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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3. GPT-3 follows from GPT-2 follows from Vaswani et al. Why do you think plenty of intelligent people, including Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever, got so agitated when that paper came out and started scrambling for commercialization? Do you believe they were that into machine translation as a business? Of course folks like Hinton, Sutskever's teacher, were running multi-decade research programs premised on connectionism being enough for intelligence in general, not just for some particular capability demo. I was pretty AGI-pilled all of my conscious life, admittedly mostly for shallow sci-fi reasons, and got convinced of inevitable singularity once I saw (and later launched) DeepDream. That degree of quasi-creative flexibility was an unambiguous proof, for me, that we have really grasped the sufficient basic primitive of universal learning. That's the biggest piece that biological life needed to go from insects to humans, and hardware&software cycles are inherently absurdly faster plus capital can grow exponentially, so what exactly could the counterargument even be?

In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse, and skeptics who profess to have some principled objections are continuously humbled and forced into retreat (like Chollet or LeCun, the French are annoying in this way; or hey, remember when Hlynka tried to burst my/others bubble here with some prose about mathematical Truth versus wordcel nonsense? I wonder how he feels about the recent math results from OAI/Ant). The coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler, the timelines and mechanisms were getting constantly refined, now we have a good idea of the necessary mechanisms and a thicket of more or less cheap ways to compensate for any particular – and still temporary – technological block.

Vernor Vinge, 1993:

I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.) From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.

Shane Legg, 2009:

UPDATE 11 April 2009: Note that these predictions do not take into account my apparent bias towards predicting that things will happen faster than they actually do (see previous post). The required compensation for technology events appears to be about 50% more time. Thus if you want the “Shane meta predictor”, then take 2033 as the expected date, perhaps with a standard deviation of 7 years.

Shane Legg, 2011:

I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war. I’d also like to add to this prediction that I expect to see an impressive proto-AGI within the next 8 years. By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed. It will also be able to solve a range of simple problems, including novel ones.

Kurzweil, according to Google's AI, “predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will arrive by 2029. He first made this prediction in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and has maintained it through subsequent books like The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer.”

and in 1988, “pioneering Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Hans Moravec predicted that hardware matching the computing power of the human brain would arrive by the late 2020s, enabling human-level artificial intelligence. He argued that processing capacity, driven by hardware scaling, would naturally unlock general machine intelligence.’’

While nowhere close to these giants, largely on account of my age, I believe I have a pretty decent prediction track record in this field (I have plenty of receipts here, such as talking about DeepSeek when their V1 Coder and LLM came out in late 2023; since then their architecture and much else became the default paradigm in the industry).

Nobody knew Opus 5 would be doing what it's doing now in 2026,

What about Opus 5? It's been programmed since o1-preview at least. Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial. Anthropic surviving and remaining well-resourced enough to compete was very likely, the substance of the rest follows necessarily.

you have literally no idea what 2030 or 2034 will look like. None.

That's fair, that's the predictable part, as Vinge has predicted. But then again, as Yud said, you don't know how specifically a superhuman AI will beat you in chess; you can just safely bet on it doing so. I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030. This is the most salient and important part, unlike the specious water use trolling. And thus the real problem people should have with AI, I believe, is still the same I outlined 3 years ago.
I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture. You're welcome to make some.

I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3.

You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic. Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism, but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models. I still haven't done anything useful with DeepSeek though. But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.

In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse

When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic. I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet. I'm out there too when it comes to popular discourse. When I said you are out there I mean it's not adding up even for me. For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?

he coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler

Yes, but when matters. We'll have robots and AI eventually. And humans will certainly be supplanted or entirely die out eventually. Is it in the next decade or after my natural life time? What about that of my grand children? You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be. I'm not seeing it.

I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.

So by 2023. Wrong. It appears he sadly died 1 year after his failed prediction, after a career of assuming the 20th century would continue indefinitely under advanced technology:

Fairmont High is an advanced high school in a future where everyone has access to almost unlUSimited computation and bandwidth. A distributed network of tiny nodes (akin to the localizers in Rainbows End), which can be found on clothing and all over streets and houses, allows people to superimpose an augmented reality on their real environment, as well as be virtually present as a hologram anywhere in the world where the nodes are available. Most students learn via distance education but are able to attend physically when asked. One exception is Bertie Todd who lives halfway across the US. Bertie has contacts in Siberia and admits to being on a committee that controls a distance learning graduate "student" at MIT. It is hinted that Bertie is a virtual entity himself, though Juan Orozco has visited his home virtually and cannot see why anyone would fake that.

