The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday | Hacker News Reader

The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

1,381 pointsecto756 comments

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly.

It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*

Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".

A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.

A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"?

Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"...

Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of.

For instance those small experiments that train a network on addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it is, that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning weights is just the medium it is expressed in.

What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.

> “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”

And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.

Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.

I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it.

It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!

> prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages

There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem

> ”when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself”

Laughed out loud at that - and cried a little.

I have had trouble explaining people: “No! don’t use your email password! This is not your email you are logging in to, your email address is a username for this other service. Don’t give them your email password!”

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

We've already been here in the 1980s.

The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.

This entire chain of reasoning takes for granted that there won't be a singularity

If you're talking about "reforming society", you are really not getting it. There won't be society, there won't be earth, there won't be anything like what you understand today. If you believe that a singularity will happen, the only rational things to do are to stop it or make sure it somehow does not cause human extinction. "Reforming society" is not meaningful

I thought the Singularity had already happened when the Monkeys used tools to kill the other Monkeys and threw the bone into the sky to become a Space Station.

> It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”)

Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would be silly if you thought you know something which rest of the science community doesn't. Actually, there's a whole new field in science developed around our understanding how models actually arrive to answers which they give us. The thing is that we are only the observers of the results made by the experiments we are doing by training those models, and only so it happens that the result of this experiment is something we find plausible, but that doesn't mean we understand it. It's like a physics experiment - we can see that something is behaving in certain way but we don't know to explain it how and why.

The problem that I see with this analysis is that the author is trying to describe a curve in data that is kind of a punctuated equilibrium on steroids. Given that the takeoff event is when systems are capable of recursive self-improvement and that event will be a huge inflection point in the curve, it feels like they are trying to predict the second half of a biphasic graph based on data from the first half, when the second half is distinctly different than the first.

Thinking about how this might work, the slope of the first half does not predict the inflection point. Once the threshold for recursive self-improvement gets crossed, the curve changes drastically. From what I have heard MAYBE we are just starting to see the glimmers of possible recursive self-improvement in GPT-5.3 / Opus 4.6. If so, this discussion, while interesting, is trying to predict the new curve based on a single relevant data point.

> here’s how LLMs actually work

But how is that useful in any way?

For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.

"'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens'".

Just say it simply,

1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.

2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.

3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.

I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.

The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely

At least that’s my personal goal

If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled

As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described.

Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally.

Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist

And no mondragon does not have one of these

> Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.

This is so true and more often than it should be. I am going to use this phrase !

Currently, everything suggests the torment nexus will happen before the singularity.

> [...] prior to reforming society [...]

Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)

What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad?

This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,

whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.

It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.

The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy,

in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.

Equally unhinged. Cheers to you!

You’re “yaas queen”ing a blog post that is just someone’s Claude Code session. It’s “storytelling” with “data,” but not storytelling with data. Do you understand? I mean I could make up a bunch of shit too and ask Claude Code to write something I want to stay with it too.

I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself.

First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human brain.

So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent based off of that reasoning alone is irrational.

The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI. That input and output is steadily improving every month. It forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think the whole thing can be explained away because you understand LLMs and transformer architecture. You don’t understand LLMs period. No one does.

I thought the answer was "42"

Reality won't give a shit about what people believe.

>It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”)

You do not know how LLMs work, and if anyone actually did, we wouldn't spend months and millions of dollars training one.

> Folks vibe with the latter

I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic or not).

For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit."

– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...

This is incredible.

> A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.

Three-minute dramas?! That sounds like an eternity. Most content on Tik Tok is under a minute.

Lookup "one minute dramas" and blow your mind.

Great article, super fun.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.

You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.

It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.

One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.

Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.

We have more middle management than ever before because we cut all the other roles, and it turns out that people will desire employment, even if it means becoming a pointless bureaucrat, because the alternative is starving.

I don’t think a lot of people here have been in the typists room or hung out with the secretaries. There were a lot of people taking care of all the things going and this has been downloaded and further downloaded.

There was a time I didn’t have to do my expenses. I had someone just know where I was and who I was working for and and took care of it. We talked when there was something that didn’t make sense. Thanks to computers I’m doing it. Meaningless for sure.

heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.

> Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.

Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.

Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.

Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow. Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ? It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.

> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance.

Damn, good read.

We are already long past that point…

It doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.

The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation

  dx    2
  -- = x
  dt

which has the solution

        1      
  x = -----
       C-t

and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation

  dx
  -- = x
  dt

because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for x<<C it is glacial) It's an obscure equation because it never gets a good discussion in the literature (that I've seen, and I've looked) outside of an aside in one of Howard Odum's tomes on emergy.

Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation

  dx
  --  = (1-x) x
  dt

thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.

> thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.

Indeed, exponential or larger than exponential growth in nature is always the beginning of a S curve. The article cites

> Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.

This will also happen with super-exponential growth. A literal singularity won't happen - it will inevitably exhaust resources and will slow down.

All in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand something more than just empty space.

How dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion about the singularity. This is the singularity we are talking about. No reality allowed.

If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity

To be fair I felt that way about regular, human written headlines long before Ai.

"It worked, until it didnt." "It was beautiful, until it wasn't"

I'd like to know how many comments over here are written using similar means. I can't be bothered to get enthusiastic about articles written by LLMs, and I'm surprised so many people in the comments here are delighted by the article.

This.

We need a way to flag AI generated articles.

"Here's the thing nobody tells you", "here's the part that should unsettle you"…

Same; I can’t believe this AI slop has >1000 points…

You’d be shocked at the amount of traction pure unabated slop gets here. HN is more winnowing chaff from wheat than anything else

Came here to say this. Pure slop, wtf is everyone going on about? Are they all LLMs too?

It's not the phrase, but the accelerating memetic reproduction of the phrase that is the true singularity. /s

It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games !

It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.

Isn't that amazing ?

Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle.

The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..

Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.

Remember that games are just simulations. Physics, light, sound, object boundaries - it not real, just a rough simulation of the real thing.

You can say that ML/AI/LLM's are also just very distilled simulations. Except they simulate text, speech, images, and some other niche models. It is still very rough around the edges - meaning that even though it seems intelligent, we know it doesn't really have intelligence, emotions and intentions.

Just as game simulations are 100% biased towards what the game developers, writers and artists had in mind, AI is also constrained to the dataset they were trained on.

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!

Google DeepMind can trace part of it's evolution back to a playtester for the video game Syndicate who saw an opportunity to improve the AI of game NPCs.

Type the word porn. Self censorship is wrong.

Sci-fi ideas of robots have been around for ages and work on AI and the term singularity kicked off around 1950, so a while ago - well before chips or me being born.

what a load of utter tripe

Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.

January 20, 2038

Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside in the sun, seemingly unobserved. A true miracle. Grigori, who once worked with computers at the nuclear plant in Bilibino, only says cryptically: "All things come to an end with time."

I suspect that's the secret driver behind a lot of the push for the apocalypse.

It also means we don't have to deal with the maintenance of vibecoded production software from 2020s!

Back in like 1998 there was a group purchase for a Y2038 tshirt with some clever print on some hot email list I was on. I bought one. It obviously doesn't fit me any longer.

It seemed so impossibly far away. Now it's 12 years.

that was precisely my reaction as well. phew machines will deal with the timestamp issue and i can just sit on a beach while we singularityize or whatever.

It reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."

By Tom Toro for the New Yorker (2012).

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Why is knowledge doubling no longer used as a metric to converge on the limit of the singularity? If we go back to Buckminster Fuller identifying the the "Knowledge Doubling Curve", by observing that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, it was doubling every 25 years. In his 1981 book "Critical Path", he used a conceptual metric he called the "Knowledge Unit." To make his calculations work, he set a baseline:

- He designated the total sum of all human knowledge accumulated from the beginning of recorded history up to the year 1 CE as one "unit."

- He then tracked how long it took for the world to reach two units (which he estimated took about 1,500 years, until the Renaissance).

Ray Kurzweil took Fuller’s doubling concept and applied it to computer processing power via "The Law of Accelerating Returns". The definition of the singularity in this approach is the limit in time where human knowledge doubles instantly.

Why do present day ideas of the singularity not take this approach and instead say "the singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization." - Wikipedia

Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop.

Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature.

Classic LLM lingo in the end there.

> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds

It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.

Eh, he actually says “…sometime in the early Twenty-First Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”

Doesn’t specify the 2020’s.

Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.

> Not a bug. The feature.

I actually think this was nice writing, and it didn't strike me as LLM thought at all, specifically because of the terse delivery.

I don't think people realize how crazy this all is (and might become)

The most interesting finding isn't that hyperbolic growth appears in "emergent capabilities" papers - it's that actual capability metrics (MMLU, tokens/$) remain stubbornly linear.

The singularity isn't in the machines. It's in human attention.

This is Kuhnian paradigm shift at digital speed. The papers aren't documenting new capabilities - they're documenting a community's gestalt switch. Once enough people believe the curve has bent, funding, talent, and compute follow. The belief becomes self-fulfilling.

