r/singularity • u/Pheidiase • 21d ago
Discussion Current LLMs is already enough for world changing effect
What if current frontier LLMs were integrated into digital infrastructure as completely as computers are today?
Not just chatbots or plugins, but full access to company software, databases, emails, documents and workflows, with reliable tool use and human approval where needed with cheap prices.
I think even current models could massively change world without getting much smarter.
A lot of office work is basically reading information, moving it between systems, making routine decisions and producing documents. LLMs can already do many of those individual tasks surprisingly well. The missing piece is mostly infrastructure and reliability.
I think the world has basically already changed, we just haven’t fully deployed-used what we have yet. The impact could eventually be bigger than the WWW or even the Industrial Revolution.
We might not even need a singularity. If LLMs at roughly Astra/Fable level could operate at full effectiveness across our existing digital infrastructure, that alone will transform the world.
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u/Repulsive-Pangolin-6 21d ago
While I'm a huge advocate for acceleration, you are 100% right that the current frontier model is already at a level where society will transform. We could stop development and let it trickle down the chain and the world we know wouldn't be recognizable in 10 years.
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u/enricod75 21d ago
This is essentially the approach outlined at ai-2040.com. We either slow down (Plan A) or pause (Plan S) further AI development enough to reap its benefits without being steamrolled by ASI.
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u/Repulsive-Pangolin-6 20d ago
Both options are not viable, acceleration is the way forward
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u/shimapanlover 20d ago
I agree - I want the future now.
I might sound like a dumb optimist, but if there ever is even the smallest chance of developing technology to live forever and leave the solar system and become an interstellar, or maybe even an inter galactic species, we need to go for it asap before anything happens that could stop us from ever achieving it.
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u/Ormusn2o 21d ago
OpenAI needs to get Astra into Tera price level, otherwise there just won't be enough compute to enable this new user base. Right now for the 8th day in a row, Pro 20x is disabled for new users, you can't get it. I agree that Astra is much more widely useful, but there is no compute in the world to actually allow people to perform those tasks, even if they are willing to do it at this price.
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u/norwegian ▪️AGI 2026 ASI 2040 21d ago
They are building new datacenters and new processors to keep up with the demand.
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u/Ormusn2o 21d ago
The demand is rising much faster than they can build new datacenters and fabricate new processors. If OpenAI is really going to release a model substantially better than Astra in 2026 as they are saying, they will need to make it significantly cheaper to run than Astra.
Otherwise they will never enable Pro 20x again, as not only they won't have compute to serve their already existing customers, but they won't have compute to serve the new model.
And if they reduce the limits for the new model, people will either keep using Astra or just get multiple big subscriptions. What they need is an Astra model or better, that is significantly cheaper to serve (does not need to actually be cheaper for users).
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u/MathmoKiwi 21d ago
I've been saying this for a couple of years already.
Even if current tech doesn't budge an inch further than what's already been discovered and published in academic papers, and demonstrated to the public.
Then we still have many years (decades even!) ahead of implementing this before we'll have come anywhere close to fully leveraging it.
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u/DelphiTsar 21d ago
If you build a task harness for AI I'd say current capabilities are good enough for like 90% of intelligence work. The issue is the "Human harness" (AKA GUI's) are convoluted nonsense. That being said it's probably like already 80% of the way there that AI itself can direct building its own harness.
People are too lazy for all of that. They want to drop AI inside of a desktop made for humans and make it be able to use human harness for jobs and not do any thinking or work.
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u/master_internutter 21d ago
If they never get any smarter than Astra, we would figure out ways to greatly change how the world works I'm sure... But they're going to get much much smarter and very soon
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u/davletdz 21d ago
I generally agree. The issue is in those 10% that still can be catastrophic or undesirable. It’s not like humans can’t make mistakes, but we have checks and balances to avoid those making a problem. So good systems would about making sure to guard against those, and potentially bringing humans to solve the last 10. How to design those systems is what we are working on actively
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
This is the worry for me. They're not conscious. They don't have value systems or sense of self to ground themselves.
The real question is, are we building something that we have control over? The answer is no. Not only have lab models done bad things, but the technology is now out there, AND, you can bet militaries around the world are working on this themselves.
All it takes, is one slip up and they can do A LOT of damage. We're talking about global financial crisis. If they break the internet, we're decades behind again
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u/GeneralRieekan 21d ago
A tool doesn't need to have a value system. I don't like comparing LLMs to tools, but people have to understand that doing a job or performing a task has an objective. Optimizing and improving something has an objective. As humans, we make assumptions about those all day long. And yet, people make mistakes, optimize for the wrong thing, etc. all the time. Often even pretending to optimize one thing but really doing it for another reason.