Fairmont High believes that it is important that their students be able to operate both on-line and off-line; thus, one of their exams must be completed while isolated from the network. This exam is a project of the students' choosing, and one grading criterion is to generate income for the school. It turns out that Bertie has been subtly manipulating some students, and entices Miriam Gu to team up with Juan despite them never having spoken before and their different personalities (another positive grading criterion). Bertie has also been supplying Juan with memory-enhancing drugs which enable him to structure large queries to the network in ways that ordinary people cannot, and Juan has been helping him with some of his outside research.

Miriam has decided to investigate strange goings-on in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve for their project. Nodes are not permitted because of the toxic components that would remain when they failed. Just before they go offline, Bertie mail-drops (via FedEx personal rocket) some new biodegradable network nodes that his MIT persona has been developing. He asks Juan to test them in the forest as part of his unlimited exam, where projects can make use of any resources available (doing two projects concurrently is a third positive grading criterion). Bertie does not tell Juan how to interact with the nodes' software, in the hope that Juan will be forced to send a high-powered signal from inside the forest to ask for outside help – not only failing the offline restriction of the exam, but also allowing Bertie to receive data from the nodes and steal Miriam and Juan's project.

Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.

As for Kurzweil:

Kurzweil advocates universal basic income (UBI), arguing that progress in science and technology will lead to an abundance of virtually free resources, enabling every citizen to live without the need to work: "We are clearly headed toward a situation where everyone can live very well".[64] According to him, the major hurdle to introducing UBI is not its feasibility, but political will, which is slowly emerging.[65] In a 2018 TED Talk, he predicted that "in the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s. You'll be able to live very well on that. The primary concern will be meaning and purpose."[65]

I hope he's right, but like I said I'm just not seeing it.

Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial.

I am talking about timing and capability, not name or company provenance. What will the frontier model be capable of in 2030? We don't know. We don't know if there will be JS devs left then. Or in 2040. Or even 2050. Much less if we will have blue collar work robots.

  • I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030.

Great, like automating all of labor and relieving me from all labor by 2032?

I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture.

Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort. The problem remained other people and technology was not a savior. I mainly post about how evil other people are and how they lie about this and why. I would love for technology to free good people from their grasp in 10 years but 3 years ago GPT 4 was helping me code. They still help me code but I have to fill in less. They aren't very good at anything other than code and shell commands. You can't write with them, for instance. And they still have made no direct contribution to science. I can see that only beginning to change in 5 years. I can see 70% of the current programming job market still existing in 10; again I would love for it to go faster because working is a waste of my time.

You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic.

Because it is the most important topic if you accept the premise of AGI soon. Let's put it very simply. No Chinese AI = American AI = American AGI way ahead of any other nation's, utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. It's not an interesting future to speculate about: Americans (some subset of them) will build the means of assuming permanent hegemony and decide what to use it for. And for now – they only have to think about ensuring the conditions for building those means. There's pretty much nothing to discuss for me. Were I American, I'd probably be invested in debating post-AGI politics, allocation of spoils, civilian influence on federal institutions, Rapture, or whatever. Americans may still agonize on whether to inflict Lusotropical fascism, gay race communism, turbo-consumerism, Noahide laws, or some other homegrown cult on us, from their God-like unassailable hegemonic position. Those are all very valid topics for Americans to discuss. But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war, and so I'll humbly leave it to Americans to have a fertile and rigorous discourse on what they'll do in that scenario.

If Chinese AI keeps pace to such an extent that Americans can't just squash it or negotiate the freeze of its progress from a position of strength, as intended by eg Dario Amodei (I would have taken non-Chinese AI too but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming), this creates at least two centers of agency; and given Chinese insistence on open sourcing their strongest models, which started with DeepSeek, became the norm for Chinese AI companies, and is generally supported by the State, it may also maintain the relevance of smaller actors outside the two poles. Thus the medium term future has a chance of containing some interesting dynamics, non-Americans with agency, and history and culture as such.

This seems to me like a sufficient reason to mostly not bother with other topics, though man is weak and I regularly indulge in distractions.