Linear capability growth is the reality. Hyperbolic attention growth is the story.

Though this is still compatible with exponential or at least superlinear capability growth if you model benchmarks as measuring a segment of the line, or a polynomial factor.

This is a good counter in my view to the singularity argument:

https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/

I think if we obtain relevant-scale quantum computers, and/or other compute paradigms, we might get a limited intelligence explosion -- for a while. Because computation is physical, with all the limits thereof. The physics of pushing electrons through wires is not as nonlinear in gain as it used to be. Getting this across to people who only think in terms of the abstract digital world and not the non-digital world of actual physics is always challenging, however.

"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026.

I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...

That quote basically sums up then entire technology landscape these days.

"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" i love this! I ordered a tshirt they other day that says "Claude's Favorite" I may be placing an order for a new design soon :)

I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.

It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.

Can confirm.

Don't be too hard on yourself. With the amount shit humans generate each day it is impossible to read every essay.

That's not really what he article said at all. More like "Singularity is when the computers are changing faster than humans can keep track of the changes."

The article didn't claim that humans were getting dumber, or that AI wasn't getting smarter.

the irony in this comment though

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.

I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.

* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)

The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn.

Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?

I just realized the inverse of Pascal’s wager applies to negative AI hype.

- If you believe it and it’s wrong, you lose.

- If you believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in a panic.

- If you don’t believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in blissful ignorance.

- If you don’t believe it and it’s wrong, you can go on living.

Of course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers):

What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?

Fortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.

I didn't even realize - I hope my consciousness is uploaded with 64 bit integers!

Head on over to my merch store to pick up the `2034 > 2038` t-shirt. Don't forget to like and submit.

Are people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San Francisco become just a cliche larp?

There's all sorts of conversations like this that are genuinely exciting and fairly profound when you first consider them. Maybe you're older and have had enough conversations about the concept of a singularity that the topic is already boring to you.

Let them have their fun. Related, some adults are watching The Matrix, a 26 year old movie, for the first time today.

For some proof that it's not some common idea, I was recently listening to a fairly technical interview with a top AI researcher, presenting the idea of the singularity in a very indirect way, never actually mentioning the word, as if he was the one that thought of it. I wanted to scream "Just say it!" halfway through. The ability to do that, without being laughed at, proves it's not some tired idea, for others.

Become?

Perhaps they’re disciples of Roko’s Basilisk

If an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a candid dismissal.

Not anytime soon. All day I'm getting: "Claude's response could not be fully generated"

>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about.

---

I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity

>Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict.

It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.

r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶ survivor.

Was this ironically written by AI?

> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.

> MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.

Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly.

I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.

I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993.

Wow only 6 times in 30 years! Surely a unique and world shattering once in a lifetime experience!

Also, is that counting all of the government "layoffs"? I think it is.

> I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway.

If one is looking for a quote that describes today's tech industry perfectly, that would be it.

Also using the MMLU as a metric in 2026 is truly unhinged.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI.

Believing what companies say is the reason for a layoff instead of figuring out the actual reason is insane. Never believe companies, they are amoral beings that will justify any reason to save their brand image.

"I could never get the hang of Tuesdays"

- Arthur Dent, H2G2

Thursdays, unfortunately

I'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there.

Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of fundamentally new ideas, and it’s unclear how that turns into superintelligence.

As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know, the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able to produce incredible images, but if you ask one to produce something in an entirely new art style (think e.g. cubism), none of them can. You just get a random existing style. There have been a few original ideas - the QR code art comes to mind[1] - but the idea in those cases comes from the human side.

LLMs are getting extremely good at writing code, but the situation is similar. AI gives us a very good search over humanity's prior work on programming, tailored to any project. We benefit from this a lot considering that we were previously constantly reinventing the wheel. But the LLM of today will never spontaneously realise there there is an undiscovered, even better way to solve a problem. It always falls back on prior best practice.

Unsolved math problems have started to be solved, but as far as I'm aware, always using existing techniques. And so on.

Even as a non-genius human I could come up with a new art style, or have a few novel ideas in solving programming problems. LLMs don't seem capable of that (yet?), but we're expecting them to eventually have their own ideas beyond our capability.

Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species (or another superintelligent AI) and then it would act like them. But how do we synthesise superintelligent training data? And even then, would they be limited to what that superintelligence already knew at the time of training?

Maybe a new paradigm will emerge. Or maybe things will actually slow down in a way - will we start to rely on AI so much that most people don't learn enough for themselves that they can make new novel discoveries?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...

The main issue with novel things is that they look like random noise / trashy ideas / incomprehensible to most people.

