Yes, phones and consumer gadgets are becoming “hot water” (at least for the affluent West). From that, he seemingly concludes that technology itself has no room for growth and development? I don’t quite follow his reasoning, but I notice a, dare I say, load-bearing sentence:
As it becomes more and more clear that these machines are nothing like conscious people, that they don’t do runaway self-improvement, and that they won’t foment the apocalypse, […]
Questions of consciousness aside, I don’t see how you can look at the developments of the last few years and conclude that AI is over, and that self-improvement is tapering off. To me, that’s still very much an unknown, and the latest model releases makes me lean more exponential than sigmoidal.
(I don’t particularly want to be right here, since I see the chances of us getting the Culture as rather slim 🖇️)
It’s not that it won’t improve, but it isn’t going to cause a runaway “singularity” event.
Like the drama around the models “escaping” and “amazing hacks” have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.
A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.
That might very well be, and would probably be the best outcome we can hope for. I guess we’ll see the shape of the curve in the next year-ish - if recursive self-improvement hasn’t come into play for real by then, I can’t see how the current investment level is defensible (but I’m not sure I see that now, so who knows)
Yes, phones and consumer gadgets are becoming “hot water” (at least for the affluent West). From that, he seemingly concludes that technology itself has no room for growth and development? I don’t quite follow his reasoning, but I notice a, dare I say, load-bearing sentence:
Questions of consciousness aside, I don’t see how you can look at the developments of the last few years and conclude that AI is over, and that self-improvement is tapering off. To me, that’s still very much an unknown, and the latest model releases makes me lean more exponential than sigmoidal.
(I don’t particularly want to be right here, since I see the chances of us getting the Culture as rather slim 🖇️)
It’s not that it won’t improve, but it isn’t going to cause a runaway “singularity” event.
Like the drama around the models “escaping” and “amazing hacks” have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.
A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.
That might very well be, and would probably be the best outcome we can hope for. I guess we’ll see the shape of the curve in the next year-ish - if recursive self-improvement hasn’t come into play for real by then, I can’t see how the current investment level is defensible (but I’m not sure I see that now, so who knows)