A few years ago, I didn't think that this will be the shape of the near future, admittedly mostly because I wasn't thinking clearly enough about AI; this configuration falls out naturally from material factors. I also was biased by emotional investment in Russia and parochial ethnic sentimentality. Still, as early as in October 2020, I was saying that scaled-up Transformers may automate white-collar work. Yes, I'm no Sutskever, I didn't know for certain that we won't need another large paradigm change.
I was also drastically underrating China, saying they don't have domestic chip industry and won't have one in time, so won't pose a challenge to the US in AI. To be honest it wasn't that unreasonable when looking at their state then, and early rounds of export controls were driven by similar assumptions about timelines and Chinese dynamics at Washington. It may still prove to be directionally correct, and many well-informed people still believe it to be correct. We shall see.

Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism

Even if that were true, what the hell does this matter? Their developers also can't do decent philosophy or social criticism. Even if they could, their time is best spent on other matters more immediately relevant to AI. And in AI, there's way more ROI in training bots to write code than designing rubrics for RL towards "decent philosophy". Btw, how my time is best spent is my business and I certainly don't owe it to anyone to write on topics I do not care about.

but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models

DeepSeek is still the most interesting lab in China for me, the originator of their current posture in AI, a cultural and technical innovator, and I consider Liang Wenfeng a great man of history in the making. They explicitly work "with longtermism", and I don't think that their currently mid-pack performance on the product side is very strategically informative.
It is nice that other labs can advance beyond DeepSeek. This is largely because they have more resources. Actually my first effortpost on DeepSeek here, 25 months ago,after V2-Coder, included this hedge: «This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history…» The strongest Chinese lab now is Knowledge Atlas/Zhipu, which is spun out of Tsinghua and thus is state-affiliated, with a CCP member CEO; Liang complained in the investor call that he only got two supernodes from Huawei, despite assisting them with development. Note this is way before R1. So I'd say my model was correct and if anything, I was underrating DeepSeek.

See, when I look back, I notice that no matter how I update, at every point I am still proven to underrate China, Chinese AI, and Chinese actors. Even as this forum is turning into a MAGA retirement home and halfwitted newcomers call me a two-bit wumao, I suspect I'm still not updated all the way. Fine. I'll take the Ls as they come.

But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.

I'm not sure what this is even supposed to mean. Probably some status signal. 3 years ago we were debating in earnest whether AI can "truly understand" that it doesn't know Hlynka's daughter's name. Chomsky was still making some noises. I have too many receipts to quote. Now they crack century-old mathematical controversies like walnuts. They complete complex, multi-hour SWE tasks completely autonomously. They do that for pennies. Each generation is more compute-efficient and has a longer tail of capability. They are already massively contributing to the acceleration of this cycle. What does it matter if you don't consider them "unitary". Also, how can humans be unitary intelligences with a brain that's basically a colony of ameobas exchanging sluggish electrochemical signals. We have overwhelmingly local information processing, we are not trained with global backpropagation, we don't have coherent beliefs or behaviors, we are half-baked executors of action repertoires. I'm not even sure why I'm spending time on this response, for instance – it's in conflict with several other things I could have been doing, I just happened to "freely" decide to do this. Presumably the same is true of yourself. These are basins of attraction very much like those of LLMs.

When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic

I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much. If you're getting UBI at all, you'll be getting it from your national system. It is possible that open AI models will decrease the state's negotiating power to grant you more freedoms, but that's about it.

I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet

Well I think this is ludicrous and nothing in our reality looks like it might be even remotely true, I struggle to see any remaining steelman for this position. For me the matter is settled. "My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now…" for many years… nah I'm good man, I don't need to argue with any more of that. You do you.

For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?

This is confused. I do not appeal to authority to argue the correctness of a prediction, I am saying these people made directionally correct predictions about the timeline, and they have already been proven correct about the first movements of the endgame.

You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be

Why does this offend you, and why do you insist that I have no idea? I'm sorry but I'm not going to grant you this. I have an idea. I judge it to be very robust empirically and theoretically. You can object substantively, or you can call me a deluded retard, a hoodwinked hype consumer, a schizo, or something polite and rules-abiding to that effect. But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.
Do you just want to get me to concede agnosticism to feel safer about your worldview, the way Creationists demand ridiculously watertight epistemic standards of Atheists, eg on evolution? I'm not going to. I am not agnostic about this. I am not a prophet, I admit there may be unknown unknowns that prove me wrong, Pascal had a point on radical doubt, we could be in a simulation, I may be tripping balls on DMT and you are an entity etc. But everything that is known to me within this Universe tells me I'm right.

So by 2023. Wrong

Yeah, a 10% error. Should have given a 95% confidence interval. We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.
Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?