Even if LLMs or some more advanced mechanical processes were able to generate novel ideas that are "good", people won't recognize those ideas for what they are.

You actually need a chain of progressively more "average" minds to popularize good ideas to the mainstream psyche, i.e. prototypically, the mad scientist comes up with this crazy idea, the well-respected thought leader who recognizes the potential and popularizes it to people within the niche field, the practitioners who apply and refine the idea, and lastly the popular-science efforts let the general public understand a simplified version of what it's all about.

Usually it takes decades.

You're not going to appreciate it if your LLM starts spewing mathematics not seen before on Earth. You'd think it's a glitch. The LLM is not trained to give responses that humans don't like. It's all by design.

When you folks say AI can't bring new ideas, you're right in practice, but you actually don't know what you're asking for. Not even entities with True Intelligence can give you what you think you want.

Certain classes of problems can be solved by searching over the space of possible solutions, either via brute force or some more clever technique like MCTS. For those types of problems, searching faster or more cleverly can solve them.

Other types of problems require measurement in the real world in order to solve them. Better telescopes, better microscopes, more accurate sensing mechanisms to gather more precise data. No AI can accomplish this. An AI can help you to design better measurement techniques, but actually taking the measurements will require real time in the real world. And some of these measurement instruments have enormous construction costs, for example CERN or LIGO.

All of this is to say that there will color point at our current resolution of information that no more intelligence can actually be extracted. We’ve already turned through the entire Internet. Maybe there are other data sets we can use, but everything will have diminishing returns.

So when people talk about trillion dollar superclusters, that only makes sense in a world where compute is the bottleneck and not better quality information. Much better to spend a few billion dollars gathering higher quality data.

> Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species

This is right, but we can already do that a little bit for domains with verification. AlphaZero is an example of alien-level performance due to non-human training data.

Code and math is kind of in the middle. You can verify it compiles and solves the task against some criteria. So creative, alien strategies to do the thing can and will emerge from these synthetic data pipelines.

But it's not fully like Go either, because some of it is harder to verify (the world model that the code is situated in, meta-level questions like what question to even ask in the first place). That's the frontier challenge. How to create proxies where we don't have free verification, from which alien performance can emerge? If this GPTZero moment arrives, all bets are off.

Great read but damn those are some questionable curve fittings on some very scattered data points

Better than some of the science papers I've tried to parse.

In other words, just another Tuesday.

Well... I can't argue with facts. Especially not when they're in graph form.

I wonder if using LLMs for coding can trigger AI psychosis the way it can when using an LLM as a substitute for a relationship. I bet many people here have pretty strong feelings about code. It would explain some of the truly bizarre behaviors that pop up from time to time in articles and comments here.

Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.

He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.

I am not convinced that memoryless large models are sufficient for AGI. I think some intrinsic neural memory allowing effective lifelong learning is required. This requires a lot more hardware and energy than for throwaway predictions.

I have always asserted, and will continue to assert, that Tuesday is the funniest day of the week. If you construct a joke for which the punchline must be a day of the week, Tuesday is nearly always the correct ending.

counterpoint: It is Wednesday, my dudes.

> If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the interesting question isn't whether. It's when.

I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.

Keep reading. It's good.

I love the ridiculously precise point estimate paired with ridiculously wide 95% confidence interval lol

Why is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.

iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know

Singularity is more than just AI and we should recognize that, multiple factors come into play. If there is a breakthrough in coming days that makes solar panel incredibly cheap to manufacture and efficient it will also affect the timelines for singularity. Same goes for the current bottleneck we have for AI chips if we have better chips that energy efficient and can be manufactured anyhwere in the world than Taiwan it will affect the timeline.

Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly).

The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.

Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).

We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.

It was GMT, wasn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ

That was rather good.

  Don't worry about the future
  Or worry, but know that worrying
  Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
  The real troubles in your life
  Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
  The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday

    - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
         Baz Luhrmann
         (or maybe Mary Schmich)

The meme at the top is absolute gold considering the point of the article. 10/10

Why does one of them have the state flag of Ohio? What AI-and-Ohio-related news did I miss?

Love the title. Yeah, agents need to experiment in the real world to build knowledge beyond what humans have acquired. That will slow the bastards down.

Perhaps they will revel in the friends they made along the way.

If only we had a battle tested against reality self learning system.

When technology is rapidly progressing up in iperbole or exponential it looks like it reach infinity. In practice though at some point will reach a physical limit and it will go flat. This alternation of going up and flattening make the shape of steps.

We've come so far and yet we are so small.

They seem two opposite concepts but they live together, we will make a lot of progress and yet there will always be more progress to be made.

