It’s possible that LLMs don’t get a whole lot better than they are now. I don’t expect this line of research to progress all the way to smarter-than-us AGI.

Just think about a dog. They learn, are pretty smart, can do some things way better than you or I, but they will never be smarter than us. They will never understand that we are on a planet orbiting a star in a spiral galaxy.

Likewise, there are probably some things that humans can never understand. Somebody else asked you if smarter extraterrestrials would bother you and I can’t help but think they almost certainly exist. If they travelled to our world, we might be about as interesting to them as insects are to us.

No. When we were kids, my generation was promised flying cars, unlimited fusion power, and sentient computers. There's a good chance I'll live to see one out of three of those things happen, and that's better than the zero out of three I thought we'd get.

Not depressed but just makes me question the value of our existence. If we are truly able to create machines with our intellectual potential, where does that leave us? Do we compete with the machines in a rat-race for a chance at happy existence? Or will we create a utopia where the machines do the difficult work and allow for an enjoyable existence for all. The people who are rooting for LLM's are hopefully working towards the latter but not sure if that is just wishful thinking.

Why? Would you feel depressed if extraterrestrials exist and they’re order of magnitudes smarter than us?