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Comment by bnchrch | Hacker News Reader

Theres two futures I see.

1. We create near AGI

2. We create ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence)

In the first scenario, an investment in any AI model company that does not own its own compute is like buying a tar pit instead of an oil well. In other words, this future has AI like a commodity and the entity who wins is the one who can produce it at the lowest cost.

In the second scenario, an investment in any AI model company is like buying a lottery ticket. If that company is the first to create ASI then you've won the game as we know it.

I think the minor possibility of the second scenario makes this a good investment. But it definitely feels like all or nothing instead of sustainable business.

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There’s a third one as well. AI will never get past its current autocomplete on steroids state and mainstream people will see through the facade at some point. AGI always was and always will be a pipe dream with the technology we currently have.

All AI stocks come crashing down from fantasy amounts of money to what they’re actually worth as they did with every previous tech hype until people find a new thing to throw their money at.

It would be the fusion nuclear reactor reactor of technology tantalizingly close but always a decade out.

>mainstream people will see through the facade at some point

do you read reddit? lots of people see through the facade now. the only people excited are shills

My experience Reddit sentiment is inversely correlated with reality, and far too cynical.

It's pretty simple to go into threads about breaking events several years later and see them loaded with confidently incorrect statements dominating the discourse.

One of my favorite examples was the $34 IPO stock offer to moderators and redditors, which was almost universally bashed (currently trading over 170).

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1b0n2eo/reddit_i...

Stocks are somewhat irrational these days.

Reddit just turned a profit after nearly 20 years in business.

Its whole use maybe upended by AI and bots, so even if its profitable now hard to know if it will continue.

I don’t know what drives it. I think part of it is that zero commission stock trades have many more small players making trades and stocks are priced on the margin.

The stock market has crashes, yes, but I don't think that's proof that all previous tech was overhyped nonsense. I'm not just talking computers here, I'm talking steam, metal, agriculture. What proof do we have that we live at the end of history, and that no such shocking, world-changing developments might occur in our lifetimes?

Certainly not debating that this isn't possible, ofc. As someone whose spent the past year+ working full time on the philosophy of this technology I think you're going against a pretty clear scientific consensus among AI experts, but perhaps you have your reasons.

I think we already have AGI anyway, so I'm either a loon or a pedant ;)

Nonsense no, all technology has a use-case, including blockchains, VR and whatever’s been hyped in the last 20 years. I’m not even an opponent of AI in its current state, its and incredibly useful tool for a big number of things.

Overhyped (and more specifically, overvalued) is a different question though. I think that most people working in the AI field have a pretty good monetary reason to say that AGI and ASI are just around the corner, but I have yet to see proof of any of it being achieved in any way whatsoever.

Looking at everything we have so far, LLMs are still only token prediction and neural nets can only do what they’ve been trained to do. The datasets may be bigger, the computing power and efficiency may be increasing and we’re building abstractions that make longer chains of „thought“ possible, but at the end of the day this is still the same technology with the same restrictions that it’s always had and I don’t see that changing.

> AI will never get past its current autocomplete on steroids state

I’m honestly betting on robotics. Tokenising words is intuitive. But the parameter space for tokenised physical inputs is both better understood and less solved for.

You can't imagine a world where tomorrow's chat bot is only marginally better than today's?

That would imply that the people pumping infinity dollars into this technology are suckers, which is impossible. The minds who put $120M into Juicero would never err in their judgement.

whispers to self Don't trip over Poe's law... Don't trip over Poe's law...

They can only see two futures at a time.

I can't personally. OpenAI's o3 aside, the rate of progress in the past two years has been eye watering to say the least.

It's tricky since the future of AI isn't something anyone can really prove / disprove with hard facts. Doomers will say that the rate of improvement will slow down, and anti-doomers will say it won't.

My personal believe is that with enough compute, anything is possible. And our current rate of progress in both compute and LLM improvement has left Doomers with shaky ground to discount the eventuality of an AGI being developed. This just leaves ASI as a true question mark in my mind.