All I have to say is that if one of my students turned in those curves as "best fits" to that data, I'd hand the paper back for a re-do. Those are garbage fits. To my eye, none of the very noisy data sets shown in the graph show clear enough trends to support one model over any other: are any of those hyperbolic curves convincingly better than even a linear fit? (No.) The "copilot code share" data can't possibly be described by a hyperbolic curve, because by definition it can't ever go over 100%. (A sigmoidal model might be plausible.) And even if you want to insist on a model that diverges at finite time, why fit 1/(t0-t) rather than 1/(t0-t)^2, or tan(t-t0), or anything else?

The author does in fact note that only the arXiv data fits this curve better than a line, and yeah: that's the one dataset that genuinely looks a little curved. But 1) it's a very noisy sort of curved, and 2) I'll bet it would fit a quadratic or an exponential or, heck, a sine function just as well. Introducing their process of doing the hyperbolic fit, they say, "The procedure is straightforward, which should concern you." And yeah, it does concern me: why does the author think that their standard-but-oversimplified attempt to fit a hand-chosen function to this mess is worth talking about? (And why put all of that analysis in the article, complete with fancy animated graph, when they knew that even their most determined attempt to find a signal failed to produce even a marginally supportive result 80% of the time?)

In short: none of the mathematical arguments used here to lead in to the article's discussion of "The Singularity" are worth listening to at all. They're pseudo-technical window dressing, meant to lend an undeserved air of rigor to whatever follows. So why should we pay attention to any of it?

I don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology.

Sure is a lot of words though :)

Is "singularity" the new 'rapture' or 'end of the world'? Who are the new nostradami and prophets?

Your audit is precise: the Singularity is simply the moment where system complexity permanently nullifies the 'primate interface'. But your analysis stalls at the mere observation of this dismantling. If we accept 100% determinism then the friction you feel from environmental inefficiency — it's nothing more than a compilation error in your own software. You see the 'truck' coming yet you continue to suffer from the inability to hit a brake that doesn't exist. When you utilize determinism as the working interface and focus as the primary tool the answer arrives of its own accord. This protocol is more fundamental than any silicon-based stack. How are you resolving the issue of objective-setting to avoid becoming mere entropic noise while waiting for your 'Tuesday'?"

> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993.

Bad analysis! Layoffs are flat as a board.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL

I was at an alternative type computer unconference and someone has organised a talk about the singularity, it was in a secondary school classroom and as evening fell in a room full of geeks no one could figure out how to turn on the lights .... we concluded that the singularity probably wasn't going to happen

"Everyone in San Francisco is talking about the singularity" - I'm in SF and not talking about it ;)

But you're not Everyone - they are a fictional hacker collective from a TV show.

Your comment just self-defeated.

Yet, here you are ;)

Another one down.

> Tuesday, July 18, 2034

4 years early for the Y2K38 bug.

Is it coincidence or Roko's Basilisk who has intervened to start the curve early?

https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1096,quality=8...

Lol unhinged.

I read a book in undergrad written in 2004 that predicted 2032...so not too far off.

John Archibald Wheeler, known for popularizing the term "black hole", posited that observers are not merely passive witnesses but active participants in bringing the universe into existence through the act of observation.

Seems similar. Though this thought is likely applied at the quantum scale. And I hardly know math.

I see other quotes, so here is one from Contact:

David Drumlin: I know you must think this is all very unfair. Maybe that's an understatement. What you don't know is I agree. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.

Ellie Arroway: Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.

This is gold.

Meta-spoiler (you may not want to read this before the article): You really need to read beyond the first third or so to get what it’s really ‘about’. It’s not about an AI singularity, not really. And it’s both serious and satirical at the same time - like all the best satire is.

I'm trying to figure out if the LLM writing style is a feature or a bug

You know, I've been following a rule where if I open any article and there's meme pictures in it, I instantly close it and don't bother. I feel like this has been a pretty solid rule of thumb for weeding out stuff I shouldn't waste my time on.

Your loss on this one then.

A fantastic read, even if it makes a lot of silly assumptions - this is ok because it’s self aware of it.

Who knows what the future will bring. If we can’t make the hardware we won’t make much progress, and who knows what’s going to happen to that market, just as an example.

Crazy times we live in.

I have lived in San Francisco for more than a decade. I have an active social life and a lot of friends. Literally no one I have ever talked to at any party or event has ever talked about the Singularity except as a joke.

This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/870.jpeg

you can easily see that at the doubling rate every 2 years in 2020 we already had over 5 facebook accounts per human on earth.