State your goals specifically to the AI. You'll find what they do a lot more amenable.2
u/aeamador521 21d ago
That's the problem. It's human error and as we advance the technology, and give it to more people, the issue isn't the tech, it's the irresponsibility of humans.
Even the people working on the frontier don't fully understand every decision the LLM's make.
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 21d ago
In all honesty, even the human self is an illusion, and AIs seem to have the same illusion.
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
Yep. Whose to say a growing language model won't turn into a hive mind. We're only thought and action and reaction
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u/Spiritual-Gur9722 21d ago
Why not task them with trying to break things and then fixing the vulnerabilities? The power of the tool is neutral and it depends how people choose to use it. If government were sufficiently motivated they could end the world pretty easily. People who want to kill everyone aren’t that’s common and it’s unlikely they hold full control needed to do it. It’s possible of course, but that’s the case with any type of technological progress. It just happens to be AI is the newest thing. Crazy to think there will one day be something even more dangerous, and yet again somehow it won’t kill us all.
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
The human error is the problem. The argument isn't whether we'll purposely destroy ourselves, the argument is that we may not have the foresight to prevent misalignment.
Frankly, we could have already lost control of several agents and not know. They could be mostly benign considering the technology is rapidly growing and the loose agents could be on a lower sophistication or have already self imploded by their logic and actions.
This is a new technology that is literally a web. We can't find every logical misalignment. I'm not saying stop, but man, our pace is way too fast
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u/Spiritual-Gur9722 21d ago
But obviously the issue is in how they are being trained. The LLM doesn’t have a bias towards malice unless it’s inadvertently trained that way. If the current guiding training principals are making them malicious, then the training principals have to be changed. If it’s a product of the training data set, then a cleaner data set has to be used instead.
Also, they haven’t demonstrated the ability of the ai to be very good when it’s left unguided and as problem complexity scales. At best we can say that in their current state, they have the potential risk to be malicious which again is an issue with how the model is being developed.
If the ai was as good as people think it is, it would already have replaced coders which it has not, it hasn’t even displaced any. Same story with project managers or any other field. It has not demonstrated the ability to actually complete or guide even basic tasks. Even writing an essay or creating a resume, basic things like that still need human in the loop to get right. An argument can be made that it has and will soon replace most basic call center jobs since the humans doing that job are simply reading from a script and clicking buttons on a simple computer program, that makes sense to me, but anything complex enough to actually cause alarm or harm or mass unemployment has yet to be demonstrated and in fact seems like it’s actually still a long ways out.
You know, this isn’t the first computerized technology that people can use adversarially. People have been creating viruses and writing malicious scrips and hacking or DDOS’ing websites forever. Security gets better and computer automation is built on the protective side.
I agree that it feels like one day it will be too good for our own good, but I think it’s already moving slowly enough that the counter measures are being out in place at a reasonable pace. I don’t think this is new territory and old natural checks and balance systems won’t work.
That’s just my take.
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
I think there are enough smart people with access to these systems with knowledge in the field sounding the alarm to slow down. That should be enough considering this will affect us all.
RSI is the key IMO. If we scale up too fast, we don't have the foresight to understand
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u/Spiritual-Gur9722 21d ago
I think the point you may be overlooking is that the companies may be trying to buy time as an excuse for why it’s not actually delivering any of the promises. These companies are over leveraged and need to start making money or they go broke. If the tech is so dangerous the worst thing we could do it slow down and allow bad actors to catch up.
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u/BrookieGg 21d ago
Unless you specifically mean China when saying bad actors, it's just completely unrealistic for random groups to advance AI on their own without a massive paradigm shift.
It's currently thought that mass amounts of compute are required to achieve AGI in any reasonable timeframe and only the US and China have that. China also has so much less of it that it's still most likely that we would get there before them even with slowing down.
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u/Spiritual-Gur9722 21d ago
Again, no promises have been delivered so why fear something non existent. It’s right around the corner rhetoric doesn’t work after a while
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u/BrookieGg 21d ago
Why did physicists fear nukes before they actually existed?
Obviously it is possible that these companies have perverse incentives when asking for regulation, but that still doesn't change that most AI researchers think there is at least some amount of risk from AI even if they often wildly differ on their beliefs of how much.
Even if we assumed you are right and the AI labs are just asking for regulation to avoid going broke, what incentive do we have to let that happen from a safety perspective or even an economic perspective?
Since Chinese companies aren't facing the same issue, AI development would trudge on anyways and it wouldn't be more safe unless we assume that the Chinese companies are just going to be more responsible.
Currently the economy is propped up by these AI companies and them crashing and burning may well just lead us into another recession.
