[sulam]

You can’t project trends out endlessly. If you could, FB would have 20B users right now based on early growth (just a random guess, you get the point). The planet would have 15B people on it based on growth rate up until the 90s. Google would be bigger than the world GDP. Etc.

One of the more bullish AI people has said the models performance scales with log of compute (Sam Altman). Do you know how hard it will be to move that number? We are already well into diminishing returns with current methodologies and there is no one pointing the way to a break through that will get us to expert level performance. RLHF is underinvested in currently but will likely be the path to get us from Junior contributor to Mid in specific domains, but that still leaves a lot of room for humanity.

The most likely reason for my PoV to be wrong is that AI labs are investing a lot of training time into programming, hoping the model can self improve. I’m willing to believe that will have some payoffs in terms of cheaper, faster models and perhaps some improvements in scaling for RLHF (a huge priority for research IMO). Unsupervised RL would also be interesting, albeit with alignment concerns.

What I find unlikely with current models is that they will show truly innovative thinking, as opposed to the remixed ideas presented as “intelligence” today.

Finally, I am absolutely convinced today’s AI is already powerful enough to affect every business on the planet (yes even the plumbers). I just don’t believe they will replace us wholesale.

[ninetyninenine]

>You can’t project trends out endlessly.

But this is not just an endless projection. In one sense we can't have economic growth and energy consumption go endlessly as that will eat up all the available resources on earth, there is a physical hard line.

However for AI this is not the case. There is literally an example of human level intelligence exiting in the real world. You're it. We know we haven't even scratched the limit.

It can be done because an example of the finished product is humanity itself. The question is do we have the capability to do it? And for this we don't know. Given the trend and the fact that a Finished product Already exists, It is Totally realistic to say AI will replace our jobs.

[AstroBen]

There's no evidence we're even on the right track to have human level intelligence so no, I don't think it's realistic to say that

Counterpoint: our brains use about 20 watts of power. How much does AI use again? Does this not suggest that it's absolutely nothing like what our brains do?