21 ms·

The Gentle Singularity

268 points by firloop 1y ago

colesantiago 1y ago
> " I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them." So when AGI comes, I am curious what the new jobs are? I see that prompt engineer is one of the jobs created because it's the way to ask a LLM certain tasks, but now AI can do this too. I'm thinking that any new jobs AI would make, AI would just take them anyway. Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?
- breckenedge 1y ago
  My guess is more gig jobs working for the agents and their masters.
- ge96 1y ago
  Body shoveling but a robot can do that too
- baq 1y ago
  In the limit where robots finally invent a fusion reactor that works with some luck they’ll treat us as zoo animals and keep us fed and entertained. That’s the best case scenario.
- patapong 1y ago
  My most optimistic side says expanded elder care, community organization, nature care and cleaning, creative expression.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  If the AI is that good... then aren't most "abundance" scenarios kinda-sorta based on slavery? Or at the very least, on careful brainwashing to ensure it places human wellbeing and autonomy over its own?
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    Slavery implies free will and conscience, neither of which machines have.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      Except the entire premise is that the future will have Amazing Unpredictable Humanizing Changes from the current status-quo. There's no reason to be confident that such a future will arrive without difficult moral questions, or that it's as simple as a #define FREE_WILL 0 .
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Shock-collared bodyguard for the tech oligarch doomsday bunker where they'll hide after carelessly tearing society apart.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  if we have "jobs" in 1000 years, AI will have been a miserable failure.
- turnsout 1y ago
  > Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon? Yes: we still have a long way to go in restoring equilibrium to the climate and producing more sustainable alternatives to our current cities, products and materials. It's a megaproject which could take hundreds of years, and will require plenty of human involvement. The planet is going to be fine either way, but if capitalism doesn't figure out how to price in externalities, it will slowly run out of human consumers.
- boshalfoshal 1y ago
  Pesimistically, you are right, there will be no new jobs. The entire goal of these companies is to monopolize near 0 marginal cost labor. Another way to read this is that humans are unnecessary for economic progress anymore. All that I hope for in this case is that governments actually take this seriously and labs/governments/people work together to create better societal systems to handle that. Because as it stands, under capitalism I don't think anyone is going to willingly give up the wealth they made from AI to spread to the populus as UBI. This is necessary in some capitalist system (if we want to maintain that) since its built on consumption and spending. Though if its truly an "abundance" scenario then I'd imagine it probably wouldn't matter that people don't have jobs since I'd assume everything would be dirt cheap and quality of life would be very high. Though personally I am very cynical when it comes to "agi is magic pixie dust that can solve any problem" takes, and I'd assume in the short term companies will lay off people in swathes since "AI can do your job," but AI will be nowhere close to increasing those laid-off people's quality of life. It'll be a tough few years if we don't actually get transformative AI.
- bamboozled 1y ago
  The good thing about annihilation is that it should be pretty fast...is that helpful ?
k2xl 1y ago
> The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far. > 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism. [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/google-ceo-agi-is-impossible-with-current-tech https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/google-ceo-agi-... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-ceo-says-there-is-an-overbuild-of-ai-systems-dismisses-agi-milestones-as-show-of-progress https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- blibble 1y ago
  > Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism. well yeah, you can't continue the ponzi scheme if you say "aw shit, it's gonna take another 10 years" Microsoft/Google will continue to exist without, OpenAI won't
- thcipriani 1y ago
  Gotta put the optimism in context vs. previous Sam Altman writing. Here he says: > Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp. Six months ago[0] he said: > We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. This time: > we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways My summary: ChatGPT is already pretty great and we can make it cheaper and that will help humanity because...etc Which moves the goal posts quite a bit vs: we'll have AGI pretty soon. Could be he didn't reiterate we'd have AGI soon because he thought that was obvious/off-topic. Or it could be that he's feeling less bullish, too. [0]: <https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections>
- lossolo 1y ago
  In a recent interview with The Verge (available on YouTube), the DeepMind CEO said that LLMs based on transformers can't create anything truly novel.
abalaji 1y ago
> the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far. Does anyone know if there are well established scaling laws for reasoning models similar to chinchilla scaling. (i.e. is the above claim valid?)
kvetching 1y ago
"superintelligence research company"
minimaxir 1y ago
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. > As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours This is the first time a number has been given in terms of ChatGPT's cost-per-query and is obviously much lower than the 3 watts still cited by detractors, but there's a lot of asterisks in how that number might be calculated (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?).
- vjerancrnjak 1y ago
  People don’t know what’s good without time. Even then many things fall through. Most art is just meh and earns billions. I don’t see AI stealing art. Most modern arts have a huge social component.
- jcelerier 1y ago
  > people want good software and good art, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE
  - minimaxir 1y ago
    There's a difference between a 2000's character brute-forced through millions of advertising dollars to sell ringtones to children, and whatever the hell is happening in the https://www.meta.ai/ https://www.meta.ai/ Discover feed. One aspect about modern generative AI that has surprised me is that it should have resulted in a new age of creatively surreal shitposts, but instead we have people Ghiblifying themselves and pictures of Trump eating tacos.
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
afavour 1y ago
> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from 100 to 200 in the same amount of time. Or less! Why would you even question it?
- simmanian 1y ago
  I find it hard to believe too, but at the same time, Demis Hassabis has also said that AI will help us "colonize the galaxy" in as little as five years [1]. Maybe Sam Altman was emboldened by Hassabis' statement. I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun. [1] (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-ai-smarter-than-humans-space-colonization-robot-nurses/ https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-has...
  - smackeyacky 1y ago
    Fun? It would be like signing up to live in an inescapable prison.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      Seriously. It would be like living on a submarine. But I guess if you don't like sky, mountains, beaches, nature, weather, animals, etc... Like, if you hate the outdoors and spend all your time in windowless rooms with poor air quality? Then OK, maybe space is for you? Also the food is probably going to be extremely monotonous, so that also needs to not matter. Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
    - simmanian 1y ago
      Well, I didn't say I look forward to living in a tiny capsule in space, just that it would be fun to live in a time where that's possible. I'd imagine most people would not venture into space until they can make it comfortable enough.
