Comment by reducesuffering
2 hours ago
In the big 2026, everything certain people worried about with superintelligence came to fruition and they were vindicated. The people closest to ASI are indicating recursive self improvement is imminent, the smartest engineers in the labs themselves are autonomously using agents to develop and improve the models. The arms race is evident. NVDA is the world's most valuable company determined by the worlds' collective wisdom of those with skin-in-the-game.
If there exists a path of runaway superintelligence, the trajectory we've experienced has been following it to a tee. Their predictive power was affirmed.
All the "AI is a nothingburger" predictions of the last decade, including many here even in the last year, have aged incredibly poorly.
Nobody cares what we (people who have been working on AGI a long time) think.
We were dismissed as cranks before and now we’re just ignored by whomever is promising the most money to investors.
So, par for the course. Everyone in AI has lived through all the cycles so far so this is just the biggest one yet.
The fact that AI researchers and heads of labs aren't being assassinated tells me that the people who claim they are concerned about the end of the world aren't actually that serious.
It has been frequently discussed amongst Less-Wrong / "doomers", especially after the Sam Altman home attack, why violence won't solve the coming problem with unaligned ASI.
If you're actually curious, here's a good summary: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
I don't follow that argument at all. Many people who claim they're concerned about the end of the world think that the one sliver of hope we have is that the specific people in charge of modern AI research take existential concerns seriously. Even if you expect that won't be enough to save us, it could hardly help the situation to replace them with other people who are less sympathetic to and probably radicalized against existential concerns.