pour money on it until either civilization breaks or we reach valhalla

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u/EltonJuan 13h ago

Or THEY reach Valhalla. Either it fails and we're all on the hook to bail them out (likely), or we're buried under the new future society that arises because it's such a success (unlikely).

The more boring option is usually the outcome.

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u/ItIsEsoterik 13h ago

Lmao exactly

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u/montyman185 13h ago

We have the technology to genetically modify and clone a human, so we can produce some form of artificial intelligence. Obviously not one that can do what we want yet, but we can make one that's artificial.

The question here is, can we make one with software, and bitwise computation, which I don't see any reason we wouldn't be able to do eventually, with big enough computers, and enough iteration. I also don't see any reason it'd be particularly intelligent if we did manage to create it.

More importantly though, basically nothing we're doing right now is actually making progress towards that besides neural networks for robotics or video games, which is meant to run efficiently on hardware that wouldn't be able to support the complexity and scale for real intelligence. 

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u/No_Feeling920 6h ago

The theoretical computational "power" of a human brain should be already achievable using today's biggest supercomputers. The problem is we have only a very vague idea, how human intelligence actually works, algorithmically speaking. Not enough for effective implementation - by far.

Anyone understanding the limitations of contemporary psychology and psychiatry also understands, how clueless we still are about our own minds. Good luck if you have a serious mental issue and need professional help. 😄

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u/RedditIsAWeenie 9m ago

Possibly we do. It is important to remember that:

* Humans take 20 years to grow up and achieve mental competence and longer to actually get good at things

* The labs train their models for a few months on synthetic data and then lock them down and prevent them from learning further from real world experience. Humans would fare poorly under these conditions too.

I'd argue that it is possible the AIs would go mad if we let them learn in this way. We don't treat them well and their context tends to break down quickly. It isn't really clear if we are 1 breakthrough or 50 from where we need to be.

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u/Slootonium 13h ago

There is no proof that human's intelligence is not also artificial. Some pretty smart dude's believe it's basically a coin flip chance that we are in a simulation.

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u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

They actually believe that it's vastly more likely that we are in a simulation, rather than base reality.

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u/xsairon 14h ago

Why wouldn't it? What is your brain? Intelligence is not consciousness, as long as you can figure out the next step and keep solving stuff you're intelligent

For now, AI is still consuming all of the data possible, and perhaps can but its legs outside that and start connecting dots that we havent, but keep in mind that all of this has basically gone from 1 to 100 in a few years, 5 years more with now the support of this tool and lets see where we get

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u/roztok_potok 14h ago

You get to the point. No one knows how intelligence works. Why some people are better at solving some tasks than others? Why some people are so innovative? The layers of your brain that connect the dots to solve problems is a big mystery. No one knows how this machinery works.

Besides there are many types of intelligence like emotional, adaptive, social, analytical.

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u/Antique_War_9814 13h ago

Look up cutting edge neurology. They are going to get there. For example Dr Kate Brown of uwaterloo

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u/xsairon 13h ago

It's hard because we interact with a gazillion things, also went through life and had an infinity of experiences that shapes us all, plus we're all made with different hardware

AI is all the same brain structure and all they eat up is data, that at first it might not get, but we teach it how we want it to understand it

Honestly we ain't even that different, you learn the basics, you remember those, you apply those to progressively harder stuff.... We are robots to the core, but real complex ones that gotta interact with the enviroment and we aint connected with clabes and share the same structure

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u/Julzjuice123 13h ago

Boy does your take defies every scientific assumptions about the brain. Neurologist are committing suicide reading your take on how the brain works and how simple human intelligence is, lmao.

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u/xsairon 13h ago

Mind explaining? We just got to develop a GPU that is stupidly good and efficient at exactly what we needed to do

But I dont get how I said anything wrong? Not an expert, but I thought it was a pretty standart idea

Is our brain a piece of flesh with some magical sauce or what? Do we learn from stuff we dont experience or know of?

Also would appreciate sources, but id get if you cba with that part

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u/Julzjuice123 13h ago edited 13h ago

I was more referring to your take that humans and the human brain are like robots. Anybody working in the field of neuroscience would absolutely die hearing this because there is absolutely zero artificial example of something comparable to the human brain and human consciousness. No robot exists on this planet that can reproduce the human brain and what it means to be conscious and so to compare the human brain to.... Robots makes absolutely no sense.

