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Comment by brotchie | Hacker News Reader

First AI thing that’s made me feel a bit of derealization…

…and this is the worst the capabilities will ever be.

Watching the video created a glimmer of doubt that perhaps my current reality is a future version of myself, or some other consciousness, that’s living its life in an AI hallucinated environment.

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I suggest you go to google/bing/whatever floats your boat and search "it will only get better" then filter results earlier than 2010. Things that I just found that were going to "only get better":

- Google search

- Web browsers

- Web content

- Internet Explorer

- Music

- Flight process at Mosul airport

- Star Wars

Google search is better. It's just that now you ask the LLM what you want to find out.

Google search is absolutely not better.

Depends on a perspective though.

I was going to say it was maybe better for advertisers but the auction has gone up and the dashboard has much less data due to legal restrictions

Those are worse due to economic and cultural reasons, not technological reasons. The technology itself will only get better.

(Also, implying that music has gotten worse is a boomer-ass take. It might not be to your liking, but there's more of it than ever before, and new sonic frontiers are being discovered every day.)

None of those have a quantifiable definition of 'better'. The current range of AI models have very easily measured metrics.

Very much disagree. Current AI benchmarks are quite arbitrary as evidenced by the ability of a model to be fitted to a particular benchmark. Like the closest benchmark to objectivity is “does it answer this question factually” and benchmarks like that are just as failable really because who decides what questions we ask? The same struggles happen when we try to measure human intelligence. The more complex the algorithm the harder it is to quantify because there are so many parameters. I could easily contrive some “search engine benchmark”, but it wouldn’t be that useful because it’s only adherent to my own subjective definition of what it means for a search engine to be good.

> Star Wars

And then you watched Mandalorian and Andor?

Jokes aside, Google Search results are worse thanks to so much web content being just ad scaffolding, but the interesting one here is music.

Music is typically imagined to be its best at whatever ages one most listened to it, partly trained in and partly thanks to meanings/memories/nostalgia attached to it. As a consequence, for most everyone, more recent music seems to be “getting worse”!

That said, and back to the SEO effect on Google Results, I'd argue mass distribution/advertising/marketing has resulted in most audio airtime getting objectively* less complex, but if one turns off the mass distribution, and looks around, there seems to be plenty of just as good — even building on what came before — music to be found.

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387975100_Decoding_...

Are you really trying to say that these models aren't going to get better from here? You think that the insane progress of the last 5 years just stops right here?

The same argument can be used for anything.

Personal jetpacks are the worst they’ll ever be. Doesn’t mean they’re any close to being useful.

It's also just wrong. Plenty of things get worse.

Not really. E.g. clay tablets, physical books will not be meaningfully better.

Yes, but they're not going to get any worse.

"not getting worse" is a pretty low bar

Which is precisely my point. It's the _lowest_ bar possible.

Books are printed on worse paper these days that doesn't last as long.

While true, it's the speed of improvement that gives the statement gravity.

The difference is the incentive to improve, and actual present rate of improvement, for models like this is far higher than it is for jetpacks. (That and certain intrinsic features at least suggest the route to improvement is roughly "more of the same," vs "needs massive unknown breakthrough".)

Trillions of dollars are not being invested in making jet packs any better

Your comparison is incorrect

You say assuming money is limitless and investor patience for returns is endless.

And if trillions of dollars were being invested in that, it would mean lots of investors being disappointed in a few years, not that jet packs were close to being useful.

Not sure if that's what you are trying to say about AI, or not.

> Personal jetpacks are the worst they’ll ever be

Have they become better over the past 20 years?

My take as well. Feels like something that is going to be plugged into my brain when I'm drooling in a nursing home.

Think of all of the suffering it will prevent

Literally, The Matrix. (I just rewatched the first one for the first time in a decade and forgot how damn good of a movie it is.)

If it helps, if you look at the biology of human vision, you find out things like the width of your cone of sharp vision is about 2 degrees, or the size of your thumb held out at arms length.

Due to this physical limitation, what you 'see' in front of you, widely accepted as ground truth reality, cannot possibly real, its a hallucination produced by your brain.

Your brain, compared to the sensory richness of reality you experience around you, has very limited direct inputs from the outside world, it must construct a rich internal model based on this.

It's very weird (at least to me), that the boundary between reality and assumption (basically educated guessing) is very arbitrary, and definitely only exists in our heads.

It's an unsettling feeling as what's more complicated - all the atoms and galaxies, trillions of life forms, the unimaginable distances of our universe OR a relatively simple world model that is our conscious experience and nothing else.

No it's good, you're ahead of the curve, most people aren't there yet.

The next step is to realize that, if life is a cheap simulation, not everyone might have... uh... fully simulated minds. Player Characters vs NPCs is what gamers would say, though it doesn't have to be binary like that, and the term NPC has already been ruined by social media rants. (Also, NPC is a bad insult because most of the coolest characters in games are NPC rivals or bosses or whatnot.)

> First AI thing that’s made me feel a bit of derealization…

> …and this is the worst the capabilities will ever be.

I guess if this bothers you (and I can see how it might) you can take some small comfort in thinking that (due to enshitification) this could in fact be the _best_ the capabilities will ever be.

Once it has been proven to be possible, other companies [1][2][3] can and will reproduce it, and will attempt to push the frontier. As far as we know, there's no bottleneck that's stalling development here.

[1]: https://www.worldlabs.ai/

[2]: https://wayfarerlabs.ai/

[3]: https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-general-world-mode...

That's pretty much the basis for the simulation theory. See also "My Big TOE" (Theory of Everything) from Tom Campbell.

Same, even worse that the world was generated on the fly—nobody even hand-crafted it. That makes it even more depressing.

... so like the real world?

I mean, Minecraft worlds are generated on the fly and they've unleashed quite a it of creativity in children

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