I apologize in advance if this comes off as critical of you personally, you’re not saying anything that isn’t said constantly and I certainly don’t mean to single you out.

With that said, we’ve got to strangle this meme. ML/AI moves forward in unpredictable fits and starts, it doesn’t follow e.g. Moore’s law in exponential formulation.

When they’re doing research and not PR, researchers talk about “performance” on “tasks”, and define those terms rigorously.

People have been trying to improve performance, as measured by some metric or metrics, on any number of tasks, since at least the 1950s.

Certain periods of time generated breakthrough after breakthrough and a bunch of “well we’ll just scale it up and it’ll be a thinking machine” sentiment amongst the lay or semi-technical public, and similar grandiosity from experts when PR and/or funding are the objective. The world we live in I guess, but not a fire we on HN should be pouring fuel on.

During other periods of time, we’ve hit the effective asymptote on the techniques thus far invented, the scaling dimensions flattened out. Then it’s all “AI was a fad, it’s hype, this is AI Winter”.

There’s no robust consensus on when these summers and winters happen, how long they last, how much performance on one task is amenable to “transfer learning” regarding another task. It seems pretty random, the constant being the PR/funding talk.

The years since AlexNet in 2011, word2vec in 2013, ResNet in 2016, Attention is All you Need in 2017, the GA on GPT-3 series just over a year ago, and countless other interesting things have been wildly fruitful, we’ve been on a hot streak.

This is generally good news! The human race has new capabilities, win! But it’s a nearly impossible claim to defend that modern attention transformers are the final word on this area of endeavor, progress since then has been substantially brute-forced via unprecedented budgets achieved through subsidy of one kind or another, and there will continue to be periods of rapid progress unlocked by key insights, and there will continue to be less explosive periods of progress, and it serves no one with a plan more noble than “cash out while the spice flows” to tee up another collapse in interest, funding, and attention by pulling a Yud: a log scale and a ruler are never the complete toolkit on forecasting novel research.

This stuff is incredibly cool stated as flat, consensus, rigorous science, it’s incredibly exciting to practitioners and laypeople alike without any breathless hyperventilation at all. The story thus far needs no grandiose embellishment to be thrilling.

But the absolute best case in terms of research we currently know about as hyped by those seeking funding would be a nightmare end-state if it landed there (it won’t, but this disaster comes in degrees): right now the off-the wall exhilarating tech demos are so expensive that the public is effectively a spectator. There’s talk of multi-trillion dollar buildouts under complete, utterly unaccountable, ethically dubious control of people who crossed the “yikes is that even legal” line some time ago.

A trillion dollars in 2024 is give or take thirty Manhattan Projects, the idea of handing that kind of scope to people who answer to no one, hold strong minority worldviews, and give the public the finger in print by calling the bribery department “OpenPhilanthropy”?

Who the fuck thinks this isn’t a dystopian horror movie outcome in an already hyper fragile world?

It’s time to squeeze the water out of these bloated, money is no object models, make them run on reasonable power budgets in the hands of John Q. Taxpayer (who along with a bunch of helpless civilians and service men and women, ultimately foots the tab when Nadella or Riyadh write blank checks one way or another), reform copyright law so that the commons isn’t vacuumed up, compressed, and copyrighted, and take a few whacks at shit like Jenson and Lisa Su being literally cousins while partitioning the market and gouging via API lock-in.

The hyper, hyper-elite stand to gain even more immunity from all scrutiny, consequence, accountability, and even bad press if “AGI” turns out to be a mere 1-3 trillion in de facto blood money away from being locked in a vault somewhere.

Literally everyone else stands to find out that slavery isn’t a strong enough word for what this would mean for them.