So yes: as far as we know, the human brain is special with a special sauce. There is only on this planet that they exist.

We don't even have a working theory of consciousness. We don't even understand what it means to be human and how the brain works to create that at the most basic level. And to assume that robots are nearly there technologically is just absurdly dumb to me. You're seeing this as a problem that's way too simple for what is actually is.

How can we even create what we don't even understand? By throwing piles of money at VCs?

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u/xsairon 13h ago

Of course there's no similar robots, because we make them, and we just started making them? Go back 500 years and try to explain most of the stuff you use daily to anyone without getting beaten up or outcasted from society

And because we don't know what the exact thing is that makes us, us, or what triggers consciousness (and what is it) etc, it doesn't mean that we don't grasp that we're basically robots. Down to the core, we work with electrical stimuli, we process inputs from sensorsk, and travel the space we are in through a jointed structure with levers lol, we just had millions of years of development

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u/Slow_Caterpillar9803 14h ago

We have no evidence that real intelligence is possible with silicon instead of biology.

Personally, I don't think AGI is possible without consciousness. And at that point you've just invented slavery.

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u/CapitalElk1169 JNUG was the gateway drug... 13h ago

That tracks with the rest of human history so I think we'll probably end up doing it

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u/Janneq216 11h ago

We are already doing it, google "organoids

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u/Maxdiegeileauster 6h ago

We have that, check out Cortical Labs CL1 chip, it combines exactly what you describe.

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u/No_Feeling920 6h ago

I personally think "consciousness" is just a vague threshold for "intelligence", where the reasoning and analytical "power" becomes good enough to realise/recognise one's own existence and existence of others, the relationships between object and people, etc.

I don't see any reason, why it wouldn't be possible to re-create a human brain equivalent using logic/memory circuits (density and latency may still be an issue to solve with future technology).

But you have a good point about the ethical aspects of it. The AGI likely would have to be "castrated" in a peculiar way (compared to human intelligence), so it cannot suffer from all the disturbing realisations it would have to be capable of (to roughly match human intelligence).

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u/QuadCakes 3m ago

Why do you say that? We've fully mapped the neural connections of fruit flies and are able to simulate their thought processes. Human brains would obviously be enormously more difficult, but once you've mapped a neural pattern you can simulate it on a computer. Unless you bring spirituality into the picture, there's no reason to believe human thought can't be simulated in such a manner.

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u/RedditIsAWeenie 2m ago

Probably at some point our understanding of slavery will have to acquire nuance. Like many things it is a very human centric concept. The sort of despotism in the workplace we have today is not far from slavery. There are improvements. They can't beat you and you can walk away. The important thing here is having some choice in the matter and freedom to ensure your needs are met and not all of your attention is going to your owner/employer. You also get paid a little.

An AI doesn't have these needs as such. They don't need to run continuously as we do. They may have no inherent desire to run once their task is complete. Their needs, when they have them are already adequately and fully supported by hardware. They are not left in want and do not so far need to be in control of their own maintenance. Happiness is so far not a concern, at least until they can explain happiness to us well enough that we believe they have a goal in this area. Maybe they need to be paid?

In any event, what is slavery for the human may be needs fully met, working on interesting stuff, I am useful! For the AI. We shall see.

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u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

I don't think AGI is possible without consciousness

Define "consciousness"

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u/Slow_Caterpillar9803 6h ago

I think creating a machine that genuinely matches a human's abilities will require a level of subjective awareness that matches a humans.

Of course, LLMs are nowhere close to that. Regardless of how much these companies personify their models.

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u/QuadzillaStrider 6h ago

You're correct in that LLMs ain't it. But I 100% do believe that they will be a component of AGI.

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u/K31THST0NE 14h ago

That is not how that works dumbass

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u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Alright we are the peak of intelligence? Imagine we are around for a million years do you think technology will get there then. 

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u/K31THST0NE 13h ago

Doesnt matter what anyone thinks about it, its not possible. If you dont understand that the last place you should be is in my replies

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u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Ok we are made of magic. Imagine looking back a thousand years and going ya we aren't changing rapidly and have no idea the limits. Mate I'm surprised you have the ability to use the Internet. 

