Comment by aguaviva
1 year ago
I don’t hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of today’s world
Sadder still is the underlying situaiton behind this: the fact that there's nothing of even remotely comparable significance happening in the public sphere for such minds to devote themselves to, as those man did. Even though the current civilization risk if anything significantly greater than in their time.
Even if you don't buy that LLMs and the transformer architecture in particular will lead to AGI, and then artificial super intelligence (ASI), the quest to try and make ASI is far more significant than anything that's ever come before. ASI would be the last thing that humans need to invent.
https://youtu.be/fa8k8IQ1_X0
We'll see if it comes to anything, first.
Until then, it doesn't have the property of being significant.
I mean it’s possible we don’t see it. Or perhaps don’t see it very much before it’s ridiculously smart. A lot of AI research is at private companies who only share some details when they formally release a model. If they could make an AI researcher AI, they may be inclined to keep it to themselves for a bit while they let it improve itself for a few generations.
I feel like having access to instant high definition video communication and to the world’s repository of text, audio, and video information at a moment’s notice from a device in your pocket is of comparable, if not more, significance.
These innovations in LEDs, battery technology, low power high performance microchips with features measured in number of atoms is extraordinary, and seemingly taken for granted.
Then we also have medicines that can even bend one’s desire to over eat or even drink alcohol, not to mention better vaccines, cancer therapies, and so on and so forth.
And the smartphone is making sure you'll get plenty of access to the people who will prevent you from taking the vaccines or the cancer therapies (which, sadly, have _not_ been progressing as much as we would need.)
Google immunotherapy bro.
Vaccines are in a golden age, except political assholes are stoking ignorance and rejection.
In fact the two are advancing together. Bespoke vaccines for your cancer in in trial now.
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