Neural network research and development existed since the 1980s at least, so at least 40 years. One of the bottlenecks before was not enough compute.

Perhaps the fact that you think this field is only 5 years old means you're probably not enough of an authority to comment confidently on it?

You don't think humans hunted tigers in 40,000BC?

Reflecting sunlight from orbit is an idea that had been talked about for a couple of decades even before Znamya-2[1] launched in 1992. The materials science needed to unfurl large surfaces in space seems to be very difficult, whether mirrors or sails.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)

What is an intellectual task? Once again, there's tons of stuff LLMs won't be trained on in the next 3 years. So it would be trivial to just find one of those things and say voila! LLMs aren't better than me at that.

I'll make one prediction that I think will hold up. No LLM-based system will be able to take a generic ask like "hack the nytimes website and retrieve emails and password hashes of all user accounts" and do better than the best hackers and penetration testers in the world, despite having plenty of training data to go off of. It requires out-of-band thinking that they just don't possess.

> They're already better than you at reciting historical facts.

so is a textbook, but no-one argues that's intelligent

To be clear, you are suggesting “huge improvements” in “every intellectual task”?

This is unlikely for the trivial reason that some tasks are roughly saturated. Modest improvements in chess playing ability are likely. Huge improvements probably not. Even more so for arithmetic. We pretty much have that handled.

But the more substantive issue is that intellectual tasks are not all interconnected. Getting significantly better at drawing hands doesn’t usually translate to executive planning or information retrieval.

> They're already better than you at reciting historical facts.

They're better at regurgitating historical facts than me because they were trained on historical facts written by many humans other than me who knew a lot more historical facts. None of those facts came from an LLM. Every historical fact that isn't entirely LLM generated nonsense came from a human. It's the humans that were intelligent, not the fancy autocomplete.

Now that LLMs have consumed the bulk of humanity's written knowledge on history what's left for it to suck up will be mainly its own slop. Exactly because LLMs are not even a little bit intelligent they will regurgitate that slop with exactly as much ignorance as to what any of it means as when it was human generated facts, and they'll still spew it back out with all the confidence they've been programed to emulate. I predict that the resulting output will increasingly shatter the illusion of intelligence you've so thoroughly fallen for so far.

> Edit: my “subtle” point was, we already know LLMs censor history. Trusting them to honestly recite historical facts is how history dies.

I mean, that's true but not very relevant. You can't trust a human to honestly recite historical facts either. Or a book.

> “The victor writes history” has never been more true.

I don't see how.

As opposed to the current world of brigading social media threads to make consensus look like it goes your way and then getting journalists scraping by on covering clickbait to cover your brigading as fact?