Work doesn't benefit humanity, work is the chains that keep us living the same day over and over til we die.

Your idea of benefit to humanity clearly doesn't involve the end of work, mine does.

AI can end work for most of us but that has to be what we want, can't be limiting it all the time bc of stupid reasons and expect it to have all the answers as if it weren't limited, that's silly.

If AI disappeared tonight so too would the future where nobody works in a call center or doing data entry or making button graphics to client exact specifications for a website nobody will ever see.

This is the Old World we live in rn - I don't want it to stay.

> I would argue that nothing would really fundamentally change.

I argue that there would be a huge collective sigh of relief from a large number of people. Not everybody, maybe not even a majority, but a large number nonetheless.

So I think it has changed society -- but perhaps not for the better overall.

It will take time though, if the internet had completely disappeared in the mid 90s nothing would have fundamentally changed

> but most of the current generation of AI hype are a limited number of algorithms and approaches, mixed and matched in different ways, with other features bolted on to try and corral them into behaving as we hope. it is much more realistic to expect that we are in the period of diminishing returns as far as investing in these approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see earth-shattering growth.

100% agree, but I think those who disagree with that are failing on point 1. I absolutely think we'll need something different, but I'm also sure that there's a solid chance we get there, with a lot of bracketing around "eventually".

When something has been done once before, we have a directional map and we can often copy fairly quickly. See OpenAI to Claude.

We know animals are smarter than LLM’s in the important, learning day-to-day ways, so we have a directional compass. We know the fundamentals are relatively simple, because randomness found them before we did. We know it’s possible, just figuring out if it’s possible with anything like the hardware we have now.

We don’t know if a battery like that is possible - there are no comparisons to make, no steer that says “it’s there, keep looking”.

This is also the time in history with the most compute capacity coming online and the most people trying to solve it. Superpowers, superscalers, all universities, many people over areas as diverse as neuro, psych who wouldn’t have looked at the domain 5 years ago are now very motivated to be relevant, to study or build in related areas. We’ve tasted success. So my opinion is based on us having made progress, the emerging understanding of what it means for individuals and countries in terms of competitive landscape, and the desire to be a part of shaping that future rather than having it happen to us. ~Everyone is very motivated.

Betting against that just seems like a risky choice. Honestly, what would you bet, over what timeframe? How strongly would you say you’re certain of your position? I’m not challenging you, I just think it’s a good frame for grounding opinions. In the end, we really are making those bets.

My bands are pretty wide. I can make a case for 5 years to AGI, or 100 years. Top of my head without thinking, I’d put a small amount on 5 years, all my money on within 100, 50% or more within 20/30.

There is another level to AI and how we fundamentally structure them that nobody is doing yet to my knowledge. This next round of innovation is fundamentally different than the innovation that is the focus now - nobody is looking to next stage bc this one hasn't achieved what we expected - bc it won't.

I sus that future iterations of AI will do much better tho.

Another reply, different thought. I’d be keen to see what eg Carmack is up to. Someone outside of the usual suspects. There is a fashion to everything and right now LLM’s are a distraction on an S curve. The map is not the territory and language is a map.

Just like nuclear fusion, right? "When" will always be some time after the next fundraising round.