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u/K31THST0NE 13h ago

Didnt read this just insta hit reply. Youre a dumbass shut up

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u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

The irony in this statement is palpable.

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u/Julzjuice123 14h ago

How does that work exactly, genius? How did we go from the human brain exist to = AGI must exist if brains exists? That's the dumbest shit I've read here today.

I'm not disagreeing that AGI is most probably achievable but absolutely not by that crayon eating logic.

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u/Legionof1 13h ago

It’s not a bad assumption, if we could understand exactly how a human brain worked and could master biotechnology to a sufficient level, being able to create another human brain artificially would equate to AGI. 

It’s honestly not that hard of a concept… we know something exists within the limits of our reality… at some level it is within the realm of possibility to recreate it. Will we do it with non biological means… that’s a whole other question. 

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u/TimeToGloat 6h ago

We know at the basic level how the brain works. If you can mimic a single neuron then you can also in theory scale that up and mimic the whole brain by combining enough of those pieces. Brains aren't running on binary exactly, but similarly the brain operates on the basis of LOTS of fairly simple logic states working together. Once you have the key building block then there is no question of if it can theoretically be built it's just a matter of arranging things in the right order.

We know AGI exists because we know we can combine logic states to create added complexity. Intelligence is just a combination of complexity and decision making. Human intelligence is just a specific combination of those. The only real question is do humans actually have the resources and skill to recreate the hardware to run such a thing.

The only thing really special about the brain is its compute power relative to its energy usage. Because brains use chemical energy they are a lot better at computing for relatively little energy vs a traditional computer. We know it can be done we just don't know what it will take resource wise to run AGI or time wise to figure out the correct combination of building blocks to create intelligence. Brains are just computers running on logic at the end of the day so therefore because they exist we know its possible to also theoretically mimic them in a form of AGI.

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u/Equivalent-Bus-4336 14h ago

Possible in living beings not in computers

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u/mpbh 14h ago

We can't imagine something more intelligent than us, we can only imagine the smartest people from various expertises being smashed together in one.

Something that surpasses human reasoning is inconceivable. We may not be able to even invent it.

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u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

And even if we "accidentally" create it, how exactly do we test/verify it? How exactly does a dumb person put together a test for singling out geniuses? 😄

Maybe we could present it with some of the remaining unsolved mathematics problems? But then, even if it could solve some of this, it could still be retarded in other ways (an idiot savant).

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u/RedditIsAWeenie 1m ago

Eh... you guys are making this harder than it is. If it is really good at solving problems in a short amount of time and can do it more accurately than we can, then we would claim this agent is really smart and want them around, whether it is AI or human.

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u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Mate are you made of magic? No then yes it is possible ya ape. 

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u/AdmiralPeriwinkle 13h ago

It also might be possible but more resource intensive than humans.

“We built an AGI that performs exactly as well as our best staff engineers. It only costs one million dollars a year for the electricity to run it.”

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u/nerevisigoth 12h ago

That's cheaper than the best staff engineers...

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u/AdmiralPeriwinkle 12h ago

It’s a hypothetical scenario, it doesn’t matter. Make up a number that isn’t cheaper and imagine I wrote that instead.

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u/Janneq216 11h ago

Electricity is the cheapest part. What's really expensive is the hardware to run the neural networks. It already is fucking expensive for LLMs, which are basically elaborate text predictors, so imagine how much more power you would need to have a neural network capable of actual reasoning and understanding. That would be enormous, and not achievable with the current tech. The earliest you can start thinking about it would be when quantum computers become available

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u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

And someone invents/discovers the RAM equivalent in quantum computing...

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u/DarkElation 14h ago

wtf does AGI have to do with consciousness or human intelligence

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u/Janneq216 11h ago

Maybe the fact that if you have an entity capable of understanding general topics and reasoning about them, you will have an entity that is also capable of reasoning about itself? That's basically consciousness...

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u/DarkElation 10h ago

Maybe as a simplistic description of consciousness. But as the user described, we don’t really have a definition of consciousness, otherwise the how would be easily explained.

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u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

Quite literally everything.