this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
76 points (88.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
42624 readers
393 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If it worked they could be profitable already instead of continuing to burn billions of investment dollars.
They're burning billions because they're trying to rush ahead of the competition in capabilities. No matter how good LLMs get, that is not their goal. They're trying to reach AGI and there are no second places in that race.
I think they know AGI is far off, and are setting a more medium term goal. I think they are just trying to corner the new LLM market that might emerge. Even if the bubble pops and 3/4 go bust, they hope to be the one that survives and gets to be the quasi-monopoly in that market for the next decade.
Nobody "knows" that AGI is far off just like nobody knows that it's near either. That is not an established fact. Those are both just popular narratives in their respective camps. We could get there tomorrow or it could take usanother 400 years. Both are plausible outcomes.
There is no AGI. Whatever they reach, there will always be a next level.
In the 1980s if you said you could make a computer play Go better than the best human masters, there are those who would have said "that would be true artificial intelligence." Then it happened, and the world moved on.
There was a time when a computer understanding speech, translating languages, would have been considered true artificial intelligence, then we got there, and the world moved on.
LLMs have solved a mathematical question left open with prize money for decades unsolved by humans (just one, really, that I know of, so far...), but that's not AGI yet...
Many forms of "the Turing Test" are being passed by LLMs tested against the majority of the general population now, but apparently that's not AGI yet...
AGI will continue to be a moving goalpost, as it should be. It's not a finish line, it's a journey. Even when automated systems are building themselves from raw material inputs, designing and building their own infrastructure, power plants, communications, and continuously improving their own designs, there will be those who still design new tests for "AGI" that they don't pass, yet.
AI and AGI are not synonymous terms. We've had AI since 1956. General intelligence means human-level intelligence. When an AI system can do any task as well as or better than humans can, it's by definition generally intelligent.
We're not changing the definitions. People thought that chess is so hard that once an AI system can play chess it has to be as intelligent as humans. That just turned out to be a false assumption. A system can be superhuman at playing chess but that ability doesn't need to translate to any other field.
Thinking that LLMs will ever become AGI is fucking hysterical. They are trying to turn lead into gold using a stove and a skillet.
Mind quoting the part where I claimed LLMs will become AGI?
Are you an AI shill?
If not, then I didn't say you claimed that. Altman and the other shills do.
Then I don't see how your response in any way relates to what I said.
Whether you think they'll ever get there or not is completely irrelevant. That is still what they're after and the reason for the massive upfront investments.