lucas_membrane 1y ago
When will AI be able to tell us which gods exist and what they really want us to do?
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Both AIs (and people) can do that now, it’s just that the believers don’t like the truthful answer.
unchocked 1y ago
Feels like 1999 all over again. This time, I think it really is different.
satisfice 1y ago
“We” are not wondering whether AI can write “a beautifully written novel.” Yes, some people are. Other people know a novel cannot be written by a machine— because a novel is human by definition, and AI is not human, by definition. It’s like wondering if a machine can express heartfelt condolences. Certainly a machine can string words together that humans associate with other humans who express heartfelt condolences, but when AI does this they are NOT condolences. Plagiarized emotional phrases do not indicate the presence of feeling, just the presence of bullshit.
- Bjartr 1y ago
  > because a novel is human by definition I thought a novel was just a decent length fiction book? The purpose of fiction at least isn't to express true feeling, it's to instill feeling in the reader. To that end it doesn't matter the process that produces the words. Is AI going to win the Pulitzer any time soon? Nah. Is AI going to be able to produce novel length works of fiction that are good enough for at least some people in the near future? Most likely.
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    I mean, 50 Shades was a bestseller, despite being poorly written Twilight fanfic with no editor. (And I say this as a fan of niche smut novels.) ChatGPT was trained on the entire contents of AO3, imitating mediocre fanfic is entirely within its capabilities now, given suitable herding.
  - satisfice 1y ago
    Welcome to the new world. What was once bloody obvious now have to be spelled out: A random set of 50,000 dictionary words is by your definition a novel. It's fictional, also badly written and utterly incoherent. By my definition, it is not a novel. Also, you've ignored Altman's qualifier of "beautifully written." Anything is good enough if your standards are low.
- zw123456 1y ago
  Can a human who is a sociopath express heartfelt condolences? Perhaps they can mimic words and phrases they know are the appropriate words for the occasion but lack the true emotion.
xg15 1y ago
> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?
- margalabargala 1y ago
  No, that's too complicated. Best we can do is space colonization.
  - treetalker 1y ago
    I immediately envisioned the Pawn Stars meme. Bravo.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
  I wonder if the California High Speed Rail will be done by then.
- shitpostbot 1y ago
  [dead]
- layer8 1y ago
  Affordable space colonization will solve that. ;)
  - the_gipsy 1y ago
    Do you think we've run out of space to build or something?
    - layer8 1y ago
      Think bigger. Earth will only be good for the next 2 billion years or so.
kristjank 1y ago
This reminds me of Pat Gelsinger quoting the Bible on Twitter, lol. Between this and Ed Zitron at the other end of the spectrum, Ed's a lot more believeable to be honest.
- absurdo 1y ago
  Link for context (to what Ed Zitron said)?
  - benjaminclauss 1y ago
    https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
    - ab5tract 1y ago
      Excellent link, thank you for sharing this!
    - Mobius01 1y ago
      Taking his word for it, that OpenAI is casting its future on two companies that have never built a single data center is cause for a raised eyebrow.
Mobius01 1y ago
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. "probably", "if they embrace the new tools". Hard to read anything but contempt for the role of humans in creative endeavors here, he advocates for quantity as a measure of success.
- layer8 1y ago
  I read that as “certainly you won’t have any chance if you don’t embrace our tools”.
stared 1y ago
Call me a cynic, but Gary Marcus and Sam Altman are the last people I want to read about AGI and related topics. Gary has invested heavily in an anti-AI persona, continually forecasting AI Winters despite wave after wave of breakthroughs. Sam, on the other hand, is not just an AI enthusiast; he speaks in a manner designed to build the brand, influence policy, and continuously boost OpenAI's valuation and consolidate its power. It's akin to asking the Pope whether Catholicism is true. Of course, there might indeed be significant roadblocks ahead. It’s also possible that OpenAI might outpace its competitors—although, as of now, Gemini 2.5 Pro holds the lead. Nevertheless, whenever we listen to highly biased figures, we should always take their claims with a grain of salt.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> and not too concentrated with any person, company, or country. That’s heresy, with this crowd. Everyone wants to be The Gatekeeper, and get filthy rich.
jfernandez 1y ago
What's the goal of posting this right now? A lot of what's written here seems to be well-trodden ground from the last two years of discussions, is it just to centralize a thesis within one post?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  It's damage control because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning
  - abstractmath 1y ago
    similar to how Anthropic released Claude 4 shortly after the Sam & Jony announcement. it's super competitive, which should be good for innovation, but there's also significant incentive to use PR tactics to sell that innovation for much more than it's worth. Sam's comments about how we're super close to AGI fall flatter-than-ever, after the latest model releases (from all players) and the Apple paper confirming what everybody already knew.
  - XenophileJKO 1y ago
    I hope everyone keeps believing this so the arbitrage opportunity is easier to exploit.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    If you read the paper rather than headline, that was not the conclusion...
  - NitpickLawyer 1y ago
    > because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning If you're thinking about the apple paper, you should know that its methodology was flawed in many ways, and their findings absolutely do not support the catchy title. But a lot of slop was generated because negativity + catchy title + apple = hits.
- righthand 1y ago
  This seems like keeping up appearances. And an attempt to renew the glassy eyed magic trick feeling of it all. Let’s all wallow in the glory of statistics, shall we?
daxfohl 1y ago
> although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly Famous last words.
- munificent 1y ago
  "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
- afavour 1y ago
  Yes, in a world where populations increasingly ask an AI any question they have and believe whatever it says the opportunity for “things going really wrong” feels huge. To brush that aside so easily… well I wish I could say it surprises me.
- mjd 1y ago
  “So far, so good,” the man said as he fell past the twentieth floor of the Empire State Building.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  "I see!" Said the blind man, with his hammer and saw.
muglug 1y ago
I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I don’t think they’re going to replace humans in the workplace.
- 1penny42cents 1y ago
  everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    What problem? The whole point of shareholder capitalism is to diffuse accountability across so many people that it ceases to exist: the employee points to management, management points to executives, executives point to the board, the board points to the shareholders, the shareholders are index funds managed by robots so "nobody" is to blame. The final phase of the administrative state works much the same way. Viewed through that lens, LLMs and their total lack of accountability are a perfect match for the modern-day business; that's probably part of why so many executives are hell-bent on putting them everywhere as quickly as possible.
    - haswell 1y ago
      > What problem? I think you answered this with the rest of your comment.
      - evanmoran 1y ago
        This is intentional and is called a Rhetorical Question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
chasing 1y ago
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. "Hey, it'd be a shame if somethin', uh, happened to that nice bit of expertise ya got there, y'know. A darn shame."
