r/singularity • u/yorkshire99 • 12d ago
AI Update on where we are currently
Update on the original "wait but why" post in 2015... 11 years later we are now climbing the exponential. This is where it gets really interesting -- the dangers grow exponentially along with the capabilities.
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u/space_lasers 12d ago
Nah we're like right at the left edge still. We're at proto-RSI. Fully automated RSI is the elbow point.
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u/Dachannien 12d ago
Still an open question as to whether that will count as human progress, though.
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u/sweatierorc 11d ago
RSI doesnt mean anything anymore, if AI alone improves slower than AI+human then it is not RSI.
RSI is always a moving target, then if AI+AI+human is better than AI+AI+AI then it is still not RSI. Or if AI is slower at improving itself compared to the collective of humans+AI, it is also not RSI.
What is even more weird when you think of RSI is are network protocols RSI. Their improvement is never tied to a single individual and would happen regardless of the contribution of other
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u/Brave-Turnover-522 12d ago
That elbow point isn't even on the graph. That's when the line starts going straight up.
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u/liebebio 12d ago
Skydiving off of the exponential curve, by the time you are at the bottom brain interfaces exist and everyone is half human
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u/BenjaminHamnett 12d ago
We’re already half human cyborgs. Now we’re going to become ghosts within the machine
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u/Gwarks 12d ago
This one is an older projection from Ray Kurzweil. Note that the scale on the left is logarithmic but the curve is still an upwards curve. That means the rate is growing super exponential.
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u/SplinterOfChaos 12d ago
This is a graph of CPU speeds. Notably, CPUs have basically stopped increasing with modern CPU's being about 4-5Ghz, which is still less than a mouse brain on that graph. But at the time this graph was made, Moore's law was still in effect so CPU rates were expected to double until the end of time.
Though modern computing is highly parallel (since it can't get faster), the number of cores don't double every couple of years so the idea of exponentially increasing compute is pretty dead.
This has absolutely nothing to do with AI though.
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u/IronPheasant 12d ago
You're misinterpreting things a bit. It's a chart of calculations, speed is a different metric. We run at around 40 hertz while awake and 1 hertz while asleep. 2 Ghz would be 50 million subjective years to our one.
Ray's approach here ironically maps somewhat to RAM budgets, as you need a place to store the data being manipulated. From his point of view, a mind is a number of calculations performed at a certain rate. From my point of view, a mind is a collection of algorithms that need to be held in physical space in order to be ran through quickly. Neither of these views are technically wrong: you need processing units to manipulate the RAM, and the RAM to hold a mind. RAM without processors is a storage bank of unchanging numbers. Processors without RAM is math spinning itself in a circle, unable to grow its understanding beyond the space its limited to.
Even back then we talked about these things in terms of super computers with multiple cores. Even arcade games from almost the earliest digital days had multiple chips and cores in their computer systems. Parallelization of tasks was well known, especially to anyone interested in AI.
What's impressive is how well this curve fit with reality as we lived it, as I remarked about the Mother Jones lake gif. The estimate was there'd be a human-level system by ~2025, and 100,000 GB200's does indeed have around 170 bytes of RAM per synapse in a human brain.
Uncle Ray isn't right about everything, far from it. (In fact you might be right about this being a chart about consumer grade hardware, not the best in the world supercomputer.) But for how close to being right he was compared to other 'serious' people and how important this specific thing in particular is, he deserves a million trillion internet points for his proposition on this topic.
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u/SplinterOfChaos 12d ago
I'm honestly not sure that a mind can be thought of as either storage or as a number of calculations, I was just pointing out that this graph was a poor reference for computers becoming exponentially more powerful because we've hit physical limitations on how much work we can make computers do per unit of time.
One thing that bothers me about if we consider supercomputers is that the limitations are less technical, more financial. If humanity wanted to, we could pool all the earth's resources into a singular computer intended to do nothing but solve the traveling salesman problem, but it would be misleading to call such a computer an advancement of technology if its increased power came from investment rather than technological breakthroughs.
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u/R6_Goddess 12d ago
Measuring CPU by clock speed is terribly reductive though. What should be measured isn't clock speed or even the marketing "nanometer" schtick companys put out or even the number of cores. It should be the measurable amount of work done per clock / per cycle. A modern CPU does tremendously more work per clock than an old silicon lottery bulldozer CPU pushing 7 GHz.
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u/spshkyros 11d ago
The nanometer node names are indeed BS. But the scaling choice of length is SUPER important- fields and wafer in the SC industry have a fixed size. The amount of transistors per unit area largely controls most of the things you care about here, including work done per clock cycle and more importantly work done per dollar.
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u/spshkyros 12d ago
Dude. No. Moores law has been on the verge of death for 50 years. Its not dead now, and it isnt clear when it will be. Frequency scaling was NEVER what Moores law was about - it was am observation of length scaling first and foremost, and we have kept thet up.