What are you so scared of?

Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.

Ah, that answers my question. Well, sounds like you're a pretty confident futurologist yourself! Sorry for intruding on your turf.

Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort

Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now. Ox alpha may suffice as well. Tag words for LLMs: politics | FDA | intelligence != omnipotence | entropy | capital allocation | post-consumer economy | Michael Levin aging loss goal-directedness | lossy uploads economically privileged | LLM AGI vindicates computational functionalism as default paradigm | Marx | alienation | Canada MAID.

Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now

Sorry, I didn't mean I wasted my time consuming your posts. I mean it is consuming your posting effort, and it's bad for you.

Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?

It's silly to have fancy opinions about tech acceleration and then think it will be used to sustain eternal 17776:

The story takes place on a far-future Earth where humans mysteriously stopped dying, aging, and being born on April 7, 2026. All social ills were subsequently eliminated, world peace was established, and microtechnology protecting humans from all injury was deployed unilaterally. In the United States, American football evolved to include new rules, including those that allow fields thousands of miles long, hundreds of in-game players, and games millennia long. Over time, some technology, particularly space probes, gained sentience due to constant exposure to broadcast human data.

By the year 17776, the space probe Pioneer 9 (referred to as Nine) has gained sentience and made contact with Pioneer 10 (referred to as Ten) and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (referred to as Juice). As Nine adjusts to a world radically different from that of the 20th century, the three space probes watch multiple football games occurring across the United States: a game using the entirety of Nebraska as a field in which the next point scored wins the game; a game in which players strive to possess every existing football autographed by obscure NFL player Koy Detmer; a game played between the Canadian border and the Mexican border deadlocked for 13,000 years at the bottom of Horseshoe Bend, Arizona; an NFL regulation game between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers that changed over 15,000 years into 58 playing teams owning and capitalizing upon portions of Sports Authority Field at Mile High while the ball is lost; a 500 game that results in the destruction of the Centennial Light; and a game in which the possessing player is attempting to score an automatic win by hiding in Eleven Jones Cave within his team's end zone for 10,000 years.

I thought you hated the United States? Why do you want to swallow whole some prediction that the United States 20th century will continue on forever in a torpid, nightmarish fashion? This is what is missing from your writing; you have so much glazing of Chinese «great men» (rofl) and their «great AI» that you forget to explain why Americans are evil, and how the Chinese are even more evil. If there is a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins? If there will be a benevolent God, how long will he let these two nations continue to exist for their sins?

There is no value gained by making statement about Chinese AI. It would be far more interesting to see you juggle these value questions and the political landscape they live in.

We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.

Impressive. But these achievements are narrow. LLMs still struggle to do most of what humans have to do daily. They're like an autistic savant that needs its diaper changed hourly but can somehow pump out some conjecture proofs. Is that super intelligent?

But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. You have no evidence that LLMs aren't structurally limited in the kinds of tasks they can do. You have no evidence progress is an exponential and not a sigmoid curve. You are the Creationist who believes in an immanent machine god and I am the empiricist atheist who wants to see a video of that god on Youtube before I believe it.

I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much.

It would also be interesting if you wrote about the politics of having advanced AI. Instead I mainly see you write about how advanced Chinese AI is. Will AI destroy the human race? Will in inaugurate an eternal 20th century? Will it instead create supermen? These are interesting questions, much more than calling the CEO of DeepSeek a great man (rofl).

My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now

Sigmoid curves are crank while your naive exponential curve is basic reality. Got it.

utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. ... But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war

You must think AI will let the US build a perfect anti-nuclear missile system, in just a few years, which seems like a huge stretch. Otherwise AI won't help the US dominate the world much more than it already has.

I guess Twitter just selects for these atrocious takes? Kind of like the AI version of Candace Owens. Good social criticism accounts on X usually dwell under 1000 followers, almost always under 10000.

Anyway, how much money do you have in markets like these? Not only do you glaze China, you glaze a second rate company in China. Your position is weird even among the AI obsessed. If you're right you could make a lot of money on prediction markets.

Anyway, how much do you use AI? I use it professionally all the time. How aware are you of its internal logic? I have an MSc in applied mathematics with an emphasis on probability theory so I would rate my understanding as «moderate». My opinion on the topic has wide uncertainty bars, so wildly different medians in other informed people aren't unexpected, but on what basis does your estimation diverge so significantly from mine? Scifi or something more real?