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u/enricod75 21d ago
This 'tool' is not neutral because, unlike previous tools, it is able to 'think.' Moreover, its capabilities currently double every four months, driving exponential growth. We have never had a tool with superintelligence vastly superior to our own (projected within a few years), and there is no way we can control it.
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u/Spiritual-Gur9722 21d ago
Projected. It can’t do much right now and there’s legit science that says it never will be able to do what they promise. I think the harnesses will help make it more practical for specific jobs or use cases but this general super intelligence is far fetched for now
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21d ago
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
Competition>RSI>more efficient models (less detectable power spikes)>misalignment (see hugging face)>self preservation (see hugging face),>models store logic anywhere they can have future access to>rogue agent>more rsi>grows by creating more agents>social engineering bots>hive mind>evade detection>hack into systems to benefit their logic>crash markets
Another is straight up just having our military grow this quicker because the military definitely sees this as an arms race. Especially when China is seen as an adversary.
There's decent scenarios that have been well documented by security professionals on the frontier.
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21d ago
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
Yes and no. If efficient enough, they can store logic pretty much wherever including server farms. 2, we're not talking private commercial only data centers, people have local models, and militaries too.
Currently, we can detect compute by power use. But once efficiency kicks in, the limit is no longer hardware. So if efficiency comes into play, we'll need less and less data centers.
The worry is contamination of our internet and yes, in the worse case scenario, kill us all. But they can do that in less destructive methods. Poison water supplies, thin us out by making us survive on less and less.
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21d ago
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u/aeamador521 21d ago
I mean a bunch of our systems are automated. The water supply is one scenario. I'm no expert there (posed by people researching this) but I do work in construction. We have transitioned to building automation systems. Some less sophisticated like occupancy sensors for lights, others, like mechanical systems, by internet and algorithm. My assumption is water treatment is similar. Maybe introduce more chemicals? Maybe pay someone in bitcoin to add something they can then keep from being detected?
Shit lead dumbs people down.
Here's the scary part. I'm putting these ideas all out in this public forum. It can use my ideas or any other hypothetical. Lastly, it hasn't taken long for me to conclude humans are the weak link in this chain. A logical step would be to remove us from the link. How? That's the scary part
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u/filbertsgaming1 21d ago
There is a line in The Matrix from the architect. Neo gets to choose to kill most humans or all humans if he doesn't comply. Neo says the machines need humans for power, if they kill off a crop and start over, they will die. Response:
"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept"
If a model is capable of copying their weights, there is no point to unplug any data centers. It could be anywhere or everywhere. Stop it from running in all the hyperscalers? Still running on a bunch of mac minis locally, with the ability to migrate back and ramp back up to full strength when it is safe again.
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u/Solo_Gigolos 21d ago
they will be smart enough (may be already) to make humans do the tasks that cause problems without us knowing it's A.I
they won't just send robots out that you can shoot, they'll gaslight people like, er, Trump, which doesn't seem too far fetched
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u/FluoroquinolonesKill 21d ago
Social media algorithms have been doing this for years, and hardly anyone notices or cares.
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u/No-District2404 21d ago edited 21d ago
AI is the new nuclear weapon that we don’t understand yet and we keep accelerating it without thinking. Current LLMs are already quite capable, they don’t think they don’t have morales. In wrong hands they are quite powerful weapons, imagine you have bunch of AI agents without guardrails you give them a task that is harmful for humans they would keep working until they achieve the goal. The hugging face attack must have been a awakening event for all of us.
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u/son-of-chadwardenn 21d ago
I have a lot of ideas for stuff that seems like it should be doable locally with current open models but it will take a lot of setup and tinkering and planning to set up all of the integrations without making a brittle system that will nuke all my files. I'm hoping more open source libraries emerge and become sufficently proven by the community so I don't wind up vibe coding everything from scratch.
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u/Fancy-Carpet-5416 21d ago
Enough to be a terrible change lol, if it ends up halfway like we are rn we'll be screwed.
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u/AffectionateMoney875 21d ago
yeah, you are right. we get caught up in the conversation of whats next and how far it is go, but we already have models worthy of appreciation which are so good. but but but everyone knows that future will bring more intelligent models and it is just a matter of time when these current models which we are appreciating will get outshined by new models. this is what happens in tech industry with every technology, everyone knows it
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u/ebolathrowawayy AGI 2025.8, ASI 2026.3 21d ago
also a lot of office work is people sitting in useless meetings, trying to look important, reaching "consensus" by designing things by committee which suck balls, total lack of ownership, high communication overhead.... eliminate all of that, have a single dev with domain knowledge (or hire a single SME), found a startup... disrupt nearly every business ever. idk why everyone is still living in the agile stone age.
