I was listening to the No Agenda podcast a few weeks ago and they played a clip from a programmer who goes by the handle the Primagen. He's an entertaining guy. He actually has a lot of good takes on programming topics.

He started talking about Artificial general intelligence. His focus was Sam Altman's recent comments about AGI being just around the corner. The Primagen brought up a point I hadn't heard anyone mention.

Why wouldn't they keep it a trade secret and just use it themselves? If you believed in your AGI wouldn't that make more sense? So does Altman really believe what he is pitching or is it typical fiat hype? A company like Altman's could use AGI to basically destroy all the competition and take over the tech world? Could they not? Its a big if, but If they create an AGI that can just create things it thinks up why would you want to sell that as a service instead of just owning all the amazing things it creates?

Here's what I think. The AGI Altman is talking about is mostly hype. It will not be able to create the next Facebook or Google. It might be able to make some crappy copies of apps at best. Look at the LLM tools we have today like ChatGPT. They can mimic patterns. They can copy writing styles that were created by humans but the majority of what they produce is pretty easy to spot as AI crap. At least it has been for me up to this point. It tends to function better the more a writing style has consistent patterns. True innovation breaks from patterns in interesting ways but builds upon them.

Many people are just blown away by ChatGPT. I find these people tend to be anything but critical thinkers. They also tend to have little experience with software engineering. I'm impressed with many of these tools but the more I understand how they work the less magical it becomes and the more I see the OZ pulling the strings.

All that said, I do not believe AGI is not right around the corner. That's a myth. I've been hearing that for the last 10 years. It's always right around the corner. And yet, people seem to still fall for this. Sam Altman is a pitchmen. Pretty much any founder in Silicon Valley is as well. You really have to take everything they say with a grain of salt because they are all pitchmen, they are marketing their products trying to get fiat funding. They are trying to get eyeballs they can sell.

They're always going to paint everything in the most rosy light. And that's really what you have to understand. You have to be skeptical, because most of the time you're being hyped. I've been around technology and worked in tech field long enough to see the patterns repeat.

I'm not saying there won't be improvements to "AI". I'm not saying that it hasn't already improved. It's useful, but it is not a general intelligence, and it is not going to take the jobs and engineers any time soon. I hesitate to even say any time soon as I doubt it will ever take engineer's jobs because there is always going to be a need for people that know how things work. No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, it is not actually intelligence. It is at best an algorithm that mimics human patterns. There is no creativity. There is only human creativity. There is our human creativity being used as the seed. But humans are weird. We're organic. We're not machines. As patterns form someone breaks out of the pattern in a new and interesting way.

I'd love to hear counter arguments. Why would it make more sense to sell access to AGI vs. using it for yourself?