The AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.
I agree with all of those things, but for the last one I see a big example in all of the people not taking the news of a demonstrable global workspace in AI, including models that have been around for years now, as anything big.
People have been insisting that AI can’t possibly actually be thinking or have any of the most vaunted aspects of the human mind and that LLMs are a dead end that won’t go anywhere for years. We want to be different and special and unique. We always have.
Many of us here went to school when it was still taught that animals weren’t really conscious and couldn’t be self-aware. Being unwilling to look at new information and honestly assess is hubris and insistence on holding to the thing you’ve been insisting, it’s not a logical analysis.
Over the years we’ve pointed to several things to insist that AI wasn’t special like us, and that it couldn’t possibly be because it lacked aspects of the human mind needed for that. Somehow it kept turning out that every thing we pointed to in ourselves ended up being shown to have a very surprisingly similar to nearly direct analogue in those modern LLMs. Last month was jaw dropping, but the bulk of the world has been so focused on the entire world going to hell it hasn’t gotten near the attention it deserved yet.
I believe the people in frontier labs are doing their best to push in that direction.
I believe the investors believe they will have AGIs in a few years.
I believe the human species has throughout history repeatedly proven the height of its hubris and the depth of its stupidity.
I agree with all of those things, but for the last one I see a big example in all of the people not taking the news of a demonstrable global workspace in AI, including models that have been around for years now, as anything big.
People have been insisting that AI can’t possibly actually be thinking or have any of the most vaunted aspects of the human mind and that LLMs are a dead end that won’t go anywhere for years. We want to be different and special and unique. We always have.
Many of us here went to school when it was still taught that animals weren’t really conscious and couldn’t be self-aware. Being unwilling to look at new information and honestly assess is hubris and insistence on holding to the thing you’ve been insisting, it’s not a logical analysis.
Over the years we’ve pointed to several things to insist that AI wasn’t special like us, and that it couldn’t possibly be because it lacked aspects of the human mind needed for that. Somehow it kept turning out that every thing we pointed to in ourselves ended up being shown to have a very surprisingly similar to nearly direct analogue in those modern LLMs. Last month was jaw dropping, but the bulk of the world has been so focused on the entire world going to hell it hasn’t gotten near the attention it deserved yet.