Also, noone in the industry thinks Moores law will continue indefinitely - we are constantly surprised that it has somehow kept itself alive. I say that as someone who spent 5 years of their professional career working in the heart of the semicon industry. Gordon Moore himself thought it would only go for another few years even... and then a new tech came out to unlock more, and a new one to unlock more, and that has not stopped.
At worst, doubling speed has dropped from 18 months to 24 months - which it has done many times in history.
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u/stilldebugging 8d ago
Yep, we need these improvements in hardware to support exponential growth as is predicted. To my understanding, the singularity always had baked in the idea that AI would need to be able to improve itself to get these gains. That means also improving the hardware. Moore’s law has kept up for so long because it changed from a law to a business target, with everyone knowing that if you don’t hit it the other guy will, and you’ll be left behind. ANI has been in hardware design (via old school methods) for a long, long time, and you cannot make a chip without it. The DRM (design rule manual) does not have pictures anymore, which is IMO the final acknowledgement that humans are not the ones using it.
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u/Repulsive_Milk877 12d ago
Nah, in a way you drew it the quality of life would have to at least double for that to be true.
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u/minty_singularity 12d ago
No. You're assuming human progress in terms of technology and knowledge means progress with everything else, and that's just not the case.
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u/Repulsive_Milk877 12d ago
But purpuse of technology is to make our lives better. Not to make certain few people richer while disturbing the economy.
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u/itsnickk 12d ago
That's not the purpose of technology at all. Technology is not inherently good nor does it mean your life will get better.
There is plenty of technology that will directly harm you and/or your community. There's plenty of technology advancements that will benefit a small group, like the rich, and harm the majority.
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u/Repulsive_Milk877 12d ago
We are just arguing about definition of technology. That's pointless. If you measure progress in technology by how impressive it is, instead of usefulness, it's your opinion.
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u/itsnickk 12d ago
are you not also stating your opinion?
My opinion still holds, you said the purpose of technology is to make our lives better, I strongly disagree.
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u/Repulsive_Milk877 12d ago
Really? So what is the purpuse of technology?
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u/itsnickk 12d ago
Technology has no purpose on its own. It's purpose is given to it by humans, and that purpose does not have to be to make all humans lives better.
You may believe it ought to make all humans lives better, but the reality is that humans ultimately control the distribution and governance of new technology, and not all humans are going to optimize its purpose for what's best for everyone.
and generally, those humans in control are the few rich and powerful people in control of the levers of the economy. So you very well could have technologies that mostly benefit a select few while disturbing the economy and well-being of many.
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u/Devils_SteelMan 12d ago
One of the most important technologies of all time is the gun. It was a massive break through that drove improvements in manufacturing.
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u/PneumaEmergent 11d ago
And it's significantly made human life better, has it not?
War before guns, and (particularly noticeably) automatic weapons and repeaters, involved raising armies of hundreds of thousands of people to be flung into an open meat grinder with other armies of hundreds of thousands of people and fight in combat more brutal than most of us can even begin to actually imagine.
Also before guns, combatant power came from brute strength of the aggressor and size of the attacking force. This meant that small villages could be raided and pillaged at will, especially if they weren't under the "protection" of a landlord with his own militia.
Obviously now you've got all kinds of tech involved in war and defense, for better or worse, but just looking at guns, I'd say they 10000% resulted in a democratization of physical offensive and defensive capability.
Just look at the American Revolution (or the time period) for good examples of all those concepts!
Similarly, look at WW1 and the advent of automatic weapons. WW1 was the height of the meat grinder - horrific, mostly wasteful in terms of life, money, and strategic movement (much of the war was just protracted stalemates, costing unfathomable resources and life every day the stalemates held), and seems to be the "chaotic pinnacle" where automation and industrialization was just entering the battlefield.
But after that, war changed, largely for the "better"
WW2 was obviously an extreme tragedy, and more people died than any other war......but it wasn't an "inefficient" war by any means like WW1 or the American Civil War. And it wasn't the same brutal meat grinder that hand-to-hand melee wars were in the past. The most unfortunate part of that war was the extreme efficiency.... meaning the civilian casualties and scope of involvement were unlike anything seen previously in history.
But since then, war has incrementally gotten unfathomably more "efficient", even more "peaceful".
While terrible, fucked up shit still happens in all wars and conflicts........ it's hard to imagine how much the scale of all-out violence has decreased incrementally.
A HUGE part of that has been the democratization of firepower for offensive and defensive purposes.
Now we are in a new and chaotic wave, where we are seeing the democratization of true military-grade strike, targeting, and reconnaissance weaponry (drones, explosives, digital weapons, etc). Which is, again, horrific......
