A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

I'm a little confused by this confidence? Is there more evidence aside from the number of smart people working on it? We have a lot of smart people working on a lot of big problems, that doesn't guarantee a solution nor a timeline.

I really don't understand the level optimism that seems to exist for LLMs. And speculating that people "secretly hate LLMs" and "feel threatened by them" isn't an answer (frankly, when I see arguments that start with attacks like that alarm bells start going off in my head).

> It's easy to spot people who secretly hate LLMs and feel threatened by them these days.

I don't think OP is threatened or hates LLM, if anything, OP is on the position that LLM are so far away from intelligence that it's laughable to consider it threatening.

> In conclusion, we will reach AGI

The same way we "cured" cancer and Alzheimer's, two arguably much more important inventions than a glorified text predictor/energy guzzler. But I like the confidence, it's almost as much as OP's confidence that nothing substantial will happen.

> It's a race with high stakes, and history shows that these types of races don't stop until there is a winner.

So is the existential threat to humanity in the race to phase out fossil fuels/stop global warming, and so far I don't see anyone "winning".

> However, these models increase productivity, allowing people to focus more on research

The same way the invention of the computer, the car, the vacuum cleaner and all the productivity increasing inventions in the last centuries allowed us to idle around, not have a job, and focus on creative things.

> It's easy to spot people who secretly hate LLMs and feel threatened by them these days

It's easy to spot e/acc bros feeling threatened that all the money they sunk into crypto, AI, the metaverse, web3 are gonna go to waste and try to fan the hype around it so they can cash in big. How does that sound?

The worst part is that when DoorDash fucks up an order, the standard remediation process every other business respects—either a full refund or come back, pick up the wrong order, and bring you the correct order—is just not something they ever do. And if you want to avoid DoorDash, you can’t because if you order from the restaurant directly it often turns out to be white label DoorDash.

Some days I wish there was a corporate death penalty and that it could be applied to DoorDash.

An assembly language programmer might have said the same about C programming at one point. I think the point is, that once you depend on a more abstract interface that permits you to ignore certain details, that permits decades of improvements to that backend without you having to do anything. People are still experimenting with what this abstract interface is and how it will work with AI, but they've already come leaps and bounds from where they were only a couple of years ago, and it's only going to get better.