Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, …

The test is this: if we took the news of these past few weeks and sent it back in time twenty years, would I agree that it looked like the beginning of an AI Singularity? The intellectually honest answer is: yes, absolutely. But then that’s all we need. No backsies.

  • unpossum@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    12·
    17 hours ago

    After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007.[4] His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.

    In the summer of 2016 he moved from MIT to the University of Texas at Austin as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Sciences #2 and as the founding director of UT Austin’s new Quantum Information Center.[7] In summer 2022 he announced he would be working for a year at OpenAI on theoretical foundations of AI safety.[8][9] He worked at the company for two years.[10]

    You should shoot him an email and let him know that he’s not qualified to write about this

      • unpossum@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        12·
        17 hours ago

        If we assume he’s talking to his peers, it is a brilliant argument, since this is a thing people in CS have been discussing since, well, Turing. It is very hard to believe that someone who spent any time at all thinking about this 20 years ago would disagree.

        • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          17 hours ago

          This guy is saying the Singularity has started.

          The Singularity is commonly defined at the point where AI can improve itself, at which point its intelligence can quickly outgrow that of its parents.

          If this guy wants to say that the singularity has happened, he has to explain what and when. So far, he has shown that AI is capable of doing some really cools stuff, but not that it is on an inexorable path to improving itself by itself.

          Other people think that LLMs are functionally limited in what they can do and they do not see a path to AGI from developing LLMs, and many of them know more than either of us and have degrees like this guy.

          • unpossum@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
            12·
            17 hours ago

            He is arguing that if we weren’t in the middle of it, we’d have to agree that the current trajectory looks like we would have expected the initial period of the singularity to look. The functional limitations of LLMs have been touted by those other people for years now, but the capabilites have kept accelerating.

            Personally, I hope against hope that the current mood in SF can put the brakes on for long enough to see where we’re going. Even better would be a real capabilities plateau, but I’m not holding my breath.