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I don't know. It just seems too good to be true. I got burned badly by futurist predictions in the eighties: the "room-temperature superconductors" announced in 1987, and the "cold fusion" hype in the spring of '89. I would like to believe, but at my advanced age, I find I can no longer look forward to anything (or get excited about anything) unless I'm drunk. Many years of experience puts me on team "Nothing Ever Happens". Edit: I read Drexler's Engines of Creation ovet Memorial Day weekend in 1988 (I had just finished my junior year in college) and it got me powerfully excited and optimistic. But then nothing happened ... and nothing continued to happen ... and decades passed, and now I'm morally sure nanotechnology will not improve anyone's life until I'm long dead and in my grave. If then.
Run a competent LLM like Qwen 3.6 with a useful harness on your own computer. It's something else seeing it and seeing the machine that's doing it as a physical thing.
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Personally, I have no strong opinions on p(ASI). It could very well be that LLMs will not get smart enough to substantially help the people currently developing them.
But even in a boring s-curve world where current AIs do not get much better, their impact on the world will be huge, possibly on par with the industrial revolution. I think a singularity and subsequent paperclips (or utopia, or Musk becoming God-Emperor) is not very likely, but I still have colleagues who use LLM to do the hard parts of their job. It seems that "Nothing Ever Happens" will not be true as far as the labor market is concerned.
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I predict (although I may be very wrong) in the near-medium term, no ASI but some very useful advancements. We didn’t get room temperature superconductors and cold fusion; but in the 1990s-2010s, we got expanded internet, improved technology by orders of magnitude (to the point we have things like hyperrealistic graphics that were probably hard to imagine before 2000), and less noticeable but significant advancements in medicine, food preservation etc. Likewise since 2020, we already have a chatbot that can research and explain niche knowledge across multiple domains, implement and debug code mostly correct up to a high level of abstraction, generate unrealistic images and video (although you can usually tell they’re generated if you look close), and even just basic actions are impressive, because everything is through natural conversation.
And there are drawbacks, like how society in 2010 gradually declined probably partly because of centralized internet services (enshittification) and general social media, and now AI is making people lazier and has reduced jobs in some fields. But I predict (again maybe optimistically) AI won’t destroy humanity or massively reduce jobs without generally-regarded-as-better replacements.
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