> Unless we have another miraculous breakthrough

I guess the argument of AI optimists is that these breakthroughs are likely to happen given the recent history. Deep learning was rediscovered like, what, 15 years ago? "Attention is all you need" is 8 years old. So it's easy to assume that something is boiling deep down that will show impressive results 5-10 years down the line.

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marginalia_nu 3 days ago | parent [-]

Scientific breakthroughs happen, but they're notoriously difficult to make happen on command or on a schedule. Taking them for granted or as inevitable seems quite detached from reality.

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oytis 3 days ago | parent [-]

True, but given how many breakthroughs we had in AI recently, for text, sound, images and video the odds of new breakthroughs happening are probably higher than otherwise.

We have no idea how many of them we need till AGI or at least replacing software engineers though.

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marginalia_nu 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's mostly just a few discoveries finding multiple applications. That's fairly common after a large breakthrough, and what you see is typically a flurry of activity and then things die down as the breakthrough gets figured out.

	▲	NoGravitas 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's "a few discoveries finding multiple applications" plus throwing as much data and compute as possible at those applications, a process that seems to be increasingly struggling uphill in the last year or so.