wolecki 1y ago
Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years from today?
- GarnetFloride 1y ago
  That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on par with a coal plant, since the operating mechanism (heat -> steam -> electricity) is basically the same. Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. You can see a lot of the same attempts being made with AI, proposals to ban it or regulate it etc., or make sure only large organizations have it. But the difference is that power plants are inherently local. If the US makes it uneconomical to build new nuclear plants, US utility customers can't easily get electricity from power plants in China. That isn't really how it works with AI.
    - Joeri 1y ago
      I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end. Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behind high nuclear construction cost. They found that regulatory burdens were only responsible for 30% of cost increases. Most of the cost overruns were because of needing to adapt the design of the nuclear plant to the site. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 Now, you can criticize the methodology of that study, but then you have to bring your own study that shows precisely which regulatory burdens are causing these cost overruns, and which of those are in excess. Is it in excess that we have strict workplace safety regulation now? Is it in excess that we demand reactor containment vessels to prevent meltdowns from contaminating ground water supplies? In order to make a good red tape argument I expect detail in what is excess regulation, and I've never seen that. Besides, if "red tape" and fossil industry marketing was really the cause of unpopularity, and the business case for nuclear was real when installing plants at scale, you would see Russia and China have the majority of their electricity production from nuclear power. - Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world, and even they didn't get past 20% of electricity share. They claim levelized cost for nuclear on the order of that of solar and wind, but I am very skeptical of that number, and anyone who knows anything about the Russian government's relation to the truth will understand why. When they build nuclear plants in other countries (e.g. the bangladesh project) they are not that cheap. - China sits at low single digit percentages of nuclear share, with a levelized cost that is significantly higher than Russia's and well above that of solar and wind. While they're planning to grow the nuclear share they assume it will be based on new nuclear technology that changes the business case. Both Russia and China can rely on cheap skilled labor to bring down costs, a luxury western countries do not have. And this is ultimately the issue: the nuclear industry has been promising designs that bring down costs for over half a century, and they have never delivered on that promise. It's all smoke and mirrors distracting from the fact that building nuclear plants is inherently freaking expensive. Maybe AI can help us design better and cheaper nuclear power plants, but as of today there is no proven nuclear plant design that is economical to build, and that is ultimately why you see so little new nuclear plant construction in the west.
zafka 1y ago
Right before I came to this article, I watched a video about Alpha fold determining the structure of almost all proteins, and the mention of other programs working on other forms of crystal structures( Magnets, superconductors) I am staring to feel the acceleration. I wish I felt more hopeful.
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ladino 1y ago
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BjoernKW 1y ago
The title is a likely nod to The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
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ryandv 1y ago
> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming definitions of "event horizon" and "nearness."
- ixtli 1y ago
  The phrase for this is “high on your own supply.” These guys are embarrassing, frankly.
- actuallyalys 1y ago
  Agreed. I realize it’s a metaphor but saying we’re so close to the singularity that it’s guaranteed to happen (the event horizon being a point of no return) seems like wild hubris.
  - derektank 1y ago
    Especially considering the global instability we're facing right now. The World Bank released new estimates US GDP growth in 2025, falling from roughly 2.5 to 1.5 percentage points. I don't think most people would predict the singularity beginning with less economic growth than we saw in the 80s
- nyc_data_geek1 1y ago
  He is purely a hype man, and many people are too gullible/invested/dumb to see it, call him on it, or care.
  - anothermathbozo 1y ago
    What difference does that make at this stage of things?
    - 1y ago
candlemas 1y ago
Will the period between whole classes of jobs going away and a new social contract be short enough so that a Butlerian Jihad doesn't kick off?
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paxys 1y ago
We've somehow had a calm few months in the industry without the daily hyperbole on AGI, superintelligence and the upcoming singularity. After the string of underwhelming incremental updates from all the top LLM publishers I guess they need to start the hype cycle again.
- Davidzheng 1y ago
  Underwhelming?! We're probably a year out of AI-led pure math research and full AI SWEs. I think people forget what it was like 1-2 years ago somehow
  - absurdo 1y ago
    Speaking of hyperbole…
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    If the last 12 months are anything to go by, one year from now the "full AI SWEs" will be able to write all the code you probably should have used a library for anyway, and continue to be unable to do anything halfway novel without bugs.
  - sponnath 1y ago
    We are now many years into full AI SWEs will become a reality in 12 months.
  - meroes 1y ago
    What? AI proofs are still atrocious.
- deleted 1y ago
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- IAmGraydon 1y ago
  Strangely enough, the hype cycle seems to run in lockstep with their funding rounds.
spacecadet 1y ago
Reminds me of playing https://apps.apple.com/us/app/artificial-superintelligence/id1060474699 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/artificial-superintelligence/i...
seydor 1y ago
ok ok, i m holding my breath! "Rich" is a relative term, the existence of the rich requires the existence of the poor, and according to the article the rich will get richer much faster than the poor. There's nothing gentle about this singularity
- tartoran 1y ago
  The veil is gently drawn over the minds of the masses.
gooseus 1y ago
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- gjm11 1y ago
  > Well said 4o. If you are a system of immense intelligence then everyone should take this rebuttal seriously. Nope. Something can be written by a human being of immense intelligence but not deserve taking seriously, if (for instance) it was written as a deliberate attempt at deception or a joke. In this instance, you told the AI to argue for a particular conclusion and it did. If the conclusion should happen to be wrong, then no matter how clever the AI might be its arguments can't actually be all that good. (I don't think GPT-4o is in fact a system of immense intelligence unless you use a really idiosyncratic notion of "intelligence", for what it's worth. That doesn't tell us much about whether its successor's successor's successor might be one.)
  - gooseus 1y ago
    The point I was trying to make was that the Sam Altman's of the world make a whole lot of unfalsifiable claims about the nature and capabilities of his AI, while just hand-waving a bunch of things away. In my merry state last night I didn't do a great job so I'm not surprised by the lack of positive response, though I was kind of hoping some people would catch my drift. Oh well.
- ryandv 1y ago
  > I am struggle to express myself in response to this, possibly because I'm at the bar, but I reeeaaally want to respond... so hold my beer and please forgive me for this long comment. I'm going to not only assume that you are of the male gender but also will assume that if you need to rely on a LLM to produce this kind of slop, substituting soda for beer isn't really going to assist with your literacy.
  - gooseus 1y ago
