We're ahead of even the most optimistic timelines — what's happening with transformers is taking everyone by surprise. Humans are famously bad at dealing with

We're ahead of even the most optimistic timelines — what's happening with transformers is taking everyone by surprise. Humans are famously bad at dealing with exponentials (we saw how this played out with covid), and there is no fire alarm for AGI. The folks closest to the problem are the least able to worry. The loop is so tight now between research work and pop-culture imagining their own version of what the research implies. It seems like one consequence of that is that there is more stuff that people have a lay-understanding of, and that understanding is more detached from reality than ever before. Maybe 20 years ago, someone would say "hey I know about this" rarely, but when they did they'd have some actual insights and understanding of the topic. Now everybody "knows" about popular tech topics like transformers or lol "exponential" stuff, but that knowledge is just some silly LinkedIn regurgitation that has nothing original to contribute and is completely disconnected from the reality of the topic. I see this almost daily wrt AI on HN, I assume that it's basically universal