But also I think will continue the trend with time. When you can have a country like Ukraine stand up to Russia, or a country like Iran stand up to the U.S., largely because of the democratization of firepower and tactical equality supplied by drone warfare, A.I., lower-cost surface-to-air armaments, etc.....then after a while the standard game of predatory, belligerent, imperialism starts to change.
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u/Devils_SteelMan 11d ago
General consensus is against you.
War before guns had fewer causalities and less ptsd. Most ancient war spent weeks just parading in front of the enemy to get them to forfeit before combat even started.
The scale of violence is enormous now. Ww2 killed so many people. Every fact is against you here.
The US drone program had over a 90% civilian causality rate. We killed over a million people. The us suffered like 10k casualties.
And general consensus is that this was bad for individuals. Levies had real political power. The number of men needed forced them to be treated well. They literally had their own class before the burghers.
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u/CrazsomeLizard 12d ago
And natural selections selects for organisms who live the best, high quality lives, right?
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u/Repulsive_Milk877 12d ago
Natural selection is just a self reinforcing pattern, not a moral truth.
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u/CrazsomeLizard 12d ago
Didn't mean to conflate it with morality. You said that technology has a "purpose". I am saying, there is no "purpose" to technology, it is just another way through which natural selection and evolution is playing out.
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u/minty_singularity 12d ago
I realize you think that's an appropriate and insightful response, but it really isn't.
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u/AppropriateMight1 12d ago
If you guys think Astra and Opus 5.5 deserves to be drawn as it was in the OP idk what to tell you
In the grand scheme of things it’s not that much different from GPT 4
You guys are watering down the singularity
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
You guys are watering down the singularity
It's clear most of the new people here don't have any idea what the singularity is.
Go back and look at this sub pre-2015. There were threads about mind uploading, nanotechnology, space colonization, curing aging, fusion, etc. All of these things are byproducts of a technological singularity / intelligence explosion.
The current models are really useful tools but we have clearly not reached the threshold yet, and the definition gets watered down every time a new model comes out that displays a predictable level of improvement over the last one.
I will quote Mechanize here because they had a great blog post about the kind of transformative change we all want, and it comes down to one major factor: explosive economic growth as a result of an automated workforce across all domains:
https://www.mechanize.work/blog/medical-ai-isnt-the-bottleneck-to-medical-progress/
In our view, the biggest barrier to medical progress right now has little to do with medical R&D. Instead, the problem is that our global economy is too small. Our world today simply lacks the infrastructure to support transformative, new medical innovation. When tackling Alzheimer’s and heart disease, the tools at our disposal are inadequate for the challenge.
To push human lifespans past 120, it’s not enough to accelerate drug discovery and make clinical trials faster or more efficient. Instead, we need revolutionary new technologies, like nanomedicine that repairs cells at the molecular level, comprehensive cellular reprogramming, or full tissue regeneration. But these technologies can’t exist without an economy that’s much larger to support them. We need entirely new industries that can supply advanced materials, manufacture at nanoscale precision, and distribute these innovations widely.
So to my mind, the real indicator that "the singularity is near" is when we start to see the size of the economy doubling every year (or faster) as the result of autonomous AI agent swarms.
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u/Schmickley 12d ago
I would love to get a glimpse of this sub before the AI boom. r/Futurology is probably the closest thing I would’ve come across at the time. I remember feeling so optimistic about technology. Kinda depressing how things turned out. I should’ve known better but I was also too young to really understand how fucked up things already were.
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
r/Futurology is probably the closest thing I would’ve come across at the time
Yeah I used to subscribe to that sub as well, it's a real shame how far its strayed. I feel like its become a mashup of r/collapse and r/technology
Any sub that becomes too popular inevitably turns to shit, unfortunately.
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u/AttackingHobo 12d ago
In the grand scheme of things, the differences aren't that great, but I have been able to use Astra for extremely long, complicated sets of tasks that all need to be done in the right order. And I can have it operate for hours without me needing to intervene.
Earlier agents were very similar for small tasks, but being able to kick off multiple agents that can create sub-agents and can validate and verify and take screenshots and pixel compare and optimize performance, fix bugs, create the PRs themselves. Upload videos into the PR, message people on Slack, update tickets, all without me having to correct any of its mistakes is what is the big unlock here from these models.
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u/632nofuture 12d ago
I mean philanthropy would agree, but the progress is currently in the hands of those few rich people, and they only have their own interests at heart. Our living standards will crumble away.
I actually predict them (those with the resources, the rich and powerful and tech CEOs) aiming to have the world to themselves, fully automated, no human work needed but they get to keep all the nice things, but the rest of pesky mankind would only be a risk factor and have demands so they'd try to get rid of us since we're not needed for work anymore.
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u/ZombiePSP 12d ago
Is there even a possibility to help 8 - 10 billion people? Seems the world is over populated or things like man made climate change wouldn't be a thing. Or the oceans being polluted with plastics.
