Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 567 posts

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#141

Post by akudha »

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

I don’t get the appeal of golf. Hitting a ball into a hole with a crooked stick? But hey, that is just my personal preference. People can play whatever sport they want, or do whatever they want and call it a sport.

That said, it would be nice if the so called sport didn’t take so much land, water etc. Especially in prime locations

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#142

Post by morpheos137 »

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.

Surprisingly enough the us constitution specifies a right to free speech. Meanwhile who is funding the past two decades of pie in the sky bullshit from silicon valley in the media? Is promoting and unpopular opinion illegal? Since when do we judge the merits of an argument based on who articulates it?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#143

Post by hkalbasi »

reasonableklout wrote: post #48
ipnon wrote: post #12

Kind of feels like fusion power at this point, always just around the corner.

What predictions about the technology are the authors making that you do not believe? There is plenty falsifiable in this in ai-2027.com, and they have not gotten everything right. But some things they have: for example, the Pentagon has already invoked export controls to restrict the deployment of a frontier model. This level of government oversight wasn't predicted until 2027 in the original scenario.

Self improvement of agent-1 is not achieved. Sure, people in AI labs write python code with AI, but I doubt it resulted in 50% algorithmic effiecency in training. Writing python code never was the bottleneck, if it was, AI labs could hire more people to do it. And this is core of the prediction.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#144

Post by gabriel-uribe »

Timwi wrote: post #136
mikestorrent wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we haven't even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they're still basically just OCR'ing screenshots?) Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow worl…

How do you think humans experience desktop interfaces? “Basically just OCR'ing screenshots” is exactly what humans do.

I was also under the impression modern AI agents have moved on from just OCR'ing screenshots to leveraging native vision model capabilities.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#145

Post by reasonableklout »

scotty79 wrote: post #104
Animats wrote: post #81

This is from the "AI 2027"[1] people. [1] https://ai-2027.com/

This seems way more accurate. Up until early 2026. Though it has bizzare fixation on geopolitics and China which it severely understimated. It's pretty obvious that China is going to outinnovate and outcompute US companies quite soon. Even if just because they care about higher education, providing enough electricity and letting smart people do smart things instead of randomly muzzling them with bans and export contr…

Hm, China is also beginning to invoke export controls to restrict homegrown models: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-ove...

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#146

Post by mangogogo »

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.

Source or link?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#147

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#148

Post by WarmWash »

swatcoder wrote: post #103
marcosdumay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When mines pay a sizeable share of their profits as local taxes, and obey environmental regulations, people suddenly start to like them.

Can you point to some examples of where that's happening? These data centers are specifically being scouted for communities whose governance is too weak to negotiate for some "sizeable share of their profits" and too ill-prepared to have suitable environmental regulations on the books already. The Ivy League sharks planning these buildout initiatives are sharp people who are looking out for the interests of their emp…

States give the tax incentives, local municipalities are cheap to buy out, that's why all these towns quickly pass approval. $30 million annually is pennies for a datacenter and a windfall for a town.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#149

Post by ranyume »

reasonableklout wrote: post #75
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…

So it's a fan-fiction?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#150

Post by Lerc »

I note that they use the Sam Altman quote.

"AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.”

Is there any serious journalistic source suggesting that this was anything other than an offhand joke? This article links to a youtube clip of the comment with context removed, but hair raising comments.

Taking the most uncharitable view of any person, you could imagine someone who was evil enough to cause the end of the world after their own lifespan where they faced no inconvenience, but not the circumstances from the quote

The quote as it stands is preposterous enough that I don't think a human capable of functioning in society would seriously say such a thing.

Are people wilfully misinterpreting the comment, or do they truly believe this an actually held opinion? If so, can they explain how they think someone could hold an opinion like that?

Post reply on HN