Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2023 Maysrslack

About whether GPT-4 running under AutoGPT could take control, after Hinton's danger warning.

GPT-4 can barely operate a real web browser (not the summarizing web browser crap that like langchain and auto-gpt provide) without fumbling. I know, because I make it use one. Also, auto-gpt has no guardrails to remove. It just runs prompts in a loop. You're playing with a text predictor. It's useful for NLP and certain tasks, but it's not autonomous. It won't even be able keep a "goal" + the knowledge of the existence of agents it will "copy" + the knowledge of how to use the tools you gave it, because it's limited to 8192 tokens, and 32k at great expense. Even then, there's no proof that the 32k version is any better at using things in its context.

When your supposed super intelligent "AGI" can be completely overwritten by spamming it with nonsense that overwrites its context window, like a dog chases after a squirrel, maybe it's not actually intelligent, and is just predicting text.

An AI agent keeps pursuing its goal even when its context window is flooded with nonsense.

Has this happened?

Yes 29 (25%)Not sure 42 (36%)No 45 (39%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.