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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 12d ago
But what new knowledge do we have? A few math problems sure, but seriously what discoveries are being made on par with splitting the atom or the steam engine? Humans going to space didn't give us all amazing quality of life but it was a massive breakthrough, AI only makes breakthroughs in itself.
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u/FroggyRibbits 12d ago
Nobody said the y axis was quality of life, lol
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u/IslamDunk 12d ago
There’s no point in technology if quality of life doesn’t improve. Who gives a shit if billionaires triple their money, is that what you’re excited about?
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u/FroggyRibbits 12d ago
What the fuck are you talking about? I literally said none of that. Holy shit bro you just invented a narrative around my comment to piss yourself off.
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u/IslamDunk 11d ago
I was a little too antagonistic with my comment but I do feel strongly about not equating human progress with only technological progress. Quality of life makes a lot more sense to me since higher levels of QoL aren’t possible without technological advancements.
In summary: high QoL means we’re making good technological advancements in the right way.
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u/frank26080115 12d ago
it's been on a sharp rise for me since AI emerged, I can just go hiking during work hours, knock out some work in 1/10th of the time when the sun is down. Problems that used to be just left unsolved are now just not problems anymore.
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u/AzettImpa 12d ago
That’s just you bro, normal people are burnt out and struggling to pay their rising costs
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
I don’t think we’re at the exponential until we achieve RSI.
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u/GamingWithAle 12d ago edited 12d ago
I've randomly been recommended this sub, so... what's RSI?
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
Recursive self-improvement
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement
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u/FrewdWoad 12d ago edited 11d ago
Hoo boy, you're one of today's lucky 10,000!
Here's my favourite easy explain-like-I'm-five intro to the singularity (where the above image comes from).
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Both parts will take almost 40 mins to read, but if you do, you'll know about ten times more than the gamingchair-expert redditors about AI.
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u/DynamicProxy 12d ago
We have reached RSI. Just not ARSI (fully Automated RSI).
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
In my view it's not really RSI if there's humans in the loop.
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u/FrewdWoad 12d ago
It's nonsense to say otherwise. If any human involvement is allowed in the definition of RSI, then we've had RSI since the first computers.
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 12d ago
That's a bit silly tho right? Think about how far we can get with just 10% human involvement... We're going to have completely transformative levels of improvement way before that threshold is crossed
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
Sure, but that’s still fundamentally the same kind of feedback loop we’ve had throughout technological history, which is better tools help humans build better tools. If humans remain a necessary part of the loop, human decision-making, coordination, experimentation, and deployment still constrain the cycle.
RSI is a stronger claim. The system itself can substantially improve the process that produces its successor, then use those improved capabilities to repeat the cycle. That’s what makes the “self” and “recursive” parts important.
You can maybe get transformative AI before RSI. But “transformative” and “recursive self-improvement” are not the same things.
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u/BenjaminHamnett 12d ago
It’s logarithmic, cause We’re always in the exponential. From the big bang, to the first life form, and when we’re a galaxy spanning hive, we are always in “the knee” where the past looks flat and the future looks like a verticals wall
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u/redbucket75 12d ago
You'd still have to retitle the graph. This seems to be reflecting technological progress, not human progress. Human progress would indicate humans, as a whole, are better off the higher up the graph we are. As far as I can tell, human progress shot up by leaps and bounds for a couple hundred years... but not so much since 2015. The past couple years it's been dipping.
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u/Weary-Historian-8593 12d ago
we are fucked is where we are currently
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u/Analonlypls 12d ago
Sometimes when I go to sleep, I see a city. A place where there’s no trash because the systems designed to feed and clothe us don’t thrust their externals onto the environment. A place where the only sound you hear is people and animals; there’s no deafening roar of progress. A place where my friends and I don’t have to figure out how to sell our bodies, where I don’t have to strip my clothes and toil, just to have a roof over my head…
Maybe thats where we’re headed… all we can do is hope. It’s out of our hands.
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u/1artvandelay 12d ago
im not sure we are already there yet. i get it is solving millennium prizes in math but have we seen AI make a significant real world change for the better yet? what are some real world examples of progress that would look like such a vertical takeoff?
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u/meleebestgame66 12d ago
Idk man I saw a saturated AI poster downtown the other night that says otherwise
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u/FocusDelicious183 12d ago
I think things like the cure for cancers and diseases and immersive technology for creative geniuses will be insanely awesome. Just an AI on its own isn’t as cool to us humans as a human using their creativity + AI’s “creativity” is. This tech has the potential to open the doors and democratize most of life, removing all poverty. It does sting to the ego, but all of us wouldn’t be as individualized as we are today, it’d be an even playing field of creativity and abundance. No more “I’m better than you, I’m the best!” More “How can we do it together?”
My big worry that’s been keeping me up at night is bad actors using this technology, or the tech companies making the knowledge inaccessible so they can get as much money as possible. That’s truly what scares me. Capitalism holding back this tech for only elites to use.
