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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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It would be odd if AI somehow got worse. I mean, wouldn't they just revert to a backup?
Anyway, I think (1) is extremely unlikely but I would add (3) the existing algorithms are fundamentally insufficient for AGI no matter how much they're scaled up. A breakthrough is necessary which may not happen for a long time.
I think (3) is true but I also thought that the existing algorithms were fundamentally insufficient for getting to where we are now, and I was wrong. It turns out that they did just need to be scaled up...
It's possible that the way of generative AI and LLMs is a dead end but that wouldn't be a stop, only a speed bump. It would only mean it takes longer for us to get there, not that we wouldn't get there.
I don't disagree, but before the recent breakthroughs I would have said that AI is like fusion power in the sense that it has been 50 years away for 50 years. If the current approach doesn't get us there, who knows how long it will take to discover one that does?
Right and all the dogs in the race are now focused on neural networks and llms, which means for now, all the effort could be focused on a dead end. Because of the way capitalism is driving AI research, other avenues of AI research have almost effectively halted, so it will take the current AI bubble to pop before alternative research ramps up again
Like every time there's an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems...
Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.
We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we'll have to admit that doubling the USA's energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn't sustainable.
The issue I have with referring to the current situation as a bubble is that this isn't just hype. The technology really is amazing, and far better than what people had been expecting. I do think that most current attempts to commercialize it are premature, but there's such a big first-mover advantage that it makes sense to keep losing money on attempts that are too early in order to succeed as soon as it is possible to do so.
I think that's intentional. Nation states and other powers that be have working propaganda mechanisms.
A real AGI is a change most important in the sense of power, not in the sense of economy (because we know how to make new humans and educate them, it wouldn't be a qualitative change there).
All this AI gaslighting is intended to stall real advancements there.
The Web in some sense was produced in the context of AI research. In general semantic and hypertext systems were. And look what it has done to the world. They may just not want another such cataclysm.
EDIT: Also notice the shift from the hypertext paradigm to the application platform paradigm in the Web.