[theptip]

If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet.

Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get.

We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically different.

Again, all of this is obvious if you spend 1k hours with the current crop, this isn’t making any capability gain forecasts.

Just for a dumb example, there is a great ChatGPT agent for Instacart, you can share a photo of your handwritten shopping list and it will add everything to your cart. Just following through the obvious product conclusions of this capability for every grocery vendor’s app, integrating with your fridge, learning your personal preferences for brands, recipe recommendation systems, logistics integrations with your forecasted/scheduled demand, etc is I contend going to be equivalent engineering effort and impact to the move from brick and mortar to online stores.

[delusional]

You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right?

AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end".

No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it's at least possible, right?

[theptip]

> then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting

I believe that some of my made up examples won’t end up getting built, but my point is that there is _so much_ low hanging fruit like this.

Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.

In my forecast the possible worlds where progress stops and then the existing models don’t end up making anything interesting are almost exclusively scenarios like “Taiwan was invaded, TSMC fabs were destroyed, and somehow we deleted existing datacenters’ installed capacity too” or “neo-Luddites take over globally and ban GPUs”, all of this gives sub-1% likelihood.

You can imagine 5-10% likelihood worlds where the growth rate of new chips dramatically decreases for a decade due to a single black-swan event like Taiwan getting glassed, but that’s a temporary setback not a permanent blocker.

Again, I’m just looking at all the things that can obviously be built now, and just haven’t made it to the top of the list yet. I’m extremely confident that this todo list is already long enough that “this all fizzles to nothing” is basically excluded.

I think if model progress stops then everyone investing in ASI takes a big haircut, but the long-term stock market progression will look a lot like the internet after the dot com boom, ie the bloodbath ends up looking like a small blip in the rear view mirror.

I guess, a question for you - how do you think about coding agents? Don’t they already show AI is going to do more than “end up uninteresting”?

[Anamon]

Coding agents are interesting, but in my opinion also many worlds away from what they're being sold as. They can be helpful and a moderate efficiency gain, if you know where to use them and you're careful to not fall into one of their many traps where they end up being a massive cost and efficiency loss down the line. They're helpful tools, but they're slow, expensive, and unreliable -- in order of decreasing likelihood that that's going to change in a big way.

I find it interesting that you chose the shopping list and fridge examples, because my view on the whole LLM hype is that 99% of it is a solution looking for a problem, and shopping and the fridge are historically such a commonly advertised area for technologies desparately looking for an actual use case. I don't think fridge content management and shopping plans are actual pain points in most people's lives. It's not something people would see a benefit in if they didn't have to do it manually. And it's an area with a very low tolerance for the systemic unreliability. The guy needed eggs to bake his cake, but the AI got him eggos instead -- et voilà, another person who thinks this whole "smart" technology is shit and won't deal with it anymore.

And so it goes with most AI use cases I've seen so far. In my view the only thing they're good at is fuzzy search. Coding agents are helpful, but in the end, their secret sauce it just that: fuzzy search.

Can fuzzy search be helpful? Yes, even very helpful! "Bigger than the Internet" helpful? I think not.

[delusional]

> Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.

The problem with talking likelihood is that it's an interpretation game. I understand you think it's wholly unlikely that it all fizzles out, I could read that from your first post. I hope it's also clear that I do think it's likely.

That's the point where we have to just agree to disagree. We have no rapport. I have no reason to trust your judgment, and neither do you mine.

[theptip]

I agree to disagree.

However I do feel a lot of this comes down to facts about the world now, eg whether Claude Opus is doing anything interesting, which are in principle places where you could provide some evidence or ideas, along the lines of the detail that I gave you.

My read so far is you are just saying “maybe it fizzles out” which is not going to persuade anyone who disagrees. Sure, “maybe”, especially if you don’t put probabilities on anything; that statement is not falsifiable.

> The problem with talking likelihood is that it's an interpretation game

I am open to updating my model in response to a causal argument, if you care to give more detail. I view likelihoods as the only way to make these sorts of conversations concrete enough that anyone could hope to update each other’s model.

[datatrashfire]

i feel a lot of people in tech have this incuriously deterministic attitude about llms right now… previous <expensive capital project> revolutionized the world, therefore llms will! despite there really nothing to show for it so far other than writing rote code is a bit easier and still requires active baby sitting by someone who knows what they are doing

[senordevnyc]

They’re already far more useful than that, and I suspect harness engineering alone could add another OOM of productivity, without any underlying change in the models available today.