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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#71

Post by supern0va »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #68
supern0va wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless/auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked. Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the curre…

I wonder. There has been some headway in getting decentralized training runs to work.

Yeah, Cognition's work is interesting in that regard, but it still doesn't obviate the need for the chips--it just enables training on them when they're spread across multiple data centers.

The Plan A proposal estimates that the ownership of ~96% of AI relevant compute hardware can have its ownership traced, since the companies selling are very few.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#72

Post by geraneum »

oezi wrote: post #28

Forecasting that the GPU build-out will reach 100 trillion USD in 2034 is wild (that's triple the US GDP in 8 years). And another 10x within 2 years. I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before. https://ai-2040.com/supplements/compute-supplement

The article reads like a compilation of online chatter, social media post, etc. on AI. Not surprising to find unsubstantiated imaginary numbers there.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#73

Post by gabriel-uribe »

nxc18 wrote: post #59
gallerdude wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve done any software development at all, certainly.

Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?

I remember being blown away by o1-o3 family of models finally stringing together coherent agentic tool calls to write and execute scripts semi-reliably for workloads in the several minutes before they would start hallucinating/flailing. GPT 5 was a bit ahead of that, but barely

Now we take for granted that the latest models can juggle between multiple browser tabs, applications, databases, simulators, docker etc to write, execute, e2e test and deploy full-stack applications over hours managing up to dozens of subagents, relatively untouched, without taking down prod even 1% of the time

Not only this, but in the GPT 5.0 era, agents had 0 taste. Nothing looked good. It was the agentic version of the twitter bootstrap era, but worse somehow. Now, I would argue the average agent frontend beats the average human frontend. This isn't even getting into 3D applications in the GPT 5 era

Anyway, the models now reliably execute more than a human can fit into their own context. It's magic

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#74

Post by bluefirebrand »

WarmWash wrote: post #69
dmix wrote: post #67

NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.

There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...

People can care about more than one thing

Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else.

Even just making them public parks would be great

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#75

Post by reasonableklout »

stego-tech wrote: post #70

The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of "papers" is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the possibility that LLMs and Diffusion models won't lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they're foisting upon the populace. If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some…

One of the authors talks about this here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a

> It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.

> ...

> Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.

> ...

> If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.

I think their position is: "it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn't get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that's scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here's our plan".

The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it's a political necessity: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2075261194978640096

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#76

Post by throwup238 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #74
WarmWash wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...

People can care about more than one thing Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else. Even just making them public parks would be great

People can pretend to care about more than one thing.

Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that's a completely different matter. It really doesn't take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you've got enough population within 30 minutes to support 22 of them (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city)

If anyone actually bothered to talk to their local reps instead of posting internet comments about how much they "care", they'd get something done. If they don't, their care is just a fart in the wind for all the good it will do.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#77

Post by mzjzjzushs »

lewi wrote: post #62
nxc18 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?

You can compare benches of the old models against the new models. So yeah, you can see the difference. Even then, you can just compare the progress in open models. Leaps and bounds from where they were 6 months ago.

[dead]

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#78

Post by mikestorrent »

tehjoker wrote: post #57
4er_transform wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart. A resource extraction based economy sees people as s…

This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010. Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the compute…

Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#79

Post by supern0va »

WarmWash wrote: post #69
dmix wrote: post #67

NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.

There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...

People are scared about the personal impact from AI, then backfill in justifications without even realizing they're doing it.

If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#80

Post by CamperBob2 »

skybrian wrote: post #64
a_vanderbilt wrote: post #24

I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI devel…

The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.

but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly

If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.

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