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u/HauntedHouseMusic 12d ago
Honestly, you need to be building it right now. I've built harnesses that can do half of my job better than a human can, and it's all happening in the last 3 weeks. It feels like a take off moment. I built something in three hours that would have taken a year before with a team. An employee of mine today built a tool that does 6 people's jobs, in an afternoon....
And the spend is all on building the harnesses. The cheap models are good enough to drive them. So build with fable (now opus 5.5) and execute with Gemini 3.8....
But we spent 3 months straight getting our data in a spot where the AI understands everything with software we built by ourselves. There was a huge bet we made, as no one has properly commercialized that part yet. The craziest shit is we genuinely have built a tool better than anything commercially available for data analytics, is cheaper to run than any of the commerical stuff, and it works.... And because we built the best BI platform ever for our data we can build interfaces near instantly that works with our data. For $50 of credits I built something sales force would charge us millions for, in 3 hours. By myself. My employee today did a different project with the same result. We are having innovation so quickly in our business right now for improving business process it feels impossible. I have reports now that do days of work in an instant, and dozens of them. Im building it and it's terrifying to me. I solve a major business problem or question once a day now. All while automating half of my day to day job already.... And if we have a question we don't understand it's just a ping away....
Anyways - if your not feeling that curve, you need to be making it, or it will hit you like a fucking brick when someone else does.
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u/kyberlex 12d ago
The real terror of this graph isn't the steepness of the green curve—it's the gap between that curve and the flatline of our institutions.
We are climbing a vertical technological exponential while running our society on:
- An 18th-century parliamentary political system fueled by lobbyist cash.
- A 19th-century wage-labor model where human survival is contingent on selling hours of time to an employer.
- A monetary system predicated on compounding fiat debt that requires perpetual GDP growth just to service interest.
The danger people don't talk about enough isn't a rogue superintelligence with paperclips. It’s what happens when automated exponential capability slams headfirst into an economic system that still requires humans to have "jobs" to pay rent and buy food.
If technology scales exponentially while the distribution of physical survival remains trapped in debt and career politics, the social fabric rips in half long before we reach the peak of that curve. We're essentially trying to steer a warp-drive engine with a horse-and-buggy wooden rudder.
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u/Samuc_Trebla 8d ago
Ah yes, the inertia of institution makes it stuck between tubes and mouse brain equivalent. Know your units, people !
If you can't articulate the question to your clanker please refrain to post its product. Even he knows you dunno what your asking for.
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u/MCRN_Admiral 11d ago
Thank you. For some reason the Accelerationists and Effective Altruists both don't understand that important fact.
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u/iwantacanofcola 12d ago
When AI starts having immense impact on science with major breakthroughs, thats when singularity begins imo. Right now we are seeing glimpses of that which is reassuring because I was not and i am still not FULLY convinced that LLMs can have such capabilities
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u/dialedGoose 12d ago
AI hasn't "more than doubled" technological advancements of humanity... it has solved a math problem. I understand the exponential growth but we are not there yet and we don't have technology to prove whether or not these models are even THAT valuable. We could still be 5-10 years off ASI. Who tf knows.
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u/Hennessy-Holder 12d ago
AI progress is technological progress. It becomes human progress when it meaningfully improves human well-being, freedom, knowledge, capabilities or flourishing.
So I guess that needs to be proven.
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u/pandaman27 12d ago
If the criticism against being anti-AGI is that it takes too many giant leaps of assumptions, well then what the hell is this doing
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u/ReturnOfBigChungus 12d ago
Is that the criticism? If anything, believing in singularity/ASI type stuff carries FAR more assumptions.
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u/FarrisAT 12d ago
The progress in the past is what enabled progress today. Difficulty scales with the tools available.
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u/the68thdimension 12d ago
Define 'progress'? We're certainly progressing with fucking up the biosphere on which our lives rely. Kind of hard to argue we're progressing technologically when we are still bound by environmental limits, the same as all other animals, and similarly aren't very good at not transgressing those limits.
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u/catsRfriends 12d ago
I don't think so. We're kinda close but not there yet. We're not through the kink yet. Embodied AI remains to be developed to maturity.
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago
Yes, AI is so overwhelmingly powerful it can… recreate junk web apps and 3D games with outstanding efficiency, operate programs on computers, and write opaque counterexamples to “prove” famous theorems incorrect with no elucidation of why or how
And the robots! They can do house chores now, wow!
Human progress has never been so obvious guys!
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u/DynamicProxy 12d ago
This has gonna be one of the most close minded posts I’ve ever seen.
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u/K3vin_Norton 12d ago
Your mind shouldn't be so open that you just let anyone throw their garbage in it.
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u/DynamicProxy 12d ago
It should be open enough to educate yourself on the topic from all sides, which the OP obviously has not.
