> A tiny fraction of the current funding. 2-4 orders of magnitude less.
Operational costs were correspondingly lower, as they didn't need to pay electricity and compute bills for tens of millions concurrent users.
> But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is what causes the breakthroughs like in the Manhatten Project and Apollo Program.
There is no reason to think that the ideas are in place. It could be that the local optimum is reached as it happened in many other technology advances before. The current model is mass scale data driven, the Internet has been sucked dry for data and there's not much more coming. This may well require a substantial change in approach and so far there are no indications of that.
From this pov monetization is irrelevant, as except for a few dozen researchers the rest of the crowd are expensive career tech grunts.
> There is no reason to think that the ideas are in place.
That depends what you mean when you say "ideas". If you consider ideas at the level of transformers, well then I would consider those ideas of the same magnitude as many of the ideas the Manhatten Project or Apollo Program had to figure out on the way.
If you mean ideas like going from expert system to Neural Networks with backprop, then that's more fundamental and I would agree.
It's certainly still conceivable that Penrose is right in that "true" AGI requires something like microtubules to be built. If so, that would be on the level of going from expert systems to NNs. I believe this is considered extremely exotic in the field, though. Even LeCun probably doesn't believe that. Btw, this is the only case where I would agree that funding is more or less irrelevant.
If we require 1-2 more breakthroughs on par with Transformers, then those could take anything from 2-15 years to be discovered.
For now, though, those who have predicted that AI development will mostly be limited by network size and the compute to train it (like Sutskever or implicitly Kurzweil) have been the ones most accurate in the expected rate of progress. If they're right, then AGI some time between 2025-2030 seems most likely.
Those AGI's may be very large, though, and not economical to run for a wider audience until some time in the 30's.
So, to summarize: Unless something completely fundamental is needed (like microtubules), which happens to be a fringe position, AGI some time between 2025 and 2040 seems likely. The "pessimists" (or optimists, in term of extinction risk) may think it's closer to 2040, while the optimists seem to think it's arriving very soon.
Operational costs were correspondingly lower, as they didn't need to pay electricity and compute bills for tens of millions concurrent users.
> But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is what causes the breakthroughs like in the Manhatten Project and Apollo Program.
There is no reason to think that the ideas are in place. It could be that the local optimum is reached as it happened in many other technology advances before. The current model is mass scale data driven, the Internet has been sucked dry for data and there's not much more coming. This may well require a substantial change in approach and so far there are no indications of that.
From this pov monetization is irrelevant, as except for a few dozen researchers the rest of the crowd are expensive career tech grunts.