This was within the Monetary Instances. I don’t have a subscription, so I don’t know what article it was in, or what context, or if they’re in on the joke of the final absurdity of the graph or not.
In case it’s not tremendous apparent which one will occur, I’ll wager all the things I’ve on it mainly being the blue line. The graph has a log scale, that’s already exponential development.
There have been outdated Yudkowsky / Hanson debates about FOOM, and I’m curious how I felt about them on the time. Trying again on it it’s type of embarrassing to ever have believed within the machine God in any respect, however there’s nonetheless believers on the market, and this submit is aimed toward you. Type of like a getting individuals out of Scientology factor. I heard as soon as that the Singularity was simply the rapture for 150+ IQ individuals and I dismissed it as some bizarre envy of 150-IQ-nerds-are-right factor. Umm yea, the individuals saying the rapture factor had been proper, and perception within the rapture for nerds is now migrating down the IQ slide.
There’s a bunch of the way this perception manifests. There’s insane hyperscaler spend on infrastructure, which is definitely fairly cool and can have good results long run when the bubble pops. The hyperscalers aren’t even unsuitable for taking the wager and shopping for GPUs, as a result of the price of lacking out is existential. To their enterprise, to not the world! Like Google is the obvious candidate for AI disruption, how a lot do you search vs use AI as we speak?
I think the ROI isn’t there for AI, everybody type of is aware of this, but not spending continues to be an enormous threat. A lot better for multiples to hype up the daybreak of superintelligence as a substitute of it is a capex race with strategic panic dynamics however we have to defend our moat.
One other is absolutely the madness of the SF/Twitter cult. I’m going to be in Berkeley in June and am already type of dreading it. This power is exhausting to be round, and plenty of of those individuals behave like literal youngsters. It’s at all times one thing I felt from SF tech, like there was one thing about these those who by no means grew up, even for the people who find themselves method older than me.
I’m not going to present the Mythos spectacle any extra consideration, however that is the epitome of what I imply. So far as I can inform, these individuals truly assume they’re constructing the machine God with all of the quasireligious hullaboo that goes with it. Now if you see how AI works and the way it’s and will probably be built-in into the financial system, I’m ashamed to have ever believed on this. And similar to Scientology, it’s an actual worldview with actual penalties for believing it.
None of this modifications the true energy of AI and the extent to which it’ll change the world. It’s a technological change on par with the steam engine, and its results will ripple into each business similar to the steam engine did. However now, are you able to consider an organization that made steam engines? I actually couldn’t, and I googled it and had by no means heard of the three Gemini Flash introduced up.
Think about a steam engine producer speaking about how they’re constructing the Iron God. Like now we’d see that as quaint and type of retro cool, however ugh how unbearable individuals could be if they really believed it. And we solely see it as quaint as a result of as we speak we perceive steam engines and have built-in them into our worldview.
And it didn’t simply cease at steam engines. We constructed gasoline engines, diesel engines, jet engines, electrical motors, they acquired higher and higher and higher and A350s and e-bikes are sick! And so they modified the world a lot. However no one worships an airplane.
AI fashions will proceed to get higher and higher and higher. We received’t return to using horses. The transformation is actual. However it’s a transformation, not a singularity.
I feel so much about how shut we actually are to human degree. People are 100T (1e14) fashions educated on 100B (1e11) tokens. Instances ~10 for the forwards and backwards, and we get {that a} 1e26 coaching run must be human degree. And it type of is, GPT 5.5 is superior.
However 1e26 is a $100M coaching run. That’s the price to construct one homunculus. Positive it may be copied and sped up, however that’s regular industrial revolution dynamics utilized to a brand new bottleneck, not God.
The 1e30 coaching runs will probably be fascinating, similar to the early builders of steam engines would see a jet engine. Temperatures and metals and RPMs orders of magnitude higher. Magical new capabilities unlocked; journeys in beneath a day from New York to Singapore in superhuman flying machines. What’s the psychological equal?
So what does this imply for actuality. This can be a lengthy grind of enhancements. A number of S-curves to trip. Effectivity, FLOPS/$, the thermodynamics of deep studying, TB/s, tensor compilers, petabytes of storage, it’s all so cool! And naturally it’s cool, it’s all the things computer systems have been because the starting.
If I see another particular person discuss the way it’s the tip of capitalism or humanity or jobs or one thing this ranges of silly, I feel they want a day trip within the nook of the playground. Take it from somebody who went by way of it, not solely is it not true, you possibly can wreck your life with a dumb ideology like that.
We now have lived on the finish of historical past for therefore lengthy that any motion feels just like the eschaton.
However it’s not the tip occasions. It’s simply motion.