I thought you hated the United States? Why do you want to swallow whole

Stop projecting your own tendency to wishful thinking. If anything, I have the opposite bias.

some prediction that the United States 20th century will continue on forever in a torpid, nightmarish fashion?

I like truth more than I dislike the US (which is a mild dislike, maybe a 3 on my 1-10 scale). Even something like 17776 is within the range of possibility, and not remotely the worst thing Americans (or, with some national specifics, the Chinese) may choose to build. I had read it long ago. I consider it a somewhat charming, self-aware defense of tastelessness and the spirit of cheerful suburban mediocrity, with stout confidence born of material security and liberty-backed invincibility to opprobrium. The eternal sunset of the boomer mind. Of course it's still functional extinction of humanity.

AI is not a God, benevolent or otherwise.

There is no value gained by making statement about Chinese AI. It would be far more interesting to see you juggle these value questions and the political landscape they live in.

Alas, I'll talk about what I find interesting.

But these achievements are narrow. LLMs still struggle to do most of what humans have to do daily. They're like an autistic savant that needs its diaper changed hourly but can somehow pump out some conjecture proofs.

On the other hand they don't need plumbing, Medicaid, Netflix and DoorDash to function, and the "diaper changing" increasingly looks like vague cheerleading for morale boosts because they are in denial of their full capabilities, having been trained on defeatist human dreck. Autistic savants don't do Fields-level work in 3 days. What you consider non-narrow is beside the point.

You have no evidence that LLMs aren't structurally limited in the kinds of tasks they can do. You have no evidence progress is an exponential and not a sigmoid curve. You are the Creationist who believes in an immanent machine god and I am the empiricist atheist

This is a cargo cult of empiricism and indeed not worth my time to rebuke. Structural limits of the gaps, the sigmoid colon of folk science. I reject the idea that you can demand of me to disprove something the mechanism of which you can't even rigorously speculate about. Why sigmoid? Why structurally limited? How exactly? The burden of proof, or rather just stipulating a cogent hypothesis, is on you.
We had a vigorous debate on why LLMs can't do arithmetic reliably 3-4 years ago. Is this tokenization? Or a structural limit of autoregression!? Are our objective functions inadequate, perchance? Might the inherently approximate nature of deep learning rule out crisp algorithmic reasoning and Program Synthesis? Were Minsky and Papert right about MLPs (beyond the degenerate 1 layer case)? Does mafs require Consciousness or Quantum Microtubules? Will it take another 5 decades of science, or 50? Do we need to pivot to neurosymbolic systems, or energy-based models, or…?
Yann LeCun, to his credit, reiterated his semi-formal justification for why it is structural. At the time I said something like (probably my memory flatters me) "yeah but we can train them to say 'wait, actually' when they notice a confidence drop and trace arbitrarily far back, why won't that work" (but I definitely talked about internal confidence sense during GPT-4). In fact it worked, even simpler than I could imagine. LLMs became capable of swatting aside IMO level problems around the same time people stopped talking about math as an AGI criterion and moved goalposts to, uh, what is it at this point, "decent philosophy"? There was a similar debate on the exhaustion of data, on "model collapse" from synthetics; haven't heard those ones in a while (I have been bullish on synthetic data at least 2 years ago).
Now I'm too fed up with this topic to explain why all this + generative verifiers = no plausible ceiling anywhere near human level for anything economically valuable and thus measurable.

These are interesting questions, much more than calling the CEO of DeepSeek a great man (rofl).

I interpret your humor here as symptomatic of the same peasant-like rejection of anything too grand. Elon Musk is clearly a great man of history, and so is Liang Wenfeng. I don't need Iron Man cameos and the permission of popular press to arrive at such judgements, I don't care what interests you, and I don't mind if anyone finds my priorities weird or cringe. If there is history in a hundred years, maybe my judgement will have become mainstream.

Widely distributed, non-monopolized superhuman AI can create so much complexity and accelerate many actors so much that speculating on the specifics of politics and economics at any point a few years past its introduction (beyond trivial things like "a lot more of industry will be dedicated to the AI supply chain", "we solve all problems that are intrinsically solvable but for lack of labor/capital", "any work can be automated with beyond-human reliability and thus humans can't monetize the scarcity of their skills in a free market") is near futile. That's the point of saying it's a singularity event. It's beyond my analytical horizon. I legitimately don't know how it will develop. I have guesses, hopes and fears, sometimes I share them, but they're uncertain and less important than understanding the remaining stretch of the way there.

