Did we hit some sort of technical inflection point in the last couple of weeks or is this just coincidence that all of these ML papers around high quality procedural generation are just dropping every other day?
This seems like basically plugging a couple of techniques together that already existed, allowing to turn 2D text-to-image into 3D text-to-image.
They have others as well.
as with a majority of ML research
Plus "we did the same thing, but with 10x the compute resources".
But yeah.
Do this enough times and eventually the thing you have looks indistinguishable from something completely novel.
In his Lex Fridman interview, John Carmack makes similar assertions about this prospect for AGI: That it will likely be the clever combination of existing primitives (plus maybe a couple novel new ones) that make the first AGI feasible in just a couple thousand lines of code.
I also liked the analogy he made with his earlier work on 2D and 3D graphics engines where taking a few short cuts basically got him on a path to success. For a while we had this "almost" 3D capability long before the hardware was ready to do 3D properly. It's the same with AGIs. A few short cuts will get us AI that is pretty decent and can do some impressive things already - as witnessed by the recent improvements in image generation. It's not a general AI but it has enough intelligence that it can still do photo realistic images that make sense to us. There's a lot of that happening right now and just scaling that up is going to be interesting by itself.
I think finding a niche for humans has proved difficult especially because of those reasons, and AI can take those hurdles much easier.
It takes nature thousands of years to create a rock that looks like a face, just by using geology. A human can do that in a couple hours. And then this AI can generate 50 3d human faces per second (assuming enough CPU).
It could be that an AGI is around the corner, as they say. We might not be machines, but are way faster than nature at reaching places. We don't have the option of waiting for thousands of years.
and I agree with you!
And the OP comment its by the magnanimous/infamous AnigBrowl
You need to start doing AI legal admin ( I dont have the terms, but you may - we need legal language to control how we deal with AI)
and @dang - kill the gosh darn "posting too fast" thing
Jiminey Crickets I have talked to you abt this so many times...
I'm a kotlin programmer so it's a scary fun thought for me.
The numbers of researchers and research labs scaled up that there is now many well funded teams with experience.
Public tooling and collaboration has reached a point where research happen across the open internet between researchers at a pace that wasn't before possible. Common Crawl, stable diffusion, hugging-face, etc...)
All the techniques that took years in small labs to prove as viable are now getting scaled up across data and people in front of our eyes.
The pace at which methods scale up is currently a lot faster than hardware improvements, so unless these scaled up methods become incredibly lucrative (not impossible), I think it's quite likely we'll soon-ish (a couple years from now) see a slowdown.
This should be further up than all the speculation about AI accelerationism. There's a very simple explanation why a lot of awesome papers come out right now, it's prestigious conference paper deadlines.
Whatever it is, this is a massive phase shift.
WTF - the singularity is closer than we thought!!!