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Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨misk@sopuli.xyz⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/sergey-brin-says-agi-is-within-reach-if-googlers-work-60-hour-weeks/

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  • JOMusic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I highly recommend Kara Swisher’s recent book “Burn Book” for insights into the Tech lads like Brin, etc, as she’s known most of them since the 90s.

    Really helps contextualize the crazy cocktail of engineering/commercial power with general naivety a lot of these guys have going.

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  • art@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I guess we don’t need it then.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So he’s saying they’ve exhausted the pool of applicants so badly to replace that with normal work weeks, just 150% amount of Googlers or maybe 200% amount of Googlers?

    Power and fame break a man. Even if he wasn’t broken from the beginning.

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    • Obelix@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      He just wants more money and doesn’t want to pay his workers. Google has been laying off thousands of people in the last year, so there really is no shortage of applicants. They could have just kept their current workforce, maybe?

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    • Cocopanda@futurology.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What I learned working with Googlers. They were dorks. Big ass dorks. Who got used by women because for the first time in their lives. They were attractive to these women. So many broken marriages and divorces from cheating husbands. That they joked about at the Christmas party. It was an eye opening experience.

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  • shortrounddev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Who gives a fuck what Sergey brin thinks

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That might speed it up, but that certainly is not a prerequisite.

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  • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    AGI requires a few key components that no LLM is even close to.

    First, it must be able to discern truth based on evidence, rather than guessing it. Can’t just throw more data at it, especially with the garbage being pumped out these days.

    Second, it must ask questions in the pursuit of knowledge, especially when truth is ambiguous. Once that knowledge is found, it needs to improve itself, pruning outdated and erroneous information.

    Third, it would need free will. And that’s the one it will never get, I hope. Free will is a necessary part of intelligent consciousness. I know there are some who argue it does not exist but they’re wrong.

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    • Opinionhaver@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Third, it would need free will.

      I strongly disagree there. I argue that not even humans have free will, yet we’re generally intelligent so I don’t see why AGI would need it either. In fact, I don’t even know what true free will would look like. There are only two reasons why anyone does anything: either you want to or you have to. There’s obviously no freedom in having to do something but you can’t choose your wants and not-wants either. You helplessly have the beliefs and preferences that you do. You didn’t choose them and you can’t choose to not have them either.

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      • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Free will is what sets us apart from most other animals. I would assert that many humans rarely exert their own free will. Having an interest and pursuing it is an exercise of free will. Some people are too busy surviving to do this. Curiosity and exploration are exercises of free will. Another would be helping strangers or animals - a choice bringing the individual no advantage.

        You argue that wants, preferences, and beliefs are not chosen. Where do they come from? Why does one individual have those interests and not another? It doesn’t come from your parents or genes. It doesn’t come from your environment.

        It’s entirely possible to choose your interests and beliefs. People change religions and careers. People abandon hobbies and find new ones. People give away their fortunes to charity.

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      • spicystraw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I want chocolate, I don’t eat chocolate, exercise of free will.

        By your logic no alcoholic could possible stop drinking and become sober.

        In my humble opinion, free will does not mean we are free of internal and external motivators, it means that we are free to either give in to them or go against.

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    • orb360@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The human mind isn’t infinitely complex. Consciousness has to be a tractable problem imo. I watched Westworld so I’m something of an expert on the matter.

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  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I bet it would happen faster if this guy was fired.

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  • 7rokhym@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thought this was an Onion article!

    Hey plebs! I demand you work 50% more to develop AGI so that I can replace you with robots and fire all of you and make myself a double plus plutocrat! Also, I want to buy an island, small city, Bunker, Spaceship, And/Or something.

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  • jinarched@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t believe a single word of this bullshit.

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  • tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They warn us about AGI while simultaneously attempting to sell it to us.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Black PR is PR too, it’s like warnings about weapons of the future and combat robots and antiutopia for many people worked as an ad, and they want that exact future.

      I think it’s the same with AGI. People think Skynet is cool and want Skynet, because they think it’s the future.

      Except it’s a bit less, like real fascism doesn’t look similar to Warhammer, just to a criminal district ruled by a gang, scaled for a country.

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  • Phegan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    He can fuck all the way off.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      globally

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  • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Or just hire 50% more engineers? Or wait 50% longer?

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    • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      with “hire more” you do run up against the “9 women can have a baby in 1 month” limit, but in this case it’s likely to help.

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      • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Why?

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    For how many years? Cuz y’all ain’t anywhere near AGI. You can’t even get generative AI to not suck compared to your competition in that market lol

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  • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    With all the rounds of layoffs they’ve had, their remaining employees would need to be quite stupid to give a shit what this disloyal piece trash says.

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  • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Hahaha

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  • jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If it’s in reach working 60 hour weeks, it’s also on reach working 40 hour weeks, it will just take 1/3rd longer. ;)

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    • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      50%

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    • howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Let’s be real, it’ll probably happen faster on 40 hour work weeks than 60.

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      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        lots of evidence pointing to it’d be quicker in 32 hour weeks than 40

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  • dan1101@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Let’s work 20 hour weeks then. Who wants AGI other than war pigs and billionaires?

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    • Opinionhaver@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Who wants AGI other than war pigs and billionaires?

      Every single person suffering from a chronic / terminal illnes for example.

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      • dan1101@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That would be nice but would the corporate medical induatry allow that?

