[throw45633]

I’ve seen a lot of sci-fi where AI is some type of multigenerational entity that guides over humanity.

It’ll be interesting to see if individual families start to have their own AI that contains generational knowledge. Like taking ancestor worship to the new age, where instead of food offerings, you are offering more RAM and storage.

[zbentley]

I guess, but like ... long context/context rot/contextual memory retrieval are still very unsolved problems. If an AI's getting input from multiple family members for years, I have a lot of trouble believing that current LLM technology will ever be able to synthesize ancient information into current conversations.

I think that's a structural defect in AI, not one of those "will be improved by the next batch of models/hardware" things. The distant-memory systems that do exist are fundamentally modeled on topic-based/feature-based retrieval. Assistant-type family AIs will probably work OK with that ("what foods do I hate" is probably reliably retrievable), but interpersonal relationships seem to be very different: rather than retrieving based on feature/fact proximity, a conversation in a long relationship has a very gestalt-ish behavior in that it's informed by lots and lots of distant memories at once. That sounds more like actual training, rather than context/memory/post-training, to me, and current AIs are not set up for that.