[techblueberry]

It is very weird to wonder, what if they're all wrong. Sam Bankman-Fried was clearly as committed to these ideas, and crashed his company into the ground.

But clearly if out of context someone said something like this:

"Clearly, the most obvious effect will be to greatly increase economic growth. The pace of advances in scientific research, biomedical innovation, manufacturing, supply chains, the efficiency of the financial system, and much more are almost guaranteed to lead to a much faster rate of economic growth. In Machines of Loving Grace, I suggest that a 10–20% sustained annual GDP growth rate may be possible."

I'd say that they were a snake oil salesman. All of my life experience says that there's no good reason to believe Dario's predictions here, but I'm taken in just as much as everyone else.

[zesterer]

(they are all wrong)

A fun property of S-curves is that they look exactly like exponential curves until the midpoint. Projecting exponentials is definitionally absurd because exponential growth is impossible in the long term. It is far more important to study the carrying capacity limits that curtail exponential growth.

[crthpl]

1. you can definitely tell apart an S-curve and an exponential if you look at the derivative(s). AI progress does not seem to be close to the middle of the S-curve. 2. e.g.: a slowdown hasn't shown up in moore's law yet.

[reducesuffering]

Covid was also an S curve...

[mrandish]

> I'd say that they were a snake oil salesman.

I don't know if "snake oil" is quite demonstrable yet, but you're not wrong to question this. There are phrases in the article which are so grandiose, they're on my list of "no serious CEO should ever actually say this about their own company's products/industry" (even if they might suspect or hope it). For example:

> "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power"

LLMs can certainly be very useful and I think that utility will grow but Dario's making a lot of 'foom-ish' assumptions about things which have not happened and may not happen anytime soon. And even if/when they do happen, the world may have changed and adapted enough that the expected impacts, both positive and negative, are less disruptive than either the accelerationists hope or the doomers fear. Another Sagan quote that's relevant here is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

[j33dd]

"In Machines of Loving Grace, I suggest that a 10–20% sustained annual GDP growth rate may be possible.""

Absolutely comical. Do you realise how much that is in absolute terms? These guys are making up as they go along. Cant believe people buy this nonsense.

[esafak]

Why not? If they increase white color productivity by 25%, and that accounts for 50% of the economy, you'd get such a result.

[arthurcolle]

I mean, once we're able to run and operate multinational corporations off-world, GDP becomes something very different indeed

[techblueberry]

> Cant believe people buy this nonsense.

I somewhat don't disagree, and yet. It feels like more people in the world buy into it than don't? To a large degree?