duccinator

I don't understand how Apple is hitting home runs. What have they really innovated on post Steve Jobs? Their products are pretty much equivalent to the competition with 5% more polish at the cost of 5% more time to release. Marketing wise, they are close to gods, but innovation wise, even Microsoft is better.

I definitely agree on the fact that Tim is a much better CEO than Sundar. However I consider Satya to be much better than Tim.

Whoops, deleted part of my response before submitting.

My optimistic/most probable predictions about the growth rate say it's wild. Like within 5-10 years with the multiple exponentials among different fields you can easily do away with most jobs unless there is a major bottleneck (I don't think there is, there is so much low hanging fruit). I guess that's what the singularity is all about. I don't think this will take multiple decades or centuries in any scenario other than the equivalent of ww3

Agreed, More clarification about the first part:

What I want to convey is that the growth function will be somewhat similar to y= c + ax^n (ignoring/collapsing into c the linear and higher order terms) rather than just y= ax^n.

The c here is robots produced via humans. I predict c will easily touch a million in 5 years with or without human help.

Even if the later bots can do only 50% the work of humans, we will still exponentially grow the robots until the humans become a bottleneck. And that 50% capability is also expected to grow exponentially.

Gemini 1.5 pro already beats most humans in most benchmarks, combine it with Sora which has a great visual world model, add some logical reasoning(architecture or scale), memory and embodiment(so it can experiment and test) and you pretty much have the seeds for an agi.

My optimistic/most probable prediction about the growth rate say it's

Regarding the last part:

My bad, I speed read your comment and didn't focus on the exponential calculations. An exponential growth is just x^n. Both x(multiplication rate(?)) and n(units of time) can be manipulated.

One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year. I believe this is not true. I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing. Once a company develops a prototype with AGI(mechanically the robots are almost there already, just the control systems and software that's lacking, which is supposed to be solved by AGI) it will rain VC money. The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later. Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built. These million will then scale exponentially. Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.

Once you have autonomous robots you can use those robots to build more robots leading to an exponential curve. The day they make the first one, we will reach a million in 2-3 years and a billion in 2-4 years after that.

imo Satya is a different ball game compared to Ballmer. I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on msft's track record pre-Satya personally.

I wonder though, considering the amount of other popular people who do not share the same achievements who you probably just ignore anyway (think some influencers and youtubers), do we really want him to shut up? His opinions and promises might not sit well with everyone but I definitely think you can learn a lot by analysing him.

I personally prefer him over the random billionaire #362682 who haven't achieved half as much and won't share anything.

Also, I would recommend reading his biography, changes your perspective on a lot of things.

A lot of western data is public, people in China aren't aliens compared to those in the west, there are only small cultural differences so chinese data in itself is usable for many western requirements.

Combine the public western data and private chinese data, and it should be enough for them to give the west a run for its money if they decide to slow/stop. Not to mention that chinese apps like tiktok are used very widely in the west, and coorps like Tencent have a tentacle wrapped around hundreds of western coorps.

No, please read my response again. My claim is that GPTs are better than human teachers, for most* domains, including software.

However, I do think a framework needs to be developed for formally learning any particular topic. If you are self learning using just chatgpt, you might miss out on a few key things. I haven't used it much personally but the khan academy bot is close.

Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers I have had the experience to learn from(and I have had some great teachers and professors). They work even better if you feed them the content of a book/manual/documentation as a reference.

They do suck at solving problems correctly, however if you give them an incorrect solution and ask them to spot mistakes, or just ask for a general method to do a problem, it works out.

However, they might not yet compare to the best of humans. The best SO answers probably represent 0.01% of the answers, which is a high bar. I am certain very amazing teachers and professors exist out there in the world whom LLMs can't beat yet but the average can't compete.

China might not be as successful as the west(yet) but they have their own ecosystem and have alternatives for most tech products.

All the tech companies in China are practically under the control of the party. China also has a billion+ people, even the market is smaller than the west, I think they will manage.

Not to mention the difference in privacy laws and a higher number of stem grads to throw at the problem.

This is truly amazing. We are living in the future.

I wonder though, if the brain already has specific regions for control of specific parts of our body, will it be impossible to add new limbs in the future? An extra arm would be helpful.

Hello Peter, thank you for the AMA. I am an Indian undergrad from a top uni, I plan to do a startup after graduating/maybe a year of work experience (I am currently working on it as a side project). What do you think are my options for getting a VISA quickly considering I do not plan to be employed for long and am unlikely to get in via O1 or E2.

There is a chance that your photos are being backed up by some cloud service and being removed from your gallery. The most likely suspect is Google Photos.

Note that Google photos not only OCRs, but it also does a visual search of objects, faces, scenery etc. and is extremely powerful.