Comment by Jtsummers
6 days ago
It's an old idea, "the singularity". The machines become smart enough to improve themselves, and each improvement results in shorter (or more significant) improvement cycles. This leads to an exponential growth rate.
It's been promised to be around the corner for decades.
To be fair, Ray Kurzweil has been the loudest voice in this space, and he's been pretty consistent on 2045 since the publication of his book almost 20 years ago[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
Per that summary, we were supposed to have $1000 computers that could simulate your mind by the start of this decade along with brain scanning by this point in the decade. I guess if it is truly an exponential or hyperbolic growth rate, the singularity could catch up to his predicted date.
I mean, an LLM isn’t too far away from this? He had the Turing test being defeated in 2029 - if anything, he was too pessimistic.
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He just had to pick a year where he would have a very good chance of not being alive.
No, he started predicting in his 2005 book, based on the “Law of Accelerating Returns”, yielding exponential growth in computing capacity.
Timeline from here on out:
2029: AI passes a valid Turing test and achieves human-level intelligence
2030s: Technology goes inside your brain to augment memory; humans connect their neocortex to the cloud
2045: The Singularity, when human intelligence multiplies a billion-fold by merging with AI