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I'm just glad that we're finally past the totally clueless people insisting AI is not even useful for coding and are on to the next stage of grief we have to drag people through on the way to acceptance that big Yud has been right the entire time. The faux cynical takes that the labs at the absolute cutting edge of this are fudding their own product to the dismay of the sitting president in some insane 8 dimensional chess move because they want to be regulated by Bernie Sanders is so plainly retarded that it can't possibly last very long.
I may yet write a top level post about bad epistemics and Ed Zitron. Somehow the man has about 100,000 subscribers on substack despite there being entire webpages assembled of his false predictions.
There's still quite a few people waiting for the bubble pop. We're way past the point of it being a reasonable opinion I agree, yet there are so many who still believe.
The embittering part of it all is that I wish I could agree with the accelerationists, it'd be so beautiful, and I'm not even full Yudd in that I think there's a very good chance Alignment ends up being tractable and even might go well automatically. But I just can't stomach ten or twenty percent chance that everyone dies. It can still be beautiful even with a pause, we can still cure cancer and fight back against aging and probably end all toil. But it'd be so nice to not have to feel trepidation about this.
One of the things that safety-pilled me was thinking about just how much work there still is to do maximising the human benefit of existing models - society still hasn't adapted to a world where an AI assistant with the intelligence of a smart intern is available at a consumer-SaaS price point. As a trivial example, there should be an insanely great agent harness (think Apple-tier) which allows my grandmother to enlist an AI agent to deal with the medical bureaucracy without my having to set things up for her. Part of the reason why this hasn't been built is that the underlying models are improving too fast and too unpredictably to make building it a good business.
A world in which training of new models stopped tomorrow would still see more tech-driven social change in the next decade than we have seen in any previous decade of human history.
The personal assistant who knows my preferences and priorities, can keep track of birthdays, navigate buerocracy and keep tabs on the local job and real estate market will be a very valuable product/service indeed.
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