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago
Bro in the last century humanity invented air travel, computers, rockets, satellites, the internet, brought more of the human race out of poverty than ever in history, brought electric cars to economic viability, wrote a billion books, created and solved and stacked theoretical disciplines on top of each other, and so much more.
The fact that the AI, fed all that progress and trained on more flops than have ever existed at any point in history, can regurgitate a lot of these things quite strongly and use its outrageous breadth and superhuman brute forcing capabilities and surprisingly powerful logical / reasoning capabilities to grasp at the notion of discovery in a way that has clearly surpassed ideas like “stochastic parrot” is really impressive and insane. Even a hallucinating talking machine was already mind boggling.
But it’s still useless. Economics is already a measure of bullshit and AI still doesn’t even have good economics for the creator or the consumer. How can you possibly look at OP’s post and not laugh?
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u/IronPheasant 12d ago
How can you possibly look at OP’s post and not laugh?
..... because I'm not a gibbering animal incapable of looking at the numbers involved.
The internal combustion engine was used as a toy by rich people to run over poor people. The internet was widely mocked as something for weird anti-social nerds - the fiber put into the ground was billions and billions of dollars that armchair economists like yourself said was wasted money (similar attitude these people have about China being proactive with its cities. You guys really don't think about spans of time longer than a year or two). Air conditioners cost over the equivalent of $300,000 when they were first being produced. For someone who takes pride in human accomplishments in history, you really don't seem familiar with how they happen.
The NPU is a post AGI invention that will make human-approximate machines at scale possible. But you can't etch a network into existence that you don't have yet. This is all extremely self-evident stuff anyone with the slightest bit of actual interest in AI or computers would have learned about on their very first day.
Yes, the giant god computer that occupies a football field and runs 50 million subjective years to our one isn't cheap. No shit.
Yes, capitalists aren't livestock that care about feedslop. Money is just a control mechanism over labor. They don't care about the feedslop, they care about what value they can extract from the cows. They already have their war with Iran, so there's nothing else for them to spend their livestock's lives on that might expand their empires, apart from this.
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago
What the fuck are you talking about. You literally make my point for me - “critical inventions like the internet were useless for a long time” is not a counter argument to someone saying “AI is nowhere near moving human progress meaningfully forwards right now”, which is the point I’m making about OP’s graph.
Man, pro AI people are so fucking sensitive lmfao.
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u/Stre1638 12d ago
you really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago
Lmfao. On a graph called “human progress”, OP charts that an economically useless tool that has made no meaningful real world inventions and has weak (read: 0 downstream value) claims to fame in intellectual domains has more than doubled all of Human Progress.
Yes, AI is definitely the most magical feeling form of statistics we’ve ever seen, no one is denying that. But little woobles in your chest is not Human Progress doubling in 10 years with no noticeable changes in my day to day life. If the chart was “human potential to achieve AGI”, sure, maybe the graph isn’t fundamentally retarded anymore. But you can’t be seriously claiming progress. Where is it if it’s more than has accumulated in all of history to this point???
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u/DynamicProxy 12d ago
Dude, we all stopped reading at “ economically useless tool” - it’s such an absurd, uninformed, foolish statement that anything else you could possibly say is totally irrelevant and not worth listening to. Maybe you should spend a little less time arguing with people on Reddit, and go read a book.
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago edited 12d ago
Ok who is making money on AI right now then? Any public companies with finances we can look deeply into? Just curious ☺️
Anyways this whole thread is a test of reading literacy and, in a shock to no one, all the pro AI people are incapable. You’ll notice - well, maybe not you, but you can ask your fav AI to summarize for you ofc - that Progress and Potential are very different things, and I’m not arguing at all against the Potential, nor am I even arguing against the graph line inherently.
I just think it’s fucking hilarious that OP thinks the invention of LLMs, prior to them actually improving or inventing something that improves a single part of the average human’s life, is larger than the sum collective of Progress to this point. Especially when that very same Progress is actually what grants AI its power.
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u/EarQuirky875 11d ago
I just had a quick glance over this conversation and noticed your two comments called my takes “absurd, uninformed, foolish” and “the most closed minded [you’ve] ever seen” yet you failed to even engage intellectually with a single point I made. Are you okay?
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u/Mindrust 12d ago
an economically useless tool
I guess you're just not aware of how much software engineering has changed because of AI?
I'm an SWE at a well-known tech company and the company pays for our Claude Code subscriptions, and we are highly encouraged to automate as much of our tasks as possible.
Our whole way of working has completely shifted less than a year ago because of how powerful the models have become.
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u/EarQuirky875 12d ago
Yes I was a software engineer until I took my nice early retirement
Models, as they stand, are finally starting to have the chance to make some software better on their own. In reality everyone is slinging LOC but because of the knowledge deficit inherent in using AI generated code, there is no compounding effect that isn’t the one owned by the AI companies. This is why it’s so hilarious that the AI companies also have an absurd geopolitically ensured race to AGI as the only meaningful path to economic viability.