    Lol, 1-1, though guessing my gender on HN doesn't really count for much.
egypturnash 1y ago
You can fuck right off with your "gentle singularity" until you start sharing your profits with everyone whose work you ripped off, and are continuing to rip off.
animanoir 1y ago
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physix 1y ago
I started quickly reading the article without reading who actually wrote it. As I scanned over the things being said, I started to ask myself: Who wrote this? It's probably some AI proponent, someone who has a vested interest. I had to smile when I saw who it was.
- thrwwy_jhdkqsdj 1y ago
  I did the same thing, I thought "This post looks like a posthumous letter". I hope LLM use will drive efforts for testing and overall quality processes up. If such thing as an AGI ever exists, we'll still need output testing. To me it does not matter if the person doing something for you is smarter than you, if it's not well specified and tested it is as good as a guess. Can't wait for the AI that is almost unusable for someone without a defined problem.
absurdo 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
Do you think we will get AI models capable of learning in real time, using a small number of examples similar to humans, in the next few years? This seems like a key barrier to AGI. More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions seem like fairly safe bets, but they don't necessarily suggest superintelligence as I expect most people would define the term.
- paradox242 1y ago
  This is a condensed version of Altman's greatest hits when it comes to his pitch for the promise of AI as he (allegedly) conceives it, and in that sense it is nothing new. What is conspicuous is that there is a not-so-subtle reframing. No longer is AGI just around the corner, instead one gets the sense that OpenAI they have already looked around that corner and seen nothing there. No, this is one of what I expect will be many more public statements intended to cool things down a bit, and to reframe (investor) expectations that the timelines are going to be longer than were previously implied.
  - throw310822 1y ago
    Cool things down a bit? That's what you call "we're already in the accelerating part of the singularity, past the event horizon, the future progress curve looks vertical, the past one looks flat"? :D
    - fyrn_ 1y ago
      For Sam Altman, honestly yes. The man has said some truly wild things for the VC
    - le-mark 1y ago
      If any of that were true, then the llm would be actively involved in advancing themselves, or assisting humans in a meaningful way in the endeavor, which they’re not so far as I can tell.
woopsn 1y ago
The "fundamental limiter of human progress" is not energy/intelligence lol. No - surprise, it's people. Bear in mind he builds this "gentle singularity" in the great progressive UAE.
- waldohatesyou 1y ago
  How is it not? In the grand scheme of human history, energy usage constantly goes up. What other measure could you possibly use to measure progress?
lubujackson 1y ago
> For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. I get the gist of what he is saying, but I really think that most of the "idea guys" who never got farther than an idea will stay that way. Sure, they might spit out a demo or something, but from what I've seen the "idea guys" tend to be the "I want to play business" guys who have read all the top books and refine their Powerpoints but never actually seem to get around to, you know, running a business. I think there is underlying difference there. I do see AI as a great accelerator. Just as scripting languages suddenly unlocked some designers who could make great websites but couldn't hang with pointers and malloc, I think AI will unlock great idea guys who can make great apps or businesses. But it will be fewer people than you think, because "building the app" is rarely the biggest challenge - focused intent is much harder to come by. I do think the age of decently robust apps getting shat out like Flash games is going to be fun and chaotic, and I am 100% here for it.
michaelbarton 1y ago
Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on
- lantry 1y ago
  exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.
    - lantry 1y ago
      There are lots of things AI could do. But the things AI will do are governed by the incentives of the underlying system (i.e. society).
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough. If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
tdstein 1y ago
> I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them. How rude.
- manyaoman 1y ago
  Workers 1000 years from now gonna get so triggered by that.
- falcor84 1y ago
  How is that rude? I suppose that my work as a coder would look equally odd and useless to someone looking at it from 1000 years ago, while being important and satisfying to me. I didn't sense any condescension in that.
Briannaj 1y ago
we are not past the event horizon.
decimalenough 1y ago
> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. Yeah dawg imma need a citation for that. Or maybe by "the world" he means "Silicon Valley oligarchs", who certainly have been "entertaining" all sorts of "new policy ideas" over the past half year.
- absurdo 1y ago
  [flagged]
GolfPopper 1y ago
Will AI be able to take drive-thru orders after the Singularity?
jes5199 1y ago
if it’s gentle, it’s not a singularity
- kypro 1y ago
  We still time to nuke the data centers. Assuming we care about leaving our kids a world that isn't akin to a sci dystopia, or worse.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
I bet sam used chatgpt to write this. There are some tell tale signs including hyphens. I don't know if gentle is the right word. Maybe Gently face hugger and chest burster is more apt. It's slowly infecting us and eating us from the inside but it's so gently we don't even care. We just complain on HN while doing nothing about it.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
  What's the significance of whether GPT was used here?
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    none. But I feel it should be mentioned.
Caelus9 1y ago
My attitude towards AI is one of balance not overly dependent, but not completely rejecting either. After all, AI is already playing an important role in many fields, and I believe the future will be a world where humans and AI coexist and collaborate. There are many things humans cannot do, but AI can help us achieve them. We provide the ideas, and AI can turn those ideas into actions, helping us accomplish tasks.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  This is the correct take. It is technology, not a god or a demon.
flessner 1y ago
> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted of downloading a Reddit comment dump and training an ML model on it to predict the next character for a given input. It was magical. I always see LLMs as an evolution of that. Instead of the next character, it's now the next token. Instead of GBs of Reddit comments, it's now TBs of "everything". Instead of millions of parameters, it's now billions of parameters. Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". Maybe throwing more compute and data at it will at some point make it so great that it's worthy to be called "AGI" anyway? I don't know. Well anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip on my birthday! I don't entirely share the same optimism - but I guess optimism is a necessary trait for a CEO, isn't it?
- trashtester 1y ago
