At this rate, I have no idea what the state of things would be even 6 months down the line.
Endless glib comments in this thread. We don’t know when the above prompt leads to takeoff. It could be soon.
“But how did skynet learn to build itself?”
“We showed it how.”
It’s a guess, of course. But, the requisite concepts for getting Transformers working are not much broader than calculus and a bit of programming.
Either the comments are glib and preposterous or they are reasonable and enlightening. I guess they are neither but our narrow mindedness makes it so?
Yeah, I know about LLAMA, but as I understand - it's not exactly legal to use and share it.
For anyone keeping track, this is when you update your cyberpunk dystopia checklist to mark off "hackers are running illegal AIs to compete with corporations".
Somewhere in the range of 6 months ~ 6 years
Where singularity = something advanced enough comes along that we can't understand or predict or keep up with it, because it's so far beyond us and changing so far faster than our ape brains can perceive, and (hopefully) it brings us along for the ride.
No promises it'll be evenly distributed though.
Can GPT9 build GPT10, with zero human input?
I’d give 50/50 odds it can.
Can GPT15 build something that isn’t a large language model and is far superior in every way?
I’d give 50/50 odds it can.
Can both the above steps happen within one solar rotation of each other?
I’d give 50/50 odds they can.
Because at some point these models won’t need humans to interact with them. Humans are very slow- that’s the bottleneck.
They’ll simply interact with their own previous iterations or with custom-instantiated training models they design themselves. No more human-perceptible timescale bottlenecks.
50/50 chance of Skynet.
It’s 50/50 that in 150 years some version of our descendants will exist, i.e. something that you can trace a direct line from Homo sapiens to. Say a Homo sapiens in a different substrate, like “human on a chip”.
The thing is if you can get “human on a chip” then you probably also can get “something different and better than human on a chip”, so why bother.
By the 24th century there’ll be no Homo sapiens Captain Picard exploring the quadrant in a gigantic ship that needs chairs, view screens, artificial gravity, oxygen, toilets and a bar. That’s an unlikely future for our species.
More likely whatever replaces the thing that replaces the thing that replaced us won’t know or care about us, much less need or want us around.
He was an uninformed crackpot with a poor understanding of statistics. And then less so. And then less so.
Something passing the Turing test 6 months to 6 years from now? Lunacy.
But give it 6 months and talk to GPT5 or 6 and then this might seem a lot more reasonable.
There's a lot you can say about Kurzweil being inaccurate in his predictions, but that is way too demeaning. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about him and the accolades he received:
Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from then President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".
He wasn’t taken seriously, especially not when he painted a future of spiritual machines.
Recently on the Lex Fridman podcast he himself said as much: his predictions seemed impossible and practically religious in the late 90s and up until fairly recently, but now experts in the field are lowering their projections every year for when the Turing test will be passed.
Half of their projections are now coming in line with the guy they had dismissed for so long, and every year this gap narrows.