> The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't.
No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern:
* There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible.
* That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis.
* We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.
AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves.
Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.
AI hypists come to the conclusion that general intelligence is inevitable because they know the brain exists and are materialists. Anyone who checks those two boxes will come to the conclusion that an artificial brain is possible and therefore AGI is as well. With the amount of money being spent then its only a matter of when
> With the amount of money being spent then its only a matter of when
Yes, but there's no strong reason to believe that "when" is "within fewer than 1000 years". What's frustrating about the hype is not that people think the brain is replicable, it's that they think that this single breakthrough will be the thing that replicates it.
Moore's law is still going as far I'm aware - there may have been clarification of sorts recently but that's kept up exponentially rather well despite everyone knowing that it can't do that.
Moore's law would improve the speed of LLMs and improve their size, but in recent weeks [0] it's become apparent that we're hitting the limit of "just make them even bigger" being a viable strategy for improving the intelligence of LLMs.
I'm excited for these things to get even cheaper, and that will enable more use cases, but we're not going to see the world-changing prophesies of some of AI's evangelists in this thread come true by dint of cheaper current-gen models.