[eastbound]

> to man walking on the moon in only 66 years

And that was before Epoch (1969, unix time started in 1970). We went from calculator to AI in 55 years, which is, actually, extremely long. It took exactly the time to miniaturize CPUs enough that you would hold as many gates in a GPU as neurones in a human’s brain. The moment we could give enough transistors to a single program, AI appeared. It’s like it’s just an emergent behavior.

[jacquesm]

> We went from calculator to AI in 55 years, which is, actually, extremely long.

I think it is insanely fast.

Think about it: that planet has been here for billions of years. Modern humanity has been here for 200,000 years, give or take. It took 199700 years and change to get to a working steam engine. 266 years later men were walking on the moon and another 55 years and we had a good facsimile of what an AI looks like in practice. That's insane progress. The next 75 years are going to be very interesting, assuming we don't fuck it all up, the chances of which are right now probably 50/50 or so.

[lttlrck]

If this is what AI is going to look like in practice it's a big letdown.

Science fiction has been predicting what an AI would be like for over a hundred years, there was even one in a movie in 1927. We're so far from what we dream that, to me, it feels like a mere leaf blowing in the wind compared to the Wright Flyer.

[jacquesm]

It's not what it can do today (which is already pretty impressive) it is what it can do in another century, which too is a relatively short time.

The Wright Flyer was a complete aircraft but small, awkward and not very practical. But it had all of the parts and that was the bit that mattered.

LLMs are not a 'complete AI' at all, they are just a very slick imitation of one through a completely different pathway. Useful, but not AI (at least, not to me). Meanwhile, a very large fraction of the users of OpenAI, Claude etc all think that AI has arrived and from that perspective it is mostly the tech crowd that is disappointed. For the rest of the people the thing is nothing short of magic compared to what they were able to do with a computer not so long ago. And for people like translators it is a massive threat to their jobs, assuming they still have one.

It is both revolutionary and a letdown, depending on your viewpoint and expectations.

[thephyber]

This rhymes with “we were promised The Jetsons and all we got was Facebook.”

Sci-fi is fanciful and doesn’t take into account psychology. What we got is the local maxima of what entrepreneurs think they can build and what people are willing to pay for.

Sci-fi is not a prediction. It is a hypothetical vision for what humanity could be in a distant future. The writer doesn’t have to grapple with limitations of physics (note FTL travel is frequently a plot device, not a plausible technology) or limitations about what product-market-fit the market will adopt.

And, of course, sci-fi dates are rarely close or accurate. That’s probably by design (most Star Trek space technologies would be unbelievable if the timeline was 2030, but more easily believable if you add a few thousand years for innovation).

[jacquesm]

And yet, a mobile phone is quite close to a Star Trek communicator and in many ways already much more powerful. Ok, you can ask to be beamed up by your friend Scotty and it likely won't happen (call me if it does) but other than that it is an impressive feat of engineering.

[sugarkjube]

> Star Trek communicator

As a trekkie this was a dream come true.

Unfortunately we still don't have a tricorder yet (despite Elisabeth Holmes' promise).

But we do have the apps and the games, they didn't have these in star trek. My phone is loaded with these (apps, not games)

[ykonstant]

>(call me if it does)

They can just tell you in person!

[billforsternz]

I agree with everything you say but I'm still exceptionally triggered by you going 2x10^5 - 300 = 199700 and change.

[jacquesm]

Well... the 200K is so loosely defined that it could well be 210000 or 190000 (or even further out) so I figured it would be funny to be exact. But you're right that that doesn't carry well online.

[galangalalgol]

It just seems that way because people had been researching neural networks from before the time they had floating point units in processors. So there were all these ideas people were waiting tp try when we finally had the speed. Then it was a matter of trying them all to see which worked the best. But yes, there is the point that even a bad ai model can learn most anything if you give it enough parameters. So the emergent property isn't far off either.