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.
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.
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.
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.
Baseline LLM improvements are agonizingly minimal and expensive now, after years of honestly amazing growth. This is just flying cars again–a technology booms and we think it has no limits until we find out that it does.
I don’t see that at all, but the next few months will tell, I think
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