[zarzavat]

I can think of two situations that might lead to an AI winter:

1. We are wildly underestimating the computation requirements.

2. There are theoretical roadblocks coming up such that even a very large number of smart people being paid to solve the problem won’t find a key sequence of ideas. Think Riemann Hypothesis, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, etc.

The counter-argument to (1) is that available computational resources are very high given the billions of dollars available. The one system we know to possess human-parity intelligence (the human brain) uses 12 watts and is not exactly a data center.

The counter-argument to (2) is that we’ve made faster than expected progress since the discovery of transformers, and we seem to be quite close already given the capabilities of GPT-4. Of course you don’t know that you’ve hit a roadblock until you hit it, but so far it’s been smooth sailing.