Comment by doubleunplussed

> The most powerful AI we have now is strictly hardware-dependent

Of course that's the case and it always will be - the cutting edge is the cutting edge.

But the best AI you can run on your own computer is way better than the state of the art just a few years ago - progress is being made at all levels of hardware requirements, and hardware is progressing as well. We now have dedicated hardware in some of our own devices for doing AI inference - the hardware-specificity of AI doesn't mean we won't continue to improve and commoditise said hardware.

> The part that seems indefensible is the unexamined assumptions about LLMs' ability (or AI's ability more broadly) to jump to optimal human ability [...]

I don't think this is at all unexamined. But I think it's risky to not consider the strong possibility when we have an existence proof in ourselves of that level of intelligence, and an algorithm to get there, and no particular reason to believe we're optimal since that algorithm - evolution - did not optimise us for intelligence alone.