> past two years has been eye watering to say the least

Are we seeing the same progress? GPT-4 was released in March 2023, that's almost two years. Tools are much better but where is the vast improvement?

I legitimately dont know how to reply, bc by this point llms co-own all aspects of my life and jumps between gpt4->claude3->claude3.5->o1 have all been very noticeable

I'm the opposite. We're presumably in a similar line of work, but while I've experimented with every major release from OpenAI and Anthropic last year -- I've barely ever used an LLM outside of that.

I still Google things I want to know and skip the AI part.

> I still Google things I want to know and skip the AI part.

My Google use is down significantly. And I mostly reach for it when I am looking for current information that LLMs do not yet have training data for. However, this is becoming less of an issue as of late. DeepSeek for example has a lot of current data.

GPT-2 was generating snippets of HTML ten years ago. Was it valid? Not always, but neither is the current crop. It's been incremental logarithmic gains approaching an asymptote for ten years now. Since before "Open"AI stopped being open.

GPT-1 was released 7 years ago, but ok. You really think GPT-4 to o1 is increasingly logarithmic the same way 4 to 4o is?

> My personal believe is that with enough compute, anything is possible.

Dunno, we're already at ridiculous amounts of compute and progress has slowed, a lot. I think we need another technological breakthrough, a change in technique, something. LLMs don't seem to be capable of actually learning in the way humans do, just being trained on data, of which we've reached the limit.

Wouldn't there be so many more possible futures though? Geopolitical conflict, economic crisis, the clime crisis, civil strife, demographic collapse, the end of globalization, an unexpected black-swan event, etc. Any one of these, even a pandemic, could push back, if not utterly prevent us from reaching these.

Endless growth and technological improvement isn't the only option, and seems to me like the least likely. The other option means that there will be a peak somewhere.

Very true and prescient. All of the technological growth of the last two decades has only been possible because of peace and cooperation between the Core Countries, but that world is as its most unstable point in decades and future peace is not guaranteed. As impressive as LLMs can be, a computer still loses to a crude home-made bomb.

> rate of progress in the past two years

This took me down a memory lane:

- Dragon Dictate speed recognition improvement curve in the mid-90s would have led to today's Siri sometime around 1999.

- The first couple of years of Siri & Alexa updates...

- Robots in the '80s led us to believe that home robots would be more or less ubiquitous by now. (Beyond floor cleaners.)

- CMU winning the DARPA Urban challenge for autonomous vehicles was a big fake-out in terms of when AVs would actually land.

Most of the benefits of computing come from relatively small improvements, continuously made over many years & decades. 2-4 years is not enough time to really extrapolate in any computing domain.

> with enough compute

"enough" here could be something that is only measurable on the Kardashev scale.

The rate of improvement in the models is nothing short of phenomenal, but the applications are meh at best, even after a few years of billions of dollars and endless hours poured by the world's best product and engineering minds. Every AI leader is pushing "agentic AI" as the next big thing but as a specialist in business automation I have my reservations. A lot of problems in automation in business happen because of insufficient investment in IT but can be solved fairly economically by off-the-shelf software, Zapier, a custom web service, or traditional ML techniques in order of complexity. Out of the more difficult problems that remain at the edges, only a small fraction can be solved by LLMs in my experience. The idea that chains of small agents will be composed and generally applied to any business problem under the sun doesn't sound right to me. I think not even the big bosses in AI know at present, but they're surely betting the house on it, and if the bet doesn't play out, things will start looking even more desperate.

Isn’t that scenario 1?

I have been living in it for a couple of years now.

I can see more futures. For example

3. We create incrementally better versions of generative AI models which are incrementally better at making predictions based on their training sets, are incrementally more efficient and cheaper to run, and are incrementally better integrated into products and interfaces.

> 3. We create incrementally better versions of generative AI models...

In my opinion, this seems to be the more likely than some of the other wilder scenarios being predicted.