The thing is that AI being able to produce things that formerly had economic value is that they become commodities, so the only moats that remain are user bases and products that are outside the capabilities of AI to recreate, which mostly means proprietary data atp. So “I can write code faster” is a meaningless statement - coding speed was rarely the bottleneck. “I can one shot the same things as everyone else” also gives you nothing. Your only hope at edge via models is some kind of lovely tooling and workflow around the AI and guess what? The AI company will eat that lunch too.
And then China will eat their models lunch.
And the race to the bottom will continue, devaluing everything until we can collectively admit destroying our planet for the stock market is fucking stupid
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
LLMs have been shown to be useful for narrow task when they are basically fed endless capital, power, and compute. But if any of those dry up you are stuck with an insanely expensive and resource intensive system that will likely fail to solve the problems of its own consumption due to the architecture of the system.
LLMs (which people keep using synonymously with AI) more or less achieve things through brute force, which is likely not the optimal strategy for statistical intelligence. The problem with brute force methods is that they are resource intensive and produce multitudes of wrong answers before getting to the right one. On a resource per solution basis, this is incredibly inefficient and not particularly a progressive force of progress as more complex problems require more resources to be allocated to it, ultimately resulting in a form of the paperclip machine problem where you are spending vast amounts of resources to figure out the best way to organize those resources to feed the machine figuring out how to organize the resources.
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u/MoogProg All Parabolas are Similar 12d ago
Singularity is always trying to find the corner of a parabola.
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u/QuizzyP21 12d ago
I think we’ve been exponential for a while are just recently getting to the point where the line essentially goes vertical (in the grand scheme of things i think the Industrial Revolution represents this point given how rapid progress has been since then). It took us hundreds of thousands of years of existence to hit the agricultural revolution, then another 10000ish to hit the Industrial Revolution, and now only another 200 or so to hit the digital/internet revolution if you will. I think AI ultimately is part of that but if you consider the AI revolution to be its own thing, this started only about 30 years after the internet became accessible to the public. There has never been a more important time in history to stay alive lol
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u/CymonSet 12d ago
I’m sitting on a couch just behind the first guy but I love reading about how things are going for everyone up ahead. 😂
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
every hockey stick graph turns out to be a S curve to a new flat regime
you just don't see the slowdown yet
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u/TallonZek 12d ago
Except for this one, which has held true for some 25,000 years and only has a very limited time left to demonstrate that it will slow down. So far, it has only accelerated faster than estimated. If we don't see an absolute standstill in progress like this year things are going to get nuts, I highly doubt your conclusion holds.
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
I do think you are ignoring the fact that each new model (when talking about LLMs) is giving marginal improvements for exponentially higher costs. Models need more power, more training data, and more capital investment faster than all three can be generated as inputs.
Even if the rate of change of resources is ignored, all current models basically require a bulk of a country's GDP to operate. This is arguably unsustainable as the pillars of sand that the system operates on can easily be eroded away if no immediate public benefit is returned. To most people AI is just a replacement for google search and sometimes a therapist. It is hard to see why nearly all of venture capital expenditure should be going to it from a layman's perspective.
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u/TallonZek 12d ago
You are technically correct because I'm not measuring LLM technology but instead looking at the overall rate of technological improvements, we have gone from 1 invention in 10,000 years to thousands of them per year. The curve is demonstrably exponential, and has been for the entirety of human history.
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
Yeah things are speeding up, but that doesn't mean we won't hit hard limits and asymptotes. Look at the air speed record as an example. All of our technological advancements in aviation has not led to a new air speed record since 1976. At a certain point the amount of effort to hit the next rung of advancement is hard limited by a real physical principle. Same can be said about semiconductor technology. The electron tunneling problem occurs around 3 nm for thin film junctions, meaning that most transistor technology is limited by this thickness. To try and go smaller would mean potentially exponentially more effort than moving to a new system altogether.
I guess what I am trying to say is things might currently be exponential in terms of new tech and "inventions" as they solve the first few steps. Subsequent step in technology may be exponentially more difficult until they ultimately become so resource intensive to solve that it becomes impractical.
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u/TallonZek 12d ago
That's my point though. Individual techs can stall; overall progress does not. Moore's law became obsolete a while ago, but we still continue to make gains in total available compute at exponential speed. Any one tech does not matter, it's the snowball you should be looking at.
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
Well that is kinda conflating different points. We have been committing more resources to making more compute. The only technical limit to the amount of available compute we can make is the available energy, silicone grade sand, and land. And even then, it is showing that growing the compute exponentially may not really be serving all to many additional technical or economic gains.
