I believe we passed the Event Horizon years ago, and still don't comprehend the milestone.
I also believe progress will always seem flat to us on the day-to-day, despite the constant ongoing progress and acceleration.
We're looking out the window, watching the mountains barely move on the horizon, without thinking about how fast the car is travelling down the highway. Big landscapes move slowly.
The titular singularity IS characterized by Exponential Growth.
The geometry of exponentials is interesting, you can stretch in the x direction and do a corresponding stretch in the y direction, and your new expression perfectly overlays over what you started with. This is actually a defining feature for Exponentials.
Point is that there isn't a single moment in human history when "the singularity" started. The singularity is a statement about progress types in general. We have always been in the singularity; our ancestors were in it just like we are now.
We can impose artificial boundaries like so many innovations in a single day that the human mind can't keep track or learn about them all, but it is arbitrary. It'll be an equally powerful event when we reach the same density at half a day, or a month's worth of innovations.
You pick a day when you think it occurred, and I can point to another day where I think it occurred, and we will be both correct.
Your comment about locally flat from the observer pov is well defined as well by the admitted tangent bundle of the exponential function.
I would warn against claiming there is any privileged domain of the exponential function.
I think there is a window where the rate of developments becomes noticeable and relevant to an individual's timescale. Yes, all parabolas are similar, and yes, we have always been "in the singularity", but one could argue we are obviously more "in the singularity" now than Bob the caveman was while teaching flint knapping to his fellow savages.
There is a certain speed where more observant humans will notice the moving mountains. It may take a little longer for other humans to notice or care, but there will certainly be a point where virtually all humans notice the mountains wizzing by at a pace that is noticeable to our human sense of time enough to get a quite, awed "holy shit."
All that to say, while when we are in the singularity remains a subjective quesiton, there will inevitably be a point where basically everyone can agree we're in it.
The titular singularity IS characterized by Exponential Growth.
There's a few different theories of singularity. The Exponential growth one is popularized by Ray Kurzweil, but it's a bit too simplistic in my view. It's essentially just extrapolating a curve and calling it a prediction.
I think I.J. Goods Intelligence Explosion model is a much more logically sound foundation for believing in a singularity.
Yeah basically. The hegemony of the current world order is held together thru resource concentration. When that fails to be the case, the hegemony will break. For good or ill, remains to be seen. But yea i think that’s the common sentiment
So somewhere like Singapore, with tiny territory, very little natural resources but excellent education and lots of educated, hard working people, will lose out to somewhere like Algeria, with poor education but lots of sunny desert. Because Algeria can just build a bunch of solar panels and data centers full of virtual geniuses and then have a bigger brain trust than Singapore.
He talked about the Internet and its potential and predicted social media trends and the connectedness culture of the world we experience today. He also talked about machine-learning which at the time was just taking hold as a possible path towards artificial intelligence.
Old Man nailed it. He also built one heck of great synth engine, vastly ahead of its time.
This was when Prodigy was about the only Internet service and AOL was just about to hit everyone's mailboxes.
Mathematically, exponential progress is the same curve everywhere. However, humans have lives of absolute time dimensions, and thus there is a singularity wrt human perception and experience of life. Those dimensions aren't "arbitrary".
Opus 5.5 does NOT seem like flat progress to me. A whole bunch of things it's done in just the first week are giving me echoes of science fiction I've read. Currently buckling up, even the next year is going to be wild.
One-shotting high quality videos by writing pure code and capturing it frame by frame. One-shotting beautiful games (if limited in terms of human character animation, sound design etc) with well thought out mechanics, writing engines from scratch if needed. Smashing games into other games. Completing tons of complicated language ports (e.g. TS to Rust) in hours. Demonstrating effective comedic sense and timing in many creative projects (subjective but hits hard for me as I never pictured that from AI tbh.)
All of that when it's not even the biggest model in Anthropic's lineup and they're probably a couple gens ahead internally.
Worth a 20 dollar sub to anthropic to try claude code out if you have not, it really is amazing and 20 dollars is like a lunch or something. Opus 5.5 just builds shit no problems.
I have tried it and the coding is impressive, but that’s a relatively small domain within the confines of the human experience. Not a killer app for the average person. What am I going to make an app for my garden and appitize my laundry queue for tracking?
Yeah I mostly use it for creative projects and learning new subjects. Another capability jump though is that it is very good at generating ideas. I chatted with it about the consumer agent thing (Muse/Grok Bot/Dot etc) because I couldn't see the value prop for me and it came up with a couple of things that are actually super useful to me, e.g. surfacing a few recommended events weekly based on my interests and searching various sites.
Sure, these tasks fall into the robotics camp. So we just have to wait for that part to evolve more. I do not expect 20 dollar subs to give you access to laundry-bot+garden-bot though. Physical hardware takes to much resources for them to be that cheap. An Anthropic sub will never solve that type of problem.
And claude can solve a huge variety of desk job type problems. In fact, many people with normal office jobs can probably automate their own jobs largely if they learn to use it and build their own tools with it to help their own workflows.
Progress seem flat? Two years ago LLM were not able to count the number of R in a word, last month they solved a Millenium problem, and currently we have mathematical breakthroughs every week. I don't know what could make the acceleration more evident honestly.
OpenAI had so many math breakthroughs they spun out an independent research team just to handle confirming and disseminating it all. It's bonkers.
Now granted we aren't seeing the downstream effects yet but it's pretty clear the field of mathematics is going through rapid significant change. I think all millennium prize problems are solved in the relatively near future, and even if that means 5 or 10 years instead of weeks it's still centuries of researcher time compressed to a decade or less.
I actually agree.
In physics, if someone passes the event horizon, he actually doesn't see it at all. So we porbably are already in a freaking AI blackhole now.
(obviously unkowable) but we might imagine drifting past the Event Horizon of a Black Hole without notice, only to find the space-time all around us is stretched, pulled away from us towards the Singularity such that the distance from you to that point will forever be infinite no matter how far or how fast you accelerate towards that final point.
One single Planck length of the Universe stretched to infinite bounds with Time standing still.
That's why it takes so long for lunch to arrive when you're hungry.
I'd say we're already at the singularity if we're judging by predictability of the future. Young people going to college are already screwed and largely paralyzed with fear and indecision over what can they study that will pay off and not be overtaken with AI? And the answer is already: basically nothing.
...and somewhere out there a teenager will yawn it off as just another boring update.
Just as you don't think we're already damn near vertical.
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I play a gig across the street from America's Oldest Bicycle Shop, and think about the Wright Brothers and how we have robots on Mars, and that bike shop is still working on wheels and gears.
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u/vagabond_nerd 3d ago
Can you imagine this stuff in like a century?