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Comment by RALaBarge | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the imagination quandary, this second, RIGHT NOW is the worst these systems will ever be. They are only going to get better.

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I don't know if he's right, but Peter Zeihan thinks the breakdown in globalization will negatively affect the ability to continue to improve the chips that AI depends on[0]. Too many steps in the supply chain, too widespread, too vulnerable to deglobalization.

0: https://zeihan.com/the-ai-race-to-regression/

An invasion of Taiwan would definitely slow progress but it wouldn’t stop it.

We already have sufficient hardware that algorithmic (software) improvements alone should get us to GPT 7 / Greek Reference 6 even if not a single new chip is delivered to an AI data center ever again, starting today.

For sure, and for that reason I mean to say that I wouldn't feel great as a manager/executive/etc either.

Those nuclear powered flying cars envisioned in the 50s were also inevitable progress of the automobile.

Maybe, maybe not. It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.

The businesses that create these systems are not profitable and run at a massive historical and go-forward loss.

New data centers required to operate these systems are facing increasing pushback at local levels. New construction is not guaranteed. Energy and power grid constraints exist as well.

Government regulation is way behind. What happens when (if) mass layoffs due to AI occur? How does the population react? Theoretically AI can be regulated out of significant progress, or outright existence for many purposes. At the end of the day, US and other prominent governments make the calls, not corporations.

> It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.

Yeah, like computers and mobile phones did. Things that have utility, even if not immediate or initially obvious, don't fizzle out.

That's survivor bias to the extreme.

What did fizzle away then and why do you believe AI is more similar to that thing than to computers?

Lots of goddamn awesome computers fizzled out. The Amiga being a prime example. Besides you can't just wave your arms in the most vague terms and then deny that survivor bias was ever a thing.

So your argument is that AI is more lika Amiga than computers? I'd say that Amiga wouldn't fizzle out if it wasn't superceded by pc. It very well may be that transformer architecture is going to be superceded by something like jepa or other world models but it doesn't change much.

Survivor bias is always a thing but it's not everything. All surviving things are not equal and neither are all gone things. If there are such things. Some cls technology never dies. There are new games written for 8-bit Atari today.

For better or for worse, this technology isn't going away any more than search engines, smartphones, or social media have gone away.

These inventions all stopped disrupting the world and just became a part of it. The question is whether LLMs are going to just take their quiet place, or profoundly change (or eliminate) humanity in a self-feeding frenzy towards singularity.

Those technologies reached profitability relatively early, if not immediately.

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

Computers never got profitable. They just made the alternative infeasible.

Also, if you believe Amazon accounting, e-commerce only very recently got somewhat profitable.

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