[bigyabai]

People assume (rightly so) that the progress in AI should be self-evident. If the whole thing is really working that great, we should expect to see real advances in these fields. Protein-folding AI should lower the prices of drugs and create competitive new treatments at an unprecedented rate. Photo and video AI should be enabling film directors and game directors to release higher-quality content faster than ever before. Text AI should be spitting out Shakespeare-toppling opuses on a monthly basis.

So... where's the kaboom? Where's the giant, earth-shattering kaboom? There are solid applications for AI in computer vision and sentiment analysis right now, but even these are fallible and have limited effectiveness when you do deploy them. The grander ambitions, even for pared-back "ASI" definitions, is just kicking the can further down the road.

[TheBicPen]

The kaboom already happened on user-generated media platforms. YouTube, Facebook, tiktok, and so on are flooded with AI-generated videos, photos, sounds, and so on. The sheer volume of this low-quality slop is because AI lowered the barrier of entry for creating content. In this space the progress is not happening through pushing the upper bound of quality higher but by reducing the cost for minimal quality to down to near-0.

[mvieira38]

Another perspective for the kaboom is search and programming tasks for the average person.

For the average consumer, LLM chatbots are infinitely better than Google at search-like tasks, and in effect solve that problem. Remember when we had to roll our eyes at dad because he asked Google "what are some cool restaurants?" instead of "nice restaurants SF 2018 reddit"? Well, that is over, he can ask that to ChatGPT and it will make the most effective searches for him, aggregate and answer. Remember when a total noob had to familiarize himself with a language by figuring out hello world, then functions, etc? Now it's over, these people can just draft a toy example of what they want to build with Cursor instantly, tell it to make everything nice and simple, and then have ChatGPT guide them through what is happening.

In some industries you just don't need that much more code quality than what LLMs give you. A quick .bat script doesn't need you to know the best implementation of anything, neither does a Python scraper using only the stdlib, but these were locked behind programming knowledge before LLMs

[dontlaugh]

So it’s either useless or harmful? Why should we be excited then?

[tim333]

It's like the web in 1998. Everyone could see the potential but nothing actually worked very well.