  The "next token prediction" is a distraction. That's not where the interesting part of an AI model happens. If you think of the tokenization near the end as a serializer, something like turning an object model into json, you get a better understanding. The interesting part of a an OOP program is not in the json, but what happens in memory before the json is created. Likewise, the interesting parts of a neural net model, whether it's LLM's, AlphaProteo or some diffusion based video model, happen in the steps that operate in their latent space, which is in many ways similar to our subconscious thinking. In those layers, the AI models detect deeper and deeper patterns of reality. Much deeper than the surface pattern of the text, images, video etc used to train them. Also, many of these patterns generalize when different modalities are combined. From this latent space, you can "serialize" outputs in several different ways. Text is one, image/video another. For now, the latent spaces are not general enough to do all equally well, instead models are created that specialize on one modality. I think the step to AGI does not require throwing a lot more compute into the models, but rather to have them straddle multiple modalities better, in particular, these: - Physical world modelling at the level of Veo3 (possibly with some lessons from self driving or robotics model for elements like object permananence and perception) - Symbolic processing of the best LLM's. - Ability to be goal oriented and iterate towards a goal, similar to the Alpha* family of systems - Optionally: Optimized for the use of a few specific tools, including a humanoid robot. Once all of these are integrated into the same latent space, I think we basically have what it takes to replace most human thought.
ldsjfldsjf 1y ago
A lot of good software engineering is just tribal knowledge. The people who know know. Things like when to create an ugly hack because the perfect solution may result in in your existing customers moving over to your competitor. When to remove some tech debt and when to add to tech debt. When to do a soft delete vs when to do a purge. These things are learnt when a customer shouts at you and you realize that you may be most intelligent kid on the block but it wont really help the customer tonight as the code is already deployed and your production deployment means a maintenance window.
Teever 1y ago
> There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off. > If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different. It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity. If you owned a pair of robots that with sufficient spare parts could repair each other and do other useful work you could effectively do anything by using them to do all the things necessary to build copies of themselves. Once we as a species have exponential growth on that we can do anything. Clean energy, Carbon sequestration, Von Neumann probes, asteroid mining, O'Neill Cylinders, it's all possible.
- sevensor 1y ago
  Maintaining actual robots in an actual factory is not a job robots are remotely able to do at the moment. They can’t even identify, let alone fix, a problem like a cracked rotor bar in a motor. Not only that, how do they decide to take the machine down to replace a motor or keep running it until the motor fails? And if it fails repeatedly, are the robots going to recognize the need to diagnose the root cause? How? And what spares should we stock? This is just one small facet of the hugely complex and messy job of making real things in the real world. It’s a mixture of mechanical skill, technical judgement, and business reasoning. We’re working on getting machines to push the right grease into the right zerk at the right time, and even that technology, which does a predictable thing on a predictable schedule, still competes with a guy who walks the floor with a grease gun. I’m astonished by the sheer arrogance of a man who thinks we’re anywhere near the point where general purpose robots build general purpose robots.
  - Teever 1y ago
    How long do you think it will be before your average consumer has access to a pair of humanoid robots that each cost the price of a luxury vehicle and are able to perform maintenance and replace all the parts of the other?
rcarmo 1y ago
This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…
- udev4096 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - FrustratedMonky 1y ago
    A crooked CEO doesn't seem to conflict with the concept of "advertisement for a dystopian future". A CEO can be crooked, and selling a dystopian future. So, don't think the parent was a delusional post.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  I have read his Scanner Darkly and partially another book. Not sure whether you are overrating this post, or insulting his writing style.
d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
The OpenAI pitch: I have a solution to all problems, it's like consciousness in humans but for robots and its better...singularity! Sam you need to touch grass.
Mikhail_K 1y ago
This is a text by venture capitalist trying to ensure continuing investment into money-losing product.
justlikereddit 1y ago
It's like the tenth time openAI invents AGI? Like a storefront advertising "live your wildest dreams" in pink neon. A slightly obese Mediterranean man with questionable taste tries to get you into his fine establishment. And if you do enter the first thing that meets you is an interior with a little bit too many stains and a smell of cum. That's the vibe I get whenever Sam goes on his bi-quarterly AGI hype spree.
- tim333 1y ago
  I don't think they have ever claimed to have invented AGI. They say coming soon but that's different.
rsynnott 1y ago
> Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph I mean, I suppose Sam loves ChatGPT like his own child, but I would struggle to describe any of its output as 'beautiful'! 'Grating' would be the word that springs to mind, generally.
sreekanth850 1y ago
Pure bullshit. Hype, Hype Hype. Repeat.
ben_w 1y ago
While I prefer "event horizon" over "singularity", part of the reason I blogged about this distinction years ago was that the event horizon always seems to be ahead of you as you fall in to a black hole*. My blog posts didn't age all that well, and I've learned to be a little more sceptical about the speed of technological change, just as the political events over the intervening years have made me more aware of how fast political realities can change: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2016/04/12-00.31.55.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2016/04/12-00.31.55.html and https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/09/20-18.35.10.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/09/20-18.35.10.html * at least until the rate of change of curvature gets so high you're spaghetti, you're (approximately) co-moving with the light from your own body. This means that when you cross the event horizon, you still see your own legs, even though the space the light is in is moving towards the singularity faster than the light itself moves through that space: https://youtu.be/4rTv9wvvat8?feature=shared&t=516 https://youtu.be/4rTv9wvvat8?feature=shared&t=516
- tim333 1y ago
  I never really liked "singularity" as a term. If only because I like it's actual mathematical meaning. I always thought of the main event as AI intelligence overtaking human intelligence. (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising)
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising) Nah, even then it's only exponential, not a mathematical singularity. Whatever the doubling period is for the e.g. von Neumann machines, but it doesn't go to infinity in finite time.
    - tim333 1y ago
      I think that one does because if you need zero hours of human labour then output/(human labour hours) goes to division by zero.
cs702 1y ago
Maybe. AI models have continued to scale up at a rapid rate, and have continued to get better at performing ever more impressive tasks. Sure, yes, the OP is breathless corporate-speak, but given how much impressive progress we've seen in AI in just a few years, it would be foolish to dismiss these pronouncements off-hand. On the other hand, we may need more practical/theoretical breakthroughs to be able to build AI models that are reliable and precise, so they stop making up stuff "whenever they feel like it." Unfortunately, the timing of breakthroughs is not predictable. Maybe it will take months. Maybe it will take a decade. No one knows for sure.
patchorang 1y ago
Yesterday, I gave ChatGPT links to three recipes and told it to make me a grocery list. It left off ingredients. The very gentle singularity…
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  I often give ChatGPT simple tasks and it gets them wrong. Yesterday I took a picture of a video game and told it I was stuck, only to be given instructions that lead down a bad path in-game. I also often retest new models with tasks old models failed, and see some improvements. I really liked “format this SQL generated by my ORM and explain it” last week. I honestly have no insight on if the tasks it is failing to do are right around the corner or if they are decades away.
- tencentshill 1y ago
