141–150 of 557 posts
> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?
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> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…
Agreed. I realize it’s a metaphor but saying we’re so close to the singularity that it’s guaranteed to happen (the event horizon being a point of no return) seems like wild hubris.
This reminds me of Pat Gelsinger quoting the Bible on Twitter, lol. Between this and Ed Zitron at the other end of the spectrum, Ed's a lot more believeable to be honest.
Link for context (to what Ed Zitron said)?
We've somehow had a calm few months in the industry without the daily hyperbole on AGI, superintelligence and the upcoming singularity. After the string of underwhelming incremental updates from all the top LLM publishers I guess they need to start the hype cycle again.
> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from…
> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.
I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.
> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from…
No we'll totally have flying cars and cure cancer and live life in an AR/VR multiverse and make all knowledge 100% free to everyone worldwide. Meanwhile the only real advancements in tech in the last two decades have been smaller computers (smartphones) and ads.
What's the goal of posting this right now ? A lot of what's written here seems to be well-trodden ground from the last two years of discussions, is it just to centralize a thesis within one post?
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the h…
Absolutely! We’re in an interesting time, and LLMs are certainly over-hyped.
With that said, I’d argue that most software today is _average_. Not necessarily bad by design, but average because of the (historic) economies of software development.
We’ve all seen it: some beloved software tool that fills a niche. They raise funding/start to scale and all of a sudden they need to make this software work for more people.
The developers remove poweruser features, add functionality to make it easier to use, and all of a sudden the product is a shell of its former self.
This is what excites me about LLMs. Now we can build software for 10s or 100s of users, instead of only building software with the goal (and financial stability) of a billion users.
My hope is that, even with tons of terrible vibe coded atrocities littering the App Store/web, we’ll at least start to see some software that was better than before, because the developers can focus on the forest rather than each individual tree (similar to Assembly -> C -> Python).
More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions seem like fairly safe bets, but they don't necessarily suggest superintelligence as I expect most people would define the term.