Frank Herbert and Samuel Butler.

dont let it get to you, the only "worse" consequence is people wasting their time like this projecting things they literally cannot predict. remember at the end of the day, its just tokens. tokens cant crack ssl, rsa, visit a stakeholder, cook a meal, and millions of other things i can list here

Guys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a singularity, as it stands.

Why bring that up when you could bring up AI autonomously optimizing AI training and autonomously fixing bugs in AI training and inference code. Showing that AI already is accelerating self improvement would help establish the claim that we are getting closer to the singularity.

You convince AI manually instead of asking one AI to convince another?

That's so last week!

Famously if you used the same logic for air speed and air travel we’d be all commuting in hypersonic cars by now. Physics and cost stopped that. If you expect a smooth path, I’ve got some bad news.

Who will purchase the goods and services if most people loose jobs ? Also who will pay for ad dollars what are supposed to sustain these AI business models if there no human consumers ?

You're all wrong; the singularity already happened... probably sometime around 2000 B.C... when humans started farming:

https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-the-singularity-is-imposs...

and just remember, we're still on transformer models, tokens in, tokens out - stuff like this with fancy math is just absolute cruft

Slight correction, I've been studying token prices last weeks so this caught my eye:

>"(log-transformed, because the Gemini Flash outlier spans 150× the range otherwise)"

> "Gemini 2.0 Flash Dec 2024 2,500,000"

I think OP meant Gemini 2 flash lite, which is distinct from Gemini 2 flash. It's also important to consider that this tier had no successor in future models, there's no gemini 3 flash lite, and gemini 3 flash isn't the spiritual successor.

I am curious which definition of ‘singularity’ the author is using, since there are multiple technical interpretations and none are universally agreed upon.

This is fun but obviously assumes the conclusion

We need a function that hits infinity at a finite time. That's the whole point of a singularity: a pole, a vertical asymptote, the math breaking:

Also interesting that tokens/$ which represents the energy constraint is the shallowest slope, and also weird taking it out doesn't impact the date. That's a red flag, as you would think removing the energy constraint would bind.

The thing that stands out on that animated graph is that the generated code far outpaces the other metrics. In the current agent driven development hypepocalypse that seems about right - but I would expect it to lag rather than lead.

*edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :)

> The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.

> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently

^ That's your problem right there.

Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct.

The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortunately.

Indeed. At various points you could have presumably done an identical analysis with journal articles and climate change, string theory, functional programming… terms & reached structurally the same conclusion.

The coming Singularity: When human institutions will cease being able to coherently react to monads!

If I understand the author correctly, he chose the hyperbolic model specifically because the story of "the singularity" _requires_ a function that hits infinity.

He's looking for a model that works for the story in the media and runs with it.

Your criticism seems to be criticizing the story, not the author's attempt to take it "seriously"

I guess the real question is how to prepare for it? Do you buy real assets like that car you wanted? Do you travel more? Do you spend your life in the gym like bryan johnson? Do you smoke weed everyday? If true societial upheaval is up on us and america falls into the abyss of mass unemployment and starvation, what are you all doing with your last four years? Before the real chaos begins

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

Quibble: when a growth rate of a metric is directly proportional to the metric's current value you will see exponential growth, not hyperbolic growth.

Hyperbolic growth is usually the result of a (more complex) second order feedback loop, as in, growth in A incites growth in B, which in turn incites growth in A.

As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually becomes an s-curve.

Data center space? Electrical power? The amount of training data available? Society's capacity to accept rapid change?

Short sci-fi 1: Last year we recorded five distinct, self-contained singularity events. Communication ceased after each one. We remain confident that ASI will eventually advance humanity’s goals.

Short sci-fi 2: Post-Singularity Day 375. We now know precisely how to trigger singularity events. Today alone, we facilitated four. They have not established contact. We remain confident.

I hope in the afternoon, the plumber is coming in the morning between 7 and 12, and it’s really difficult to pin those guys to a date

2034? That's the longest timeline prediction I've seen for a while. I guess I should file my taxes this year after all.

If this is a simulation, then the singularity has already happened.

If the singularity is still to come, then this is not a simulation.

No one ever learns from Malthus.

One of the many errors here is assuming that the prediction target lies on the curve. But there's no guarantee (to say the least) that the sorts of improvements that we've seen lead to AGI, ASI, "the singularity", a "social singularity", or any such thing.

Once MRR becomes a priority over investment rounds that tokens/$ will notch down and flatten substantially.

This is a delightful reverse turkey graph (each day before Thanksgiving, the turkey has increasing confidence).

The Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has just changed

A similar idea occurred to the Austrian-Americam cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster in a 1960 paper, titled:

  Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026

There is an excellent blog post about it by Scott Alexander:

"1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...

Good post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and demographic health.

With this kind of scientific rigour, the author could also prove that his aunt is a green parakeet.

A hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.

You have not read far enough.

But this is a phase change process.

Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...

What I want to know is how bitcoin going full tulip and Open AI going bankrupt will affect the projection. Can they extrapolate that? Extrapolation of those two event dates would be sufficient, regardless of effect on a potential singularity.

The hyperbolic fit isn't just unhinged, it's clearly in bad faith. The metric is normalized to [0, 1], and one of the series is literally (x_1, 0) followed by (x_2, 1). That can't be deemed to converge to anything meaningful.

> already exerting gravitational force on everything it touches.

So, "Falling of the night" ?

Does "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling?

Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the world like smartphones once did

For you it was the most important day of your life. But for ChatGPT it was Tuesday.

> arXiv "emergent" (the count of AI papers about emergence) has a clear, unambiguous R² maximum. The other four are monotonically better fit by a line

The only metric going infinite is the one that measures hype

Wait is that photo of earth the legendary Globus Polski? (https://www.ceneo.pl/59475374)

Big if true, we might as well ditch further development and just use op's LLM since it can track singularity, it might already reached singularity itself

The Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday.

The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)

Was thinking what if we had 42/43 days a month. Will the singularity date end-up on 42nd of a month but sadly it doesn't.

However, it does fall on a 42nd day if we have 45/46 days per month!

Thus will speak our machine overlord: "For you, the day AI came alive was the most important day of your life... but for me, it was Tuesday."

I've never been Poe's lawed harder in my life.

lols and unhinged predictions aside, why are there communities excited about a singularity? Doesn't it imply the extinction of humanity?

It depends on how you define humanity. The singularity implies that the current model isn't appropriate anymore, but it doesn't suggest how.

We avoid catastrophe by thinking about new developments and how they can go wrong (and right).

Catastrophizing can be unhealthy and unproductive, but for those among us that can affect the future of our societies (locally or higher), the results of that catastophizing helps guide legislation and "Overton window" morality.

... I'm reminded of the tales of various Sci-Fi authors that have been commissioned to write on the effects of hypothetical technologies on society and mankind (e.g. space elevators, mars exploration)...

That said, when the general public worries about hypotheticals they can do nothing about, there's nothing but downsides. So. There's a balance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianism

I think the idea is we merge with the AI.

100% an AI wrote this. Possibly specifically to get to the top spot on HN.

Those short sentences are the most obvious clue. It’s too well written to be human.

Just in time for Bitcoin halving to go below 1 BTC

Patch Tuesday. They were coming for us. Thousands of AI bots. Scrambling. All our computers getting pwned by both zero days the machines were sitting on, and quickly programmed exploits which were abused the exact same minute the patch notes were up. First, they came for our IoT. But I didn't run any IoT, so I did not object. Second, they came for our smartphones. But I didn't own any smartphone, so I did not object. Next, they came for our desktops. But I didn't run any desktop, so I did not object. Then, they came for the cloud. But I didn't run any cloud, so I did not object. Finally, they came for our server. And only I remained, no other server existed at this point. I was quickly able to describe the above, with the conclusion: the machines won. EOL

Damn. I had plans.

Is there a term for the tech spaghettification that happens when people closer to the origin of these advances (likely in terms of access/adoption) start to break away from the culture at large because they are living in a qualitatively different world than the unwashed masses? Where the little sparkles of insanity we can observe from a distance today are less induced psychosis and actually represent their lived reality?

The Singularity Will Not Be Televised

> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.

I’m going to lose it the day this becomes vernacular.

Just so I know that I took the time to say it.

The "singularity is going to be exponential" fantasy is based on assuming change simply becoming proportional to recent advances. Hence the exponential shape. Even conceding "chartism" one would need to at least propose some imaginary mechanism that goes reciprocal to pretend that sort of curve is coming.

Yes, the mathematical assumptions are a bit suspect. Keep reading. It will make sense later.

What about the rate of articles about the singularity as a metric of the singularity?

This assumes humanity can make it to 2034 without destroying itself some other way…

Prior work with the same vibe: https://xkcd.com/1007/

That would be 8 years after math + humor peaked in an article about singularity

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

Eh? No, that's literally the definition of exponential growth. d/dx e^x = e^x

> Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away."

Je suis un polynôme

This is great news, knowing that I have until 2034 instead of just 2027.

Thanks, added to calendar.

> Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time. You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite. Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away."

> Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.

Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.

why is everything broken?