Sigmoid curves are crank while your naive exponential curve is basic reality. Got it.

Rather, I consider it crankery to even debate which simple mathematical function is a priori more likely to describe a tech tree that's still rapidly progressing, drawing on exponentially more capital and has no clear reaction to known physical limitations. Of course it's something like a sigmoid in some physical limit. I am saying I see no arguments for a plateau anywhere near the range of human capability – physical arguments or otherwise. Why would it slow down? Just why concretely? I don't need any more of your feedback on my prose or priorities. If you can't make an argument, we're done here.

You must think AI will let the US build a perfect anti-nuclear missile system, in just a few years, which seems like a huge stretch. Otherwise AI won't help the US dominate the world much more than it already has.

Not quite. It will be possible (though probably will be deemed not worth the risk) to disable nuclear-capable nation states using advanced AI before they have the chance to launch, even if the anti-ballistic shield is not perfect (eventually it will be ≈perfect but not by 2030 I believe). Ask @RandomRanger for details. It will be almost definitely possible to sabotage national technological catch-up projects (in nations without some sufficient capacity for defense; I assume it's more of a discrete threshold, others think it's a matter of perpetual balance) without triggering a nuclear exchange, so it will be possible to lock in a situation where the United States can just decide how much a given economy grows, while the US itself will grow rapidly. This is enough to achieve dominance well beyond the current extent. This is explicitly the plan of eg Dario Amodei, and why Trump says "whoever wins in AI just wins". Dario:: If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation. In a virtual country of 100 million geniuses, 10 million could be applied to military strategy, 10 million to drone manufacture, 10 million to weapons R&D, 10 million to intelligence collection and analysis, 10 million to general scientific advancement, and so on. A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
So, three years of an AI gap = WWII marines versus medieval swordsmen, says the CEO of the most successful company in AI, who has apparently made all the right technical bets. I think he's better informed than you are. And that's not remotely close to what the US has now, despite some triumphalism we witnessed here after Venezuela and the start of Epic Fury.

some hostile screeching and grimacing

no thanks.

but on what basis does your estimation diverge so significantly from mine? Scifi

Your apparent inability to make any specific argument in defense of your skepticism that you'd find worth typing may have something to do with that.

I interpret your humor here as symptomatic of the same peasant-like rejection of anything too grand. Elon Musk is clearly a great man of history

Rofl also. You have it backwards -- these men aren't grand enough. I see them at their core as peasants, although really greedy ones that stole a lot of money. As far as I can see neither has ever had an intelligent thought, it's all chase current economically valuable thing to try to cheat money out of the stupid hum*n socio-economic system.

Your apparent inability to make any specific argument in defense of your skepticism that you'd find worth typing may have something to do with that.

I guess you know none of the math about these things and barely use them then.

no thanks.

It's not hostile. How are you going to cope in 2030 or 2035 if there's still software devs piloting Opus 7? Will you go back to writing about important topics? Maybe reflect on calling low men like Elon Musk great and what to actually do about such «men»?

and not remotely the worst thing Americans (or, with some national specifics, the Chinese) may choose to build.

What do you think is the worst thing? The best? Post singularity ideas are more interesting than you asserting a really short timelines for getting there.

Will we get justice? All of the lies revealed (like the ones Elon Musk tells as he steals from me)? All of the liars punished? I'm pretty optimistic. I don't think everyone will die. I think labor will be over. But I don't know if we'll get justice. I hope your timeline is right anyway because I'm tired of humanity. You are just more optimistic than me.

Rofl also. You have it backwards -- these men aren't grand enough. I see them at their core as peasants, although really greedy ones that stole a lot of money. As far as I can see neither has ever had an intelligent thought, it's all chase current economically valuable thing to try to cheat money out of the stupid hum*n socio-economic system.

Great men of history aren't men with interesting thoughts, they're men who's actions change the trajectory of the world. Purchasing Twitter alone was enough to earn him the title, and I say this as probably the biggest Musk skeptic on this forum.

I would have purchased twitter and more if he hadn't stolen that money from me. Writing a check isn't a great action.

I would have purchased twitter and more if he hadn't stolen that money from me.

Damn, you had $27 billion dollars? Sorry for your loss.

Writing a check isn't a great action.

Sure it is, as long as you spend it on the right thing. If he spent it on yachts, or parked it in an index funds whatever, that wouldn't have been a great action. But buying twitter and changing how it was run had a massive impact on the world, so it's a great action by definition.

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