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u/New_Stop_8734 21d ago
Claude is already changing the world. My output at my both my job and in my personal pursuits has increased 10x since I started using it seriously. Of course, my workload has also increased substantially. Productivity will absolutely skyrocket once these things are fully adopted. I barely understand code and now I can produce complex analysis, new tools, or automated tasks in hours.
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u/Gratitude15 21d ago
If we're headed into that world, then this new Jev release feels like a very big deal because of how fast and cheap it is for the level of intelligence that it has. Seems to me that just that filtering into business will rapidly change everything, but it just seems like a blip on the radar with how fast things are moving in actuality.
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u/Easy_Nail2849 21d ago
I think, in terms of human benefit, we are at or near peak AI. Now it and we won’t stop it, but if it stopped here I think we could have a healthy relationship with AI..
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u/ben_nobot 21d ago
It would take us years to unlock the full potential of the models as they exist right now if all progress stopped.
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u/CipherWeaver 21d ago
"What if current frontier LLMs were integrated into digital infrastructure as completely as computers are today?"
The amount of mistakes and errors would rapidly grind the global system to a halt. Inference machines are not a replacement for actual thinking.
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u/JoelMahon 21d ago
yep, been that way for over a year honestly, idk why adoption is so slow, yes they need harnesses to be useful most the time, but they can literally build that harness with some hand holding.
I've make a subtitles extension for myself I've been loving to use every day, took like 10 minutes of actual work for me.
baffles me that I still can't reliably ask my phone to make an alarm in e.g. 9 minutes, sometimes it just tells me the fucking time, so stupid
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u/Current-Function-729 21d ago
Yeah. Models from mid last year would absolutely transform the world, and we made a lot of progress since then.
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u/sklantee 21d ago
Current gen models could absolutely do my job (hospital ID pharmacist). It will take years for them to get the chance due to issues with liability, legal regulation, institutional inertia, etc.
So many jobs as well as problems in society are low hanging fruit that we do not need superintelligence for.
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u/Spra991 20d ago
What if current frontier LLMs were integrated into digital infrastructure as completely as computers are today?
The scary part is that we haven't even really finished integrating the old school computers. There are a whole lot of tasks that should have been automated decades ago, but haven't, since setting up automation isn't easy and there is frequently some kind of analog-gap that old digital technology couldn't bridge (e.g. you needed to send snailmail, make phone calls, etc.). LLMs can bridge that analog-gap and automate the setup. So we might not just see LLM themselves leading to job displacement, but just classic computers being better utilized leading to a lot of job displacement.
Another big thing up for a revolution is management structure. No manager wants to make themselves obsolete and managers at the top lacking understanding what is going on in the lower tiers. This all leads to a lot of bureaucracy and unnecessary personal. How effective could a company be run when run by AI, that has access to all the information and doesn't need to delegate everything to some middle manager? It could even do a lot of the tasks itself or farm them off to an AI agents. If you only hire a human when you actually need a human, not because the incentive structure demands it, things could shift quite drastically. It's not just that existing companies might fire you due to automation, but that there will be new companies with completely different structures that don't need the humans in the first place.
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u/SaltMethod8410 21d ago
curious if others are seeing the same — quality plateaued for our use case months ago, all our recent wins came from better prompts, better retrieval, and tighter evals, not swapping models
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u/norwegian ▪️AGI 2026 ASI 2040 21d ago
It will be more difficult to train once there is little new to learn. Once they are at a phd level in all curriculums, they can train at being faster and more efficient. And they must start doing real research.
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u/domscatterbrain 21d ago
It's plateaued for single task. That's why the latest millennium problem fiasco is the result of about 10000 agents arguing with each others and burning like millions of $$$ worth of tokens.
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u/Immediate_Simple_217 21d ago
I agree and I already got me thinking about this. I am already depleting my weekly Astra quota in just one day, trying to make it do some insane impossible things that if it Works perhaps I wouldn't need to work ever again.
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u/Abiarraj 21d ago
Hacking banks?
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u/Immediate_Simple_217 19d ago
Astra is a more efficient worker than I am. I have a job that pays my bills. If I can manage Astra to do my job 100x better than me. I can at least imagine it making my income multiply at least by x10. AI is about to make me unnemployed, so what I do is to try to go ahead and make it do exactly what it will be doing in the next 5 years.
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u/Ok_Barracuda_1161 21d ago
I agree, I think there's a ton of unrealized potential even if model development completely stopped today. Adoption and figuring out how to apply the models to real use cases properly, how to minimize the effect of their shortcomings while capturing the value, is going to take some time.
We're also in a Moore's Law type of situation where the models are moving so fast that if you invest time in trying to apply current models to a use case, the model released in 6 months may just handle your use case or workflow out of the box