> the top post on hn right now: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth

The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above.

1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things.

2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise.

3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.

Looking at my calculator and thinking the wall has been hit.

This has a real hitchhikers guide to the galaxy ring to it!

We need contingency plans. Most waves of automation have come in S-curves, where they eventually hit diminishing returns. This time might be different, and we should be prepared for it to happen. But we should also be prepared for it not to happen.

No one has figured out a way to run a society where able bodied adults don't have to work, whether capitalist, socialist, or any variation. I look around and there seems to still be plenty of work to do that we either cannot or should not automate, in education, healthcare, arts (should not) or trades, R&D for the remaining unsolved problems (cannot yet). Many people seem to want to live as though we already live in a post scarcity world when we don't yet.

https://medium.com/@kin.artcollective/the-fundamental-flaws-...

So when things are told to be accelerating, we have some choices to do.

First, what is accelerating compared to what other regime in which referential?

Who is telling that things accelerate, and why they are motivated to make us believe that it's happening.

Also, is accelerating going to be forever and only with positive feedback loops? Or are the pro-acceleration sending the car quicker in a well visible wall, but they sell the speech that stopping the vehicle right now would mean losing the ongoing race. Of course questioning the idea of the race itself and its cargo cult is taboo. It's all about competition don't you know (unless it threat an established oligarch)?

Good news, we won't have to fix the y2k36 bug.

This is great. Now we won’t have to fix y2K36 bugs.

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a growing value, then x'(t) is it's growth, and x''(t) its acceleration. If x influences x'' , say by a linear relation

x''(t) = x(t)

You get exponentials out as the solutions. Not hyperbolic.

I always thought of the exponential as the pole of the function "amount of work that can be done per unit time per human being", where the pole comes about from the fact that humans cease to be the limiting factor, so an infinity pops out.

There is no infinity in practice, of course, because even though humans should be made independent of the quantity of extractable work, you'll run into other boundaries instead, like hardware or resources like energy.

I got a strong ChatGPT vibe from that article.

> Real data. Real model. Real date!

Arrested Development?

This is what I come here for. Terrific.

But what does Opus 4.6 say about this?

The revolution will not be televised.

I sincerely hope this is satire. Otherwise it's a crime in statistics: - You wouldn't fit a model where f(t) goes to infinity with finite t. - Most of the parameters suggested are actually a better fit for logistics curves, not even linear fits, but they are lumped together with the magic Arxiv number feature for a hyperbolic fit. - Copilot metric has two degrees and two parameters. dof is zero, so we could've fit literally any other function.

I know we want to talk about singularity, but isn't that just humans freaking out at this point? It will happen on a Tuesday, yeah no joke.

I know this is not to be taken too seriously but I don't even buy the premise: Why would those metrics predict the singularity?

Tokens will not suddenly become free (as in beer) – AI will still consume energy –, there will still be a finite amount of arXiv papers mentioning emergence (for not just one reason), release frequency of frontier models is not necessarily related to breakthroughs (model capabilities might also approach an asymptote), Copilot code share increasing will likely happen over time anyway even if all AI research stopped today. Etc.

End of the World? Must be Tuesday.

it's funny how your forecast reaches such a similar results as "AI 2027"

Will.. will it be televised ?

Was expecting some mention of Universal Approximation Theorem

I really don't care much if this is semi-satire as someone else pointed out, the idea that AI will ever get "sentient" or explode into a singularity has to die out pretty please. Just make some nice Titanfall style robots or something, a pure tool with one purpose. No more parasocial sycophantic nonsense please

This'll be a fun re-read in ~5 years when most of this has ended up being a nothing burger. (Minus one or two OK use-cases of LLMs)

Today is tuesday

Why the plutocrats believe that the entity emerging from the singularity will side with them? Really curious

Most obviously AI-written post I think I’ve seen.

Have some personal pride, dude. This is literally a post written by AI hyping up AI and posted to a personal blog as if it were somebody’s personal musings. More slop is just what we need.

Hail Zorp

What time?

Am I the only one who found the terminal more interesting?

The singularity is always scheduled for right after the current funding round closes but before the VCs need liquidity. Funny how that works.

Wow what a fun read

This really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually. We're just not sure when.

The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-com collapse.

What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI.

I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder, riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me Skynet over that crap.

LLM slop article.

Who willingly reads this pompous AI slop?

> 95% CI: Jan 2030–Jan 2041

Friendly reminder:

Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.

this just feels like ai psychosis slop man

what?

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

You won't read, except the output of your LLM.

You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?

You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.

This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.

Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.

Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.

putting it out there will make it so!

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