There is without a doubt a lot of marketing and hype bullshit around AI right now, but that doesn't mean that there aren't reasons to be optimistic about LLM capabilities.

I do think that the strong divergence of opinions among knowledgeable people is interesting. No matter what your position is on this topic, there are smart people arguing against it. The thing I'm most confident about is that anyone being overly confident is likely to be wrong.

The obvious approach would be to attach a proper memory somewhere between layers and farm out reasoning to a sat solver, also preferably between layers. This sounds very sci-fi but chatting with a computer has been sci-fi 20 months ago and it’s a commodity now.

- are 'in the room' when evidence of new capabilities emerge

- are 'in the room' when discussion of new use cases and applications are held

- have an intuition about the raw rate of advancement and how it changes over time

Imagine you're 'in the room' during the Manhattan project when someone says 'hey, there's a nonzero chance that a test will ignite the Earth's atmosphere'. Vanishingly small maybe, but of incalculable impact. These folks may be the sort that say something rather than not.

I would love it if people were having well reasoned discussions of the risk of AI, that are grounded in actual evidence of what capabilities AI has today, and how they might incrementally change in the future to cause more or less damage.

But unfortunately whenever I try to discuss grounded risks, I get responses that reference the anthropogenic principle or other similar unfalsifiable claims. The arguments amount to "Well, of course I can't show you evidence of how AI is going to end the world! If I could, then the world would already be over!".

Which is an awfully convenient excuse for why your arguments are a special case that don't have to proved with evidence, like any other claim. Its perfect for a side that knows that it doesn't have any!

I can be convinced out of my position, with evidence. But I have no idea what proof I could possibly show the other side to do the same for them.

There's a lot of momentum (driven by incentivization) around sensationalizing and storyboarding emerging technology into the "to the moon" and "neo Luddite" camps, and there's far too many people that fall into that uncritically.

My guess based on historical precedent of most emerging tech is that ten years from now AI (my preferred name is machine learning) will settle in as a useful tool for certain tasks, and we will be shrugging about the implications of it.

1. A system which understands not just the language but the meaning behind it and the cultural context around it.

2. Let's assume it's multi-model and have all the senses having the same level of technical maturity.

3. It has read all the text available for all the major sciences and understood the meaning behind it including the possible applications of it.

To that end, having the above conditions satisfied I am assuming there should be major breakthroughs in all sciences. So far what I have seen is that the AI system is able to selectively brute-force it's way in finding a solution. Maybe I am just being impatient.

The reality is that they have shown the world some pretty big, powerful offerings they are working on. That value is already priced into their stock.

If they fail to deliver on the hype, which they will, it will tank their value hard. If they meet the hype expectations (no one ever lives up to the hype, ever), there will be no jobs and no employees and no businesses and thus their stock will tank.

I believe that, more realistically the easy, low hanging fruit has already been plucked and they are leaving now before everyone realises the emperor has no clothes on.

There are definitely use-cases being worked out for this technology, and the people who are developing these are using this technology on a daily basis (or creating it); their proximity to the technology and gain in understanding of it probably is helping them realize how this could be truly subversive and an existential threat.

And the 'oops, we made Roko's Basilisk' risk is not the only risk that people are concerned with, of course. LLMs come with many of their own risks, primarily around misuse (ie using them for anything important.)

[Takes risk]: See I took a risk and nothing happened.

[Takes risk]: See I took a risk and nothing happened.

[Takes risk]: See I took a risk and nothing happened.

[Takes risk]: "Dies horribly and tragically in a completely avoidable fashion after taking excessive risk"