I replied elsewhere in this thread largely agreeing with your perspective. That felt like a disservice to you, so I deleted it. Here's my positive take: Often

I replied elsewhere in this thread largely agreeing with your perspective. That felt like a disservice to you, so I deleted it. Here's my positive take: Often times in computer science we come up with partial solutions wherein we can't quite conquer the fundamental limitations of that solution. We get to 95 or 98%, but that remaining few percentage points that would make all the difference never gets there. I think LLMs may be fundamentally subject to the same dynamic, and despite the fact they can be chained or composed, that dynamic may nevertheless buy us a significant amount of time. The hype surrounding LLMs right now will ensure over-investment in that particular path, increasing the chances that we end up hitting some type of AI winter again. Yeah, the world will change (and it already has), but maybe there's a fundamental limitation there that prevents a proper superintelligence emerging via way of just chaining these things together. I don't have as high hopes for a societal chaos-style scenario, but I think we can weather that one. Trust infrastructure will emerge to combat the chaos. The worst case scenario is that LLMs are indeed missing some fundamental piece required to think in the traditional sense, yet nevertheless constitute a superintelligent tool AI scenario—a set of magic numbers—that pose an existential risk. If that's the case, there exist innumerable ways to fuck with that. States and corporations have more power than most people realize, and in short order we may find out just how quickly the ability to use a GPU or the internet is a privilege. While OpenAI blazing ahead is dangerous, what with Anthropic vying to eclipse current GPT-4 scales in response—it may actually pan out to be the best course of action insofar that it wakes up governments to the problem early enough before things get immediately dangerous on an existential level. --- As for your boy, you already know this—but you need to believe for his sake and your sake that it's all going to be OK, because it actually might be, and that's reason enough to press forward. No sense in wasting the present fretting about the future when it's largely outside of your control; it's a recipe for unhappiness and despair. Focus on the things within your scope that you have control over. Enjoy the present and indulge in hope. Not everything can be rationally quantified or predicted.