Comment by hgoel
8 hours ago
In the real world there aren't any true exponentials, everything eventually saturates as ultimately physics related constraints hit. You can only compress information so much, transfer it so quickly, you can only access resources at a certain speed, only so much energy is available, etc.
AI ultimately has to live in this reality and face the corresponding limitations. These companies have already consumed much of the world's supply of computing power for the next several years, and they're burning vast sums of money to keep the improvements going. RSI won't learn for free, it won't extract massive cost reductions without up front expense, it can't build factories faster than humans can work out related societal matters, it can't magically pave the deserts with solar panels for power or build and run nuclear power plants and more.
Point is, the cost of progress is already approaching the limits of what even the richest countries are able to bear (without war-like mobilization), and to bypass those constraints would require a supposed ASI to construct its own parallel supplychain from scratch without having much ability to directly interfere with reality. Recursive self improvement is ultimately limited by everything else that cannot move at the speed of electricity.
We don't know exactly what the limits of AI improvement on our current infrastructure are, though. If the human brain is 20W, and a datacenter is 1GW, then maybe that datacenter can be 50 million times smarter than a human. If that's not already a risk to humankind I don't know what is.
Is the datacenter gonna grow legs?
Give me one datacenter, I'll keep it under control all by myself.
Now, if some dumbasses start hooking up their data centers to...I don't know, like--robot factories? That sounds like a risk to humankind.
If we could agree on that, no LLMs connected to robot factories, that would be a great place to start regulation. Though 1) I don't think we could agree on that 2) it's already well under way 3) we have extremist anti-regulation ideologues in control of american government.
> Recursive self improvement is ultimately limited by everything else that cannot move at the speed of electricity.
I'm not sure what your point is. No one thought RSI would break the laws of physics.
I'd recommend reading the full post :)
Specifically: AI ultimately has to live in this reality and face the corresponding limitations. These companies have already consumed much of the world's supply of computing power for the next several years, and they're burning vast sums of money to keep the improvements going. RSI won't learn for free, it won't extract massive cost reductions without up front expense, it can't build factories faster than humans can work out related societal matters, it can't magically pave the deserts with solar panels for power or build and run nuclear power plants and more.
Point is, the cost of progress is already approaching the limits of what even the richest countries are able to bear (without war-like mobilization), and to bypass those constraints would require a supposed ASI to construct its own parallel supplychain from scratch without having much ability to directly interfere with reality.
No proponents of RSI state they will be operating outside of reality. Said another way, they will operate within the confines of what's possible and still be RSI. I'm quite surprised this is something that needs to be clarified.
You are constructing a straw man of your own making.
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