Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

> Study Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and your excitement about how quickly this technology would take over other cognitive work would wane as you learned just how much brute human force went into fine-tuning the software specifically to beat Kasparov.

That was ~26 yeas ago. In the intervening 26 years humans have been curb-stomped so hard at chess that certain microwaves might be competitive against human grandmasters. Anyone who doesn't think that was an exciting moment for AI research has impossible standards, we're living in a tiny window of existence where humans were at the top of the intellectual food chain and are now dropping to also-ran status along with the rest of the meat-based animal kingdom.

All these moments are the real deal. The idea that somehow this particular step change is even unexpected is missing the forest for the trees. The trends that have been observed since the beginning of computers are chugging away so quickly the whole process may well happen in a single generation.

Where on the S-shaped curve are we? I am curious if one day the paradigm that brought forth the current chatbots has to be abandoned because it's reached his limits, and a new approach will replace it.

But certainly it has inspired the field of AI massively and I expect many new developments which will lead is into a future that resembles sci-fi books and movies.

I am also interested in what good sci-fi will look like in the future? It looks like "the singularity" is defined by the limits of our imagination. We cannot imagine what comes after it, so this means we cannot write sci-fi on it, right?

> Where on the S-shaped curve are we?

Why do you think it's an S-shape? As you say, we're heading for a singularity!

This is the Real Deal, but not in away you would imagine.

So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense! This is the end of debate, consensus and interactive communication, as we know it!

Similar moment was in Africa in 1960, after they got AK45 and other cheap weapons. It was easy to dominate Congo River Basin with a few Maxim machine guns mounted on boats, when opponents had only spears. But when every tiny village gets comparable fire power, there are no colonies!

What's a large language model doing when it's not being queried?

Am I correct that they only compute information when dealing with a prompt? If so, that seems like a fundamental flaw. An actual "thinking machine" would be constantly running computations on its accumulated experience in order to improve its future output.