About whether scaled-up language models can reach general intelligence when thought doesn't need language.
Has this happened?
Yes 3 (3%)Not sure 25 (22%)No 87 (76%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether scaled-up language models can reach general intelligence when thought doesn't need language.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Sure, when humans use multiple skill to address a specific problem, you can sometimes outperform them by scaling a spefic one of those skills.
When it comes to general intelligence, I think we are trying to run before we can walk. We can't even make a computer with a basic, animal level understanding of the world. Yet we are trying to take a tool that was developed on top of system that already had an understanding of the world and use it to work backwards to give computers an understanding of the world.
I'm pretty skeptical that we're going to succeed at this. I think you have to be able to teach a computer to climb a tree or hunt (subhuman AGI) before you can create superhuman AGI.