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    • RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean, we could get a rogue agi take over the world. It might not even be worse lmao

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    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      WarPigs by Sabbath was about the future.

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  • oakey66@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    AGI is not in reach. We need to stop this incessant parroting from tech companies. LLMs are stochastic parrots. They guess the next word. There’s no thought or reasoning. They don’t understand inputs. They mimic human speech. They’re not presenting anything meaningful.

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    • Opinionhaver@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Why is AGI not in reach? What insight do you have on the matter than you can so confidently make an absolute statement like that?

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      • oakey66@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Experts in the field.

        open.spotify.com/episode/4IoS9rBDq7GLwsgccKqCti?s…

        I also work in the industry. In particular I work in data analytics consulting. It’s all hype to sell consulting hours and compute.

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    • biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      My favourite way to liken LLMs to something else is to autocorrect, it just guesses, and it gets stuff wrong, and it is constantly being retrained to recognise your preferences, such as it starting to not correct fuck to duck for instance.

      And it’s funny and sad how some people think these LLMs are their friends, like no, it’s a collosally sized autocorrect system that you cannot comprehend, it has no consciousness, it lacks any thought, it just predicts from a prompt.

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    • eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I promise this is relevant and worth the watch.

      m.youtube.com/watch?v=tBE06SdgzwM&t=3s

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    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That undersells them slightly.

      LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

      LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.

      They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.

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      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        LLM’s can now generate answers. Watch this:

        www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPf5GCQBNn4&t=450s

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I feel like I have found a lone voice of sanity in a jungle of brainless fanpeople sucking up the snake oil and pretending LLMs are AI. A simple control loop is closer to AI than a stochastic parrot, as you correctly put it.

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      • Opinionhaver@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        pretending LLMs are AI

        LLMs are AI. There’s a common misconception about what ‘AI’ actually means. Many people equate AI with the advanced, human-like intelligence depicted in sci-fi - like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, and GERTY. These systems represent a type of AI called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), designed to perform a wide range of tasks and demonstrate a form of general intelligence similar to humans.

        However, AI itself doesn’t imply general intelligence. Even something as simple as a chess-playing robot qualifies as AI. Although it’s a narrow AI, excelling in just one task, it still fits within the AI category. So, AI is a very broad term that covers everything from highly specialized systems to the type of advanced, adaptable intelligence that we often imagine. Think of it like the term ‘plants,’ which includes everything from grass to towering redwoods - each different, but all fitting within the same category.

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      • SinningStromgald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        There are at least three of us.

        I am worried what happens when the bubble finally pops because shit always rolls downhill and most of us are at the bottom of the hill.

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  • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lmfao

    Yeah, Cloud Console would probably suck less too

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So he’s saying it’s not in reach then.

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  • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Anyone else feel hungry?

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No, but lets go get some margaritas.

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      • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Bloody Mary’s are back on the menu!

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      • Flisty@mstdn.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Slushy the rich?

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  • Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A liar, scam artist, and scumbag.

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  • 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If it can be reached in 60 hour work weeks it can be reached in 40, but nah mfs should rush to get themselves replaced

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If it can be reached in 60 hour work weeks, then it can be reached in 40 hour work weeks be hiring a second person.

      If management isn’t willing to put the effort in of hiring the required staff, why would I want to work the job of 2 people for 1 persons pay?

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      • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        IT project management doesn’t work that way, but it doesn’t matter much. 60 hour work weeks wouldn’t help, either.

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  • Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    …and the horse he road in on.

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  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is Google in the cloning business? Because I could swear that’s Zack Freedman from the Youtube 3D printing channel. He even wears the heads-up display (Youtube Link). Sorry for being off-Topic but who cares about what tech CEOs say about AGI anyway?

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  • sundrei@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What a brilliant suggestion, no way an AI could have come up with that, executive jobs are safe forever!

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  • andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What is the point, though?

    If you made AGI, you’d have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they’re called people!

    I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it’s equal parts useless and evil.

    First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A “cure for cancer”? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn’t ideas, it’s that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. “Intelligence” isn’t the limiting element!

    The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I’m sure they won’t come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.

    It’s like Jason’s problem-solving advice in “The Good Place”:

    “Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away, I had a different problem.”

    Sure. Let’s work ourselves to death forTHIS.

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    • lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t think a device will ever have a thought. I find it somewhat akin to a belief in the anamism of objects, that it will aquire some form of life force of its own. What a thought is, is a complete mystery. Nobody knows why they happen, where they come from. So, who is even to determine whether an inamimate object is exhibiting signs of consciousness? There are some people that believe it, others are just running a con.

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      • andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m a materialist, so I think digital consciousness is totally possible. But then I’m also a bit of an animist too, so maybe you’re right.

        I agree overall, though. It’s so much more epistimology than actual technology, and the field seems to be half grifters and half cultists. Which doesn’t really inspire confidence that this is in any way a genuinely useful commercial venture.

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  • bungle_in_the_jungle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    No. Dumbass.

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  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

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    • Damage@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      And somehow it will run on thin air

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      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        What if the whole earth, itself, is like, one giant supercomputer, designed to answer the ultimate question, and it’s just been running for billions of years?

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  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m pretty sure the science says it’s more like 20-30. I know personally, if I try to work more than about 40-ish hours in a week, the time comes out of the following week without me even trying. A task that took two hours in a 45-hour “crunch” week will end up taking three when I don’t have to crunch. And if I keep up the crunch for too long, I start making a lot of mistakes.

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