Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.
This is actually a very hard question to answer. If you’re truly AGI-pilled and believe in this progress continuing, then you basically have to contend with a scenario where AI is better than you at doing anything by an order of magnitude. And doing things suboptimally just for the sake of some notion of human independence doesn’t feel right to me.
Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.
yup - its the j curve of productivity phenomenon in action. and we'll see smaller companies reaping benefits faster becasue they can start with AI native development.
The line is not just AI. It’s our whole story. You can extrapolate it to Moore’s law, automation, agriculture, and so on. And there's no decay. It's just perception.
We are already in the singularity. We’ve always been. It just gets faster at each step.
I reject the premise that we need to go back to some old ways of living to find meaning. My life is full of meaning, but it would probably look like meaningless abundance to someone who was toiling on a farm 18 hours a day or being chased by saber-toothed tigers.
The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will have to change. What does that look like? Do we create content and share our art? Do followers and attention become the new currency?
I agree with you that there is no certainty, and in fact the future will almost certainly not look like anything we imagine. I think that's what makes it exciting.
We think about starships and humans mining Mars, and it'll probably be nothing like that. It might just be humanoids or AI drones that actually end up colonizing the solar system, with the humans never really leaving earth except as mind uploads...
But at the end of the day, things are changing. Things are accelerating. And our mental models of what works or doesn't work will almost certainly break. I don't fear the future, nor do I project any confidence on what that's going to look like, but I know I want to be part of it.
The demand for frontier intelligence is basically infinite. The frontier doesn't just complete a task more effectively, it creates new tasks and new problems and new solutions. It grows the pie exponentially. It's like looking at the internet the first time and trying to imagine the economy that will be built using it: social media, YouTube, Online job boards, Blogs etc.
woa your nephew lives inside a height-optimization machine that gets redesigned every few months (weeks), learns from every growth chart on Earth, and keeps proving it can grow faster?
At least I have trends backing up my claim. What precedent is there for saying, "Yeah, AI has kept getting better, and keeps doing things that we thought it would never be able to do, but now I think it’s going to plateau because I just can’t see the model writing good poetry or being smart enough to make determinsitic tool calls" or whatever?
I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?
AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?
No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.
Yeah not only is it totally unsubstantiated, the benchmarks are getting less useful to really show the difference between these models. Big model smell is still a thing and GLM 5.2 while impressive is not Fable class.
Here is something I would like people to chew on. Perhaps the smartest researchers in the world across multiple labs know more about this than we do? Perhaps they are aware of issues like the data wall and diminishing marginal returns. And perhaps they are being honest when they tell you there is no wall?
In general most developers are going to find themselves fighting incentives which will color their opinion. AI isn't there yet but if you are going to abase your whole world view on a point on a graph and not on the trajectory you are in for a bad time.
This is like saying we only need 100 websites when the internet came out. We have no idea what second third fourth order effects of frictionless and abundance are. What you think is software itself will change.
We will have better and cheaper intelligence in the future than we have now. This is not Uber. Inference is profitable for these companies. Looking at API pricing and assuming that reflects the cost basis is dumb.
It costs less for OpenAI to serve GPT-5.5 than it did to serve GPT-4. An H100 is more valuable today than it was five years ago because it can serve more intelligence per token.
Jevons paradox and short-term crunches may cause some swings, but the value of a token keeps increasing while the average token price decreases.
Chinese models are already a fraction of the cost, and we will have a mythos/fable-level open-source model by the end of the year. There is no “gotcha” where every AI company rugs you in unison.
Stop trying to figure out how this screws you. Start figuring out what cool shit you can build with it.
That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out.
My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. Or follow it to a tee and fail which is what all of them did (happy to hear about any counter examples here from the original book). So what exactly is the point if you can't even move the needle a little bit?