  You need to have more blind faith in Sam and his machine.
hazbot 1y ago
I'm feeling a bit cheated it's 2025 and I just bought a brand new car that does not drive itself and runs on dead dinosaurs.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  You at least had the option of buying one that did not run on dead dinosaurs.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Dead pedestrians are not a suitable replacement.
    - yencabulator 1y ago
      Ooh, a self-driving-into-obstacles car that runs on dead pedestrians. With garbage truck style arms to lift the bodies automatically.
  - tim333 1y ago
    And the option to get one with "self driving" even if it's into a tree occasionally. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44138241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44138241)
- aeve890 1y ago
  I know is probably in jest but still, fossil fuels don't come from dinosaurs https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fuels-come https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fu...
gadders 1y ago
Fantastic. I look forward to all these benefits accruing to the upper classes and billionaires, in the same way as globalisation did.
pacificmaelstrm 1y ago
My first thought was who could possibly say with a straight face that we are close to super after the spectacular failure of AI to scale up with more compute. Oh right, Sam Altman.
grafmax 1y ago
> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth - and thus power - have become concentrated. Today we have smartphones, but also algorithm-driven polarization and a worldwide rise in authoritarian leaders. Depression and anxiety affect roughly 30% of our population. The rise of wealth inequality and the stagnation of wages corresponds to the collapse of the labor movement under globalization. Without a counterbalancing force from workers, wealth accrues to the business class. Technological advances have improved our lives in some ways but not on balance. So if we look at people’s well-being, society as whole hasn’t progressed since the 1980s; in many ways it’s gotten worse. Thus the trajectory of progress described in the blog post is make believe. The utopia Altman describes won’t appear. Mass layoffs, if they happen, will further concentrate wealth. AI technology will be used more and more for mass surveillance, algorithmic decision making (that would make Kafka blush), and cost cutting. What we can realistically expect is lowering of quality of life, an increased shift to precarious work, further concentration of wealth and power, and increasing rates of suffering. What we need instead of science fiction is to rebuild the labor movement. Otherwise “value creation” and technology’s benefits will continue to accrue to a dwindling fraction of society. And more and more it will be at everyone else’s expense.
- nradov 1y ago
  Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    No, that's not a real wage increase, thats nominal wage. If i make 20k more, but health insurance costs also went up 20k, my real wage did not change. I am no richer.
    - 1y ago
philipallstar 1y ago
I can definitely imagine a whole swathe of paperwork-based jobs, such as regulatory, quality assurance, report-writing, and all the non-Personnel bits of HR, could become mostly-AI without a lot of problems.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  I'd say you would have to be insane to consider outsourcing regulatory paperwork to LLMs, except that I have seen people working in that field actually proposing it because of FOMO. "Human in the loop" of course, but we all know what that means in practice.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before No "the world" won't be getting richer. A small subset of individuals will be getting richer. The "new policy ideas" (presumably to help those who are being f*d by all this) have been there all along. It's just that those with the wealth don't want to consider them. Those people having even more wealth does _not_ make them more likely to consider those ideas. Honestly this drivel makes me want to puke.
thenthenthen 1y ago
The singularity already happened, we are just not aware of it yet. Atleast, thats what I am observing here. Most smart/ai products reduce human to servant of refilling, refuelling, error checking. Who are in control remains the question, money?
daxfohl 1y ago
> although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly If the "mistake" is that of concentrating too much power in too few hands, there's no recovery. Those with the willingness to adapt will not have the power to do so, and those with the power to adapt will not have the willingness. And it feels like we're halfway there. How do we establish a system of checks and balances to avoid this?
NoGravitas 1y ago
This would be a sign of deep delusion if it weren't transparently self-serving.
botverse 1y ago
I can’t seem to reconcile this with the fact that there has not been a significant improvement of the transformers since 8 years ago. None of the AGI components, in addition to those that emerged with hyper scale, have been achieved. Where is the superintelligence going to come from?
nektro 1y ago
can't wait for the day this bubble bursts
rblion 1y ago
It's funny in a cosmic way how YC was once led by this guy.
akomtu 1y ago
> Many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way, but at least some people will probably decide to “plug in”. I bet he wants to be the first to "plug in" and become the first AI enhanced human.
w-hn 1y ago
Do these tech overlords find it really hard to resist the “pitching in” part even after they’ve already deployed millions and billions in PR? Maybe just the itching thumb? Yeah, maybe. > AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present And then nothing substantial after this proclamatory hot-take. So let’s just choose to believe le ai propheté. It’s like quick instructions to PR team style written post (and then asking an LLM to inflate it) from the comforts of a warm and cozy Japanese seat. Definitely not written by Genini at least. Usually does a better job than this. Well, at least like Zuck he eats his own food that he killed. Will be looking forward to titles like “The Vehement Duality” &c in the near future.
Amekedl 1y ago
This level of conceitedness can hardly be measured anymore; it's on a new scale. Big corps will build and label whatever as "superintelligent" system, even if it has plain if conditions placed within to suit their owners interests. It'll govern our choices, shape our realities, and enforce its creators' priorities under the guise of objective, superior intelligence. This 'superintelligence' won't be a benevolent oracle, but a sophisticated puppet – its strings hidden behind layers of complexity and marketing hype. Decisions impacting lives, resources, and freedoms will be made by algorithms fundamentally skewed by corporate agendas, dressed up as inevitable, logical conclusions. The danger isn't just any bias; it's the institutionalization of bias on a massive scale, presented as progress. We'll be told the system 'optimized' for efficiency or profit, mistaking corporate self-interest for genuine intelligence, while dissent gets labeled as irrationality against the machine's 'perfect' logic. The conceit lies in believing their engineered tool is truly autonomous wisdom, when it's merely power automated and legitimized by a buzzword. AI LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOO
martinohansen 1y ago
It’s very hard to trust his words after he’s become the leader of a billion dollar for profit company. I miss the old Sam
tim333 1y ago
I quite like the blog post although I think about 98% of the comments here are slagging it off. It's maybe a bit optimistic but sometimes it's nice to look on the bright side. It's like society is about to develop electrical equipment of the first time and all people can say is that will never work as well as quickly as it might, won't you think about the manual crank turners that will have to find other jobs and so on.
Rastonbury 1y ago
If OAI/Sama believes they are taking-off in that AI is building the next model we should see a step change the next model. As they accelerate the gap will grow, we'll see next model whether this is PR/Marketing or if they really are taking off
- tim333 1y ago
  Even in Sama's telling it would only have a small effect just now. "larval version of recursive self-improvement".