> this future has AI like a commodity

Thats why I like the idea of openrouter so much. Next token prediction is a perfect place to run a marketplace and compete on price / speed.

It's hard for me to see a future where the long term winners aren't just the chipmakers and energy companies.

With the o3 benchmarks its becoming apparent the primary thing from keeping current generation of models from getting smarter is more processing power. If somehow chips got 10x faster tomorrow, it still wouldn't be fast enough. Even at 1000x faster than current performance, those $3k o3 queries now cost $3 which are still too much.

If you invest in a data center, any amount of billions you put in will not future proof it because faster chips are always around the corner and you will be at the mercy of suppliers.

If you invest in a model, even if you invested billions in 1-10 years people will be able to run equivalently powerful models on consumer hardware.

I'm loving the competitive system LLMs created by having a unified API interface allowing you to swap out models and providers with single lines of code.

>n the first scenario, an investment in any AI model company that does not own its own compute is like buying a tar pit instead of an oil well. In other words, this future has AI like a commodity and the entity who wins is the one who can produce it at the lowest cost.

Why do you assume that AI will become a commodity that is only metered by access to compute?

Right now (since June 2024), Anthropic is ahead of the field in quality of their product, especially when it comes to programming. Even if O1/O3 beat them on benchmarks, they are still nowhere near when normalized for compute needs.

Can they sustain this? I don't know, but in the end this is very similar to known software or even SAAS business models. They are also in a somewhat synergetic relationship to Amazon.

Did office software ever become commoditized? Google and many more tried hard, but there is still the same company in the lead that was in the 90ies.

> especially when it comes to programming

there is this sentiment on internet, but in my personal experience, GPT4 hallucinate APIs and usage examples way less, and after trying to get Claude working, I switched to GPT as the first step in my coding workflow.

Definitely disagree with your binary of options, but if I do accept them, why would scenario 2 justify investing? That scenario sounds to me like a likely societal collapse, rendering any investment moot. Even it it’s not some terminator or paperclip maximizer situation, and the first team to build ASI is able to keep a handle on it, I’m not sure our economy or civilization could handle that much intelligence, let alone concentrated in the hands of a for-profit corporation. The knowledge of such a thing existing would make securities markets collapse instantly - can’t really compete with an ASI agent there, so might as well move everything to real estate and gold.

More alarmingly, such a thing would be more dangerous than a nuclear weapon, and might reasonably merit a nuclear first strike.

I guess I should expect it on a VC-tied forum, but it seems strange to talk about company valuations and investment outlooks in the event of an artificial superintelligence operating in the world.

Reminds me of Vault-Tec from the Fallout universe trying to "win the capitalism game" and "optimize shareholder value" after a nuclear apocalypse, going so far as to facilitate nuclear war in order to raise their value as a "defense company"

Your comment raised a question for me: what makes you certain that there isn't already an artificial superintelligence operating in the world? I am not sure that it is possible to know when the threshold has been crossed.

I would suggest being careful treading that thought experiment.

If we invented ASI today, it'd still take a lot of economic digestion time, especially on the physical side.

ASI doesn't mean it can magically reverse-infer a digital process from an existing hodge-podge of automation and manual steps.

ASI doesn't mean there are instantly enough telerobotics or sensors to physically automate all processes.

Similarly, even ASI will by definition be non-deterministic and make mistakes. So processes will have to be reengineered to be compatible with it.

A superintelligence, at a bare minimum, equates to an exponential increase in software development capacity for everyone to the point at which we don’t need devs and we very quickly don’t need anything that devs can automate.

Even that is small minded frankly. The economy would not survive a super intelligence.

I think that's giving a lot of credit to "super".

Can the smartest developer you know build a project correctly without any requirements?

There's a lot of sausage making behind what to build, how to integrate it with other things, who needs to be told what on which other teams, etc.

Even pie in the sky breakthrough ASI isn't going to be able to do all of that, Day 0.

