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Very true on that front. LLMs were pretty magical when I first tried playing with them in 2022. And honestly they're still kind of magical in some ways. I don't think I've felt that way about any other tech advancement in my life, except for maybe the internet as a whole.
Any particular reason why you're optimistic? What are your priors in regards to AI?
Same as you, I don't pretend to be able to predict an unknowable technological future and am just relying on vibes, so I'm not sure I can satisfy you with a precise answer...? I outlined why I'm so impressed with even current-day AI here. I've been working in AI-adjacent fields for 25 years, and LLMs are truly incomparable in generality to anything that has come before. AGI feels close (depending on your definition), and ASI doesn't, because most of our gains are just coming from scaling compute up (with logarithmic benefits). So it's not an existential threat, it's just a brand new transformative tech, and historically that almost always leads to a richer society.
You don't tend to get negative effects on the tech tree in a 4X game, after all. :)
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