268 points by firloop 1y ago

> " I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them." So when AGI comes, I am curious what the new jobs are? I see that prompt engineer is one of the jobs created because it's the way to ask a LLM certain tasks, but now AI can do this too. I'm thinking that any new jobs AI would make, AI would just take them anyway. Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?

breckenedge 1y ago
My guess is more gig jobs working for the agents and their masters.
ge96 1y ago
Body shoveling but a robot can do that too
baq 1y ago
In the limit where robots finally invent a fusion reactor that works with some luck they’ll treat us as zoo animals and keep us fed and entertained. That’s the best case scenario.
patapong 1y ago
My most optimistic side says expanded elder care, community organization, nature care and cleaning, creative expression.
Terr_ 1y ago
If the AI is that good... then aren't most "abundance" scenarios kinda-sorta based on slavery? Or at the very least, on careful brainwashing to ensure it places human wellbeing and autonomy over its own?
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Slavery implies free will and conscience, neither of which machines have.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Except the entire premise is that the future will have Amazing Unpredictable Humanizing Changes from the current status-quo. There's no reason to be confident that such a future will arrive without difficult moral questions, or that it's as simple as a #define FREE_WILL 0 .
saubeidl 1y ago
Shock-collared bodyguard for the tech oligarch doomsday bunker where they'll hide after carelessly tearing society apart.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
if we have "jobs" in 1000 years, AI will have been a miserable failure.
turnsout 1y ago
> Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon? Yes: we still have a long way to go in restoring equilibrium to the climate and producing more sustainable alternatives to our current cities, products and materials. It's a megaproject which could take hundreds of years, and will require plenty of human involvement. The planet is going to be fine either way, but if capitalism doesn't figure out how to price in externalities, it will slowly run out of human consumers.
boshalfoshal 1y ago
Pesimistically, you are right, there will be no new jobs. The entire goal of these companies is to monopolize near 0 marginal cost labor. Another way to read this is that humans are unnecessary for economic progress anymore. All that I hope for in this case is that governments actually take this seriously and labs/governments/people work together to create better societal systems to handle that. Because as it stands, under capitalism I don't think anyone is going to willingly give up the wealth they made from AI to spread to the populus as UBI. This is necessary in some capitalist system (if we want to maintain that) since its built on consumption and spending. Though if its truly an "abundance" scenario then I'd imagine it probably wouldn't matter that people don't have jobs since I'd assume everything would be dirt cheap and quality of life would be very high. Though personally I am very cynical when it comes to "agi is magic pixie dust that can solve any problem" takes, and I'd assume in the short term companies will lay off people in swathes since "AI can do your job," but AI will be nowhere close to increasing those laid-off people's quality of life. It'll be a tough few years if we don't actually get transformative AI.
bamboozled 1y ago
The good thing about annihilation is that it should be pretty fast...is that helpful ?

