AI 2040: Plan A

Post by dmitriy_ko » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #277

skrebbel wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nuts how well "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People"[0] aged. That talk is a decade old by now and still hits just as hard as it did back then, despite the incredible advances made in AI in the meantime. [0] https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Yeah I think its possible that for many folks its the first time they're coming up on these concepts, and it troubles them in the same way that the concept of death troubles them (and me, to be clear!). For me its as simple as watching how people talk, and seeing how in every single case whatever the next thing is, if you believe It, there is only ever justification of doubling down, doing more, going deeper, reducin…

Post by yusufozkan » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

27183 wrote: post #389

stalfie wrote: post #378

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No one imagined LLMs in their current format, it was simply a result of discovering that scaling compute and tokens produced better and better results with the Transformer architecture. The inventors of the Transformer architecture were working on better translation, and probably did not imagine that their architecture would lead to modern LLMs. Imagining something in advance is not necessary at all for scientific ad…

> Imagining something in advance is not necessary at all for scientific advancement. This is particularily true in AI, and no one expects to imagine what superintelligence is until after it is created. Then why does anyone expect to create it? I'll take a stab at an answer: they think an LLM is some kind of "incremental improvement" and therefore a step along the inevitable path to discovering AI. But that seems delu…

Post by ozozozd » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #267

This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was. I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification. Yall…

Post by 27183 » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

techpression wrote: post #399

derektank wrote: post #360

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As early as the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur’s work had inspired a belief in the scientific community that it must, in principle be possible to selectively exterminate bacteria. The German physician Paul Ehrlich expounded on this in greatest detail in 1907 when he described his “magic bullet” (or Zauberkugel) theory for effectively targeting pathogens without harming the human host, similar to the immune system.…

And now we’re desperately trying to ”upgrade” penicillin (and friends) because it doesn’t work any more in many cases. Do you think we can repeat the process or do we need something completely different? This is why biological comparisons are weak, we talk about a few agents verifying and checking LLMs, meanwhile the world consists of almost an infinite number of the same, just operating on different time scales. I a…

Post by sudb » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

27183 wrote: post #404

sudb wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By reaching into the voids of its embedding space and returning tokens related to nonexistent semantics. Or, if you like, "hallucinating". The hallucinations which are useful we might call "novel". This sounds to me like an admission that LLMs are not just doing a stochastic search, then. > close enough facsimile to intelligence What's the distinguishing criteria then? How can you tell the difference?

I think we must be talking past eachother. I define stochastic search as a search process with randomness injected into it that can return the following things: - Something contained in the data set, not necessarily the same thing for every iteration of a given query - Something not contained the data set (hallucination), not necessarily the same thing for every iteration of a given query Does that clear it up? > Wha…