When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder “what pace, exactly?” Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say “well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field” at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.
Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn’t really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago – I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it’s been almost a year since “will smith eating spaghetti,” so…
I’m gonna be honest the videos did better than I expected, still meh in the weird uncanny valley aspect, but better than I expected. But still think that we have reached the end of the fast progress curve due to the whole gpt 4 is basically a couple of 3.5’s chained together. Which I think is a sign of people running out of ideas, same as how in the era of multicore cpus the speed of cpus has not increased that drastically, and certainly not that noticeably (compared to the 90’s etc).
What is going to be amazing however is the rise of 40k mechanicus style coders, I saw somebody go ‘you don’t need to know how to code, my program gave this http error, I didn’t know what it meant, so I asked GPT how to fix it and implemented that and it works’. Amazing, bunch of servitors.
As people noted the last few AI autumns, this is a bad assumption. Winter is coming. S-curve, not exponential.
When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder “what pace, exactly?” Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say “well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field” at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.
Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn’t really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago – I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it’s been almost a year since “will smith eating spaghetti,” so…
I’m gonna be honest the videos did better than I expected, still meh in the weird uncanny valley aspect, but better than I expected. But still think that we have reached the end of the fast progress curve due to the whole gpt 4 is basically a couple of 3.5’s chained together. Which I think is a sign of people running out of ideas, same as how in the era of multicore cpus the speed of cpus has not increased that drastically, and certainly not that noticeably (compared to the 90’s etc).
What is going to be amazing however is the rise of 40k mechanicus style coders, I saw somebody go ‘you don’t need to know how to code, my program gave this http error, I didn’t know what it meant, so I asked GPT how to fix it and implemented that and it works’. Amazing, bunch of servitors.
Seeing as the notion of “progress” in this space is entirely subjective and based on general vibes, it’s easy to make a case for any curve shape.
I could make a passable argument that it’s actually a noisy sinusoid.