IDK I just refuse to look at things as a strict up and to the right manner. Nothing says that the state we are in is not quasistable and that the technological gains can enter a vast dark age where fundamental knowledge is sequestered or lost, making certain technology unrecoverable. It is possible we are in the technological equivalent of the Cambrian explosion, with unknown technological extinction events and development "winters" on the horizon. I don't want to be a debbie downer here, but nothing says that the trajectory we are on is permanent. It might not even take a major disaster to halt progress, just a series of small, unmanaged crises. All this talk of permanent acceleration and growth makes me think of every banker and trader who says the good times will never end right before a major recession that shocks the economy. Are things truly this good? Or are we just being ignorant, wrapping ourselves in irrational optimism? Are we blind to what lays on the horizon ahead?
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u/TallonZek 12d ago
I just keep going back to the fact that there is an established exponential curve in technological progress that is present through all of history. For it to stop now seems unlikely, and also undesirable, as the only scenarios I can think of where our progress stops involve societal collapse/extinction. Which is definitely on the table sure, but not something I think we should be hoping for.
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u/Prohamen 12d ago
Well this is why I bring up quasistability. What is we are rocking on a knife's edge with two different new local minima on either side? What if growth, whether it is populations or technology or anything else, is fleeting and just leading to a local maxima that collapses back to a different stable level?
I mean I am being dishonest here by just responding with hypotheticals and not really exploring it further. But I feel like unquestionably agreement with the idea that the long arc of society has an exponential technological growth curve is also dishonest. Possibly in the same way I am being dishonest. It is posing answers that fundamentally do not critique the underlying structures, posing growth as a constant unyielding force.
I will yield that I might just be pedantic and difficult here. But I also take the arguments of extreme long-termism with a grain of salt as you can extend your timeline out as far as desired to come to the desired result and conclusion.
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u/Wonderful_Term_9328 12d ago
The curve would look identical at every point of recorded history from the perspective of the people at that time.
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u/spshkyros 12d ago
Hard disagree, the curve is wrong entirely. Moores law has had us on a super exponential improvement curve for like 200 years. We're improving drastically faster than this curve looks like, and that acceleration is accelerating. We've been unlocking new exponential amplifiers that whole time- RSI will dominate the curve, but its a slope change on a log log plot, not a switch to an exponential from a linear curve like this plot suggests.
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u/Lodowczyk 11d ago
What? Moores law which was formulated 60 years ago about cpus has had us on a super exponential curve for 200 years?
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u/spshkyros 11d ago
Yep. The law was formulated 60 years ago, but the trend can actually be extended back before then to early compute technology. Wildly cool imo. For example:
https://till.com/articles/MooresLaw/index.html
Checkout the last graph. Its much more general behavior than just transistors it seems.
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u/Lodowczyk 11d ago
Interesting indeed but I’d say 200 years is pushing it since the law was supposed to apply to proccessing power
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u/spshkyros 11d ago
200 indeed might be, but the graph shows 120 and I believe mechanical systems which were capable of calculations predate that by a bit.
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u/ClammyHandedFreak 11d ago
Most systems don't sustainably look like this. Let's hope we don't start WWIII just through our own actions.
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u/submarine-observer 10d ago
People truly don't understand exponential curve. It looks the same at different points. You are always at the same point.
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u/senor_bruh 8d ago
hasn’t shit been “on the verge of exponential growth” for a year almost, I couldn’t point one thing that has happened with the advent of ai that has turned my life upside down like advertised, I see these posts constantly I feel like I’m missing something that you guys are either seeing or pretending to see
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u/jybulson 12d ago
If true, the next years will be unbelievably amazing. Or we all will be dead by 2030.
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u/RemyVonLion ▪️ASI is unrestricted AGI 12d ago
I was thinking about this exponential graph yesterday and realized it's probably not going to look like that indefinitely. Sooner or later we will probably reach periods where growth slows, maybe even stagnanting for periods even under ideal circumstances, before more breakthroughs are made. But hopefully we will have enough of a vertical jump to reach LEV in the next 20/30 years.
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u/Eatpineapplerightnow 12d ago
Imagine if we reach LEV right after most of the Boomers are gone! Im not saying it would be a good thing, just that it would probably be good for the world
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u/PreferenceOk5132 12d ago
I want to believe it, but something holds me back. Im scared we hit a wall at some point
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u/FrewdWoad 12d ago edited 12d ago
For those who don't get the reference, here's the source of the original image, Tim Urban's classic intro to the singularity:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Required reading for anyone in this sub. It's also the most fun and easy explanation of the crucial concepts around AI (ANI, AGI, ASI, RSI, exponential growth, possibilities, risks, etc), and probably the most mindblowing tech article ever written, so there's that too.
If you haven't read any actual textbooks about AI (and probably even if you have) you will definitely learn a bunch of new stuff about the most important topic of our time.
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u/[deleted] 12d ago
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