And if we're using a tautology to define ASI as something that can do that on Day 0, then I'd point out that in the entire history of technology there hasn't been a single advancement that wasn't subsequently refined and improved.

Except maybe fire.

If an AGI isn’t way smarter than the smartest person I’ve ever met, it’s definitely not a super intelligence. The very nature of a super intelligence is one that far exceeds human intelligence, including the the ability to rapidly design smarter AI.

Can the smartest person you know do everything all at once?

If not, how much smarter do you think someone would need to be to do so?

ASI ridiculousness starts from defining it as a do-anything machine. Everything has limits.

If I could instantiate 20 clones of the smartest person I know to work 24/7 without distractions or fatigue that could write code at the speed of compute, it would utterly demolish any team of humans of any size.

Like… I’ve had a TODO that I’ve expanded and worked on for a few years for a personal project. If I had a tireless bot of my own intelligence, it should only have taken about an hour. Human limitations are immense barriers.

"Invest into our biotech company. Imagine how rich you will be when the next pandemic wipes out humanity!"

I just don't understand how commoditization argument is stated as truism in hacker news and in most AI posts that's the top voted comment. If at all, I see perfect non-ASI AI as superset of search engine and no search engine can match Google's quality even after 2 decades.

I don’t understand how folks think the economy will survive the advent of AGI. Imagine if you could spin up white collar workers at whim for a fraction of the cost… how do we think the economy is going to work if that happens?

back in _____ folk were wondering how economy will survive now that we don’t need everyone to do farming since we have tractors and other farming machinery… as with any other previous “revolution” (industrial, information…) the society will move on. might be rocky for a bit though :)

All of those revolutions have largely exacerbated wealth inequality and were driven by _gradual_ transitions with build out of capital. The shift away from subsistence farming was a huge deal. But AGI would be way harder. It’s immediately deployable for very little investment and can replace basically any white collar job.

Capital has been an economic multiplier of human labor. AGI is more like flooding the market with infinite labor. There will be blood in the streets, at best.

> Capital has been an economic multiplier of human labor. AGI is more like flooding the market with infinite labor...

A tractor was one of many things that humans have invented that could be considered a labor multiplier and put many people out of work.

Yes but it put people out of work by making the people more efficient. As did computers. AGI does not make people more efficient. Even if wealth accrued to the capital holders, it still drive a large demand for higher value human labor.

AGI is just more people. It’s infinite people in the labor market driving wages down to zero.

Productivity went up for those still employed.

Yes that’s what I said

> If that company is the first to create ASI then you've won the game as we know it.

You can have as much intelligence in a model/system as you want, and it can well be ASI, but as long as this intelligence doesn't have the resources it needs to run at its full potential, or at least at one higher than the competition, you're still not over the hill.

Ultimately those companies or countries which will have the most resources available for an ASI to shine will be the ones which win.

Once ASI has figured out how to obtain energy (and ICs?) "for free", or at least cheaper than the competition, it will have won.

ASI that can't design its own superior chips surely isn't real ASI

I think if we create ASI, the companies that invest on it won't necessarily see huge returns because I am 100% sure that the tech will be declare a national security matter and be heavily regulated. Since you need lots of compute to run those models, most people won't be able to run them without a cloud provider.

Not before the companies leaders, board of directors and investors use it for some very profitable trading first.

They don't actually need to achieve AGI or ASI. All they need to do is pump expectations around growth to the point where the public will believe all the BS about their terminal growth rate to dump their equity on the open market.

Putting aside the absurdist notion of “AGI” to start with, we live in a world of finite resources and we’ve used up our carbon budget and are burning down the planet to run LLM right now.

The new “reasoning” models get very marginal improvements in output for huge increase in token count and energy use.

None of this is sustainable, and eventually, and soon, crops will start to fail en masse due to climate disasters.

Then the real fun starts.

Right now “AI” is more harmful than helpful on a species level balance sheet. These are real problems, today.

>But it definitely feels like all or nothing instead of sustainable business.

That is kinda startup funding in general isn't it?

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