Humanity Has Managed to Fall into Time Loop Regarding "AI"

[kokhanserhii]

The AI Time Loop

Much of the current AI debate is stuck in a time loop, where regulation and public skepticism focus on models from 2017 to 2023. As a researcher who has been following AI since the 1980s, I argue that we have reached a phase transition. The gap between the 2023 model and the 2026 system is not gradual—it's the difference between a moped and a spaceship—yet our terminology and social contracts remain dangerously outdated.

The harmful term "artificial intelligence" creates the false illusion of an autonomous subject, obscuring the critical role of human performers and the human narratives of various communities. By reimagining these systems as "smart chats" with specific years of release, we return to an engineering-centric approach, where the value of the outcome is determined by the operator's ability to "play" the instrument. For the educated user, these tools serve as a bridge to the collective wisdom of humanity, while for the uninitiated, they remain a source of artificial information noise. https://zenodo.org/records/18683885

[PaulHoule]

This wasn't human written [em-dash] This an AI opinion.

[A_D_E_P_T]

There's a manifesto at the Zenodo link that was obviously written by a human. Not that I agree with it. It could have used some LLM editing, if you ask me.

[A_D_E_P_T]

And yet: https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci

GPT-4 was a world-shaking release. The best "AIs" (LLMs) of 2026 are only marginally better. The gap between 2023 and 2026 isn't nearly so large as you imply, especially insofar as "general" intelligence (not coding specifically) is concerned.

[kokhanserhii]

I trust your judgment. It's worth noting that I'm talking about the publicly available versions of GPT chat, the free version available to everyone. I also tried to explain that I'm probably not talking about the tool's various capabilities, but rather how and when I learned to use it effectively in my small niche of users.

[kokhanserhii]

I think adding the word "self-improvement" would be sufficient, and today the emphasis will be less on "improvement" and more on "self-improvement," because today humans are better at improving "smart chats" and robots through "theories, trial, and error" than systems are at improving themselves. A significant step forward would be the use of the phrase "architectural self-improvement." Of course, there are different approaches and different understandings of "improvement" here. I don't advocate predictions of any kind of "explosive self-improvement" in artificial intelligence systems. It's obvious. Just look at how people improve them... As improvements progress, phrases like "we need $10 billion" and "we need a trillion dollars" periodically appear. Some people mistakenly believe that self-improvement will be free. Yes, it will be free, but the scale of improvement will be limited. Nowadays, huge sums of money are spent on experiments for improvement, not for the sake of the reasonably expected improvements themselves, but for the sake of the race for leadership in the global market.