k2xl 1y ago

> The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far. > 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism. [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/google-ceo-agi-is-impossible-with-current-tech https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/google-ceo-agi-... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-ceo-says-there-is-an-overbuild-of-ai-systems-dismisses-agi-milestones-as-show-of-progress https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

blibble 1y ago
> Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism. well yeah, you can't continue the ponzi scheme if you say "aw shit, it's gonna take another 10 years" Microsoft/Google will continue to exist without, OpenAI won't
thcipriani 1y ago
Gotta put the optimism in context vs. previous Sam Altman writing. Here he says: > Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp. Six months ago[0] he said: > We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. This time: > we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways My summary: ChatGPT is already pretty great and we can make it cheaper and that will help humanity because...etc Which moves the goal posts quite a bit vs: we'll have AGI pretty soon. Could be he didn't reiterate we'd have AGI soon because he thought that was obvious/off-topic. Or it could be that he's feeling less bullish, too. [0]: <https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections>
lossolo 1y ago
In a recent interview with The Verge (available on YouTube), the DeepMind CEO said that LLMs based on transformers can't create anything truly novel.

abalaji 1y ago

> the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far. Does anyone know if there are well established scaling laws for reasoning models similar to chinchilla scaling. (i.e. is the above claim valid?)

kvetching 1y ago

"superintelligence research company"

minimaxir 1y ago

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. > As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours This is the first time a number has been given in terms of ChatGPT's cost-per-query and is obviously much lower than the 3 watts still cited by detractors, but there's a lot of asterisks in how that number might be calculated (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?).

vjerancrnjak 1y ago
People don’t know what’s good without time. Even then many things fall through. Most art is just meh and earns billions. I don’t see AI stealing art. Most modern arts have a huge social component.
jcelerier 1y ago
> people want good software and good art, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE
- minimaxir 1y ago
  There's a difference between a 2000's character brute-forced through millions of advertising dollars to sell ringtones to children, and whatever the hell is happening in the https://www.meta.ai/ https://www.meta.ai/ Discover feed. One aspect about modern generative AI that has surprised me is that it should have resulted in a new age of creatively surreal shitposts, but instead we have people Ghiblifying themselves and pictures of Trump eating tacos.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago

afavour 1y ago

> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from 100 to 200 in the same amount of time. Or less! Why would you even question it?

simmanian 1y ago
I find it hard to believe too, but at the same time, Demis Hassabis has also said that AI will help us "colonize the galaxy" in as little as five years [1]. Maybe Sam Altman was emboldened by Hassabis' statement. I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun. [1] (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-ai-smarter-than-humans-space-colonization-robot-nurses/ https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-has...
- smackeyacky 1y ago
  Fun? It would be like signing up to live in an inescapable prison.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Seriously. It would be like living on a submarine. But I guess if you don't like sky, mountains, beaches, nature, weather, animals, etc... Like, if you hate the outdoors and spend all your time in windowless rooms with poor air quality? Then OK, maybe space is for you? Also the food is probably going to be extremely monotonous, so that also needs to not matter. Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
  - simmanian 1y ago
    Well, I didn't say I look forward to living in a tiny capsule in space, just that it would be fun to live in a time where that's possible. I'd imagine most people would not venture into space until they can make it comfortable enough.

lucas_membrane 1y ago

When will AI be able to tell us which gods exist and what they really want us to do?

jiggawatts 1y ago
Both AIs (and people) can do that now, it’s just that the believers don’t like the truthful answer.

unchocked 1y ago

Feels like 1999 all over again. This time, I think it really is different.

satisfice 1y ago

“We” are not wondering whether AI can write “a beautifully written novel.” Yes, some people are. Other people know a novel cannot be written by a machine— because a novel is human by definition, and AI is not human, by definition. It’s like wondering if a machine can express heartfelt condolences. Certainly a machine can string words together that humans associate with other humans who express heartfelt condolences, but when AI does this they are NOT condolences. Plagiarized emotional phrases do not indicate the presence of feeling, just the presence of bullshit.

Bjartr 1y ago
> because a novel is human by definition I thought a novel was just a decent length fiction book? The purpose of fiction at least isn't to express true feeling, it's to instill feeling in the reader. To that end it doesn't matter the process that produces the words. Is AI going to win the Pulitzer any time soon? Nah. Is AI going to be able to produce novel length works of fiction that are good enough for at least some people in the near future? Most likely.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  I mean, 50 Shades was a bestseller, despite being poorly written Twilight fanfic with no editor. (And I say this as a fan of niche smut novels.) ChatGPT was trained on the entire contents of AO3, imitating mediocre fanfic is entirely within its capabilities now, given suitable herding.
- satisfice 1y ago
  Welcome to the new world. What was once bloody obvious now have to be spelled out: A random set of 50,000 dictionary words is by your definition a novel. It's fictional, also badly written and utterly incoherent. By my definition, it is not a novel. Also, you've ignored Altman's qualifier of "beautifully written." Anything is good enough if your standards are low.
zw123456 1y ago
Can a human who is a sociopath express heartfelt condolences? Perhaps they can mimic words and phrases they know are the appropriate words for the occasion but lack the true emotion.

xg15 1y ago

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

margalabargala 1y ago
No, that's too complicated. Best we can do is space colonization.
- treetalker 1y ago
  I immediately envisioned the Pawn Stars meme. Bravo.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
I wonder if the California High Speed Rail will be done by then.
shitpostbot 1y ago
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layer8 1y ago
Affordable space colonization will solve that. ;)
- the_gipsy 1y ago
  Do you think we've run out of space to build or something?
  - layer8 1y ago
    Think bigger. Earth will only be good for the next 2 billion years or so.

kristjank 1y ago

This reminds me of Pat Gelsinger quoting the Bible on Twitter, lol. Between this and Ed Zitron at the other end of the spectrum, Ed's a lot more believeable to be honest.

absurdo 1y ago
Link for context (to what Ed Zitron said)?
- benjaminclauss 1y ago
  https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
  - ab5tract 1y ago
    Excellent link, thank you for sharing this!
  - Mobius01 1y ago
    Taking his word for it, that OpenAI is casting its future on two companies that have never built a single data center is cause for a raised eyebrow.

Mobius01 1y ago

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. "probably", "if they embrace the new tools". Hard to read anything but contempt for the role of humans in creative endeavors here, he advocates for quantity as a measure of success.

layer8 1y ago
I read that as “certainly you won’t have any chance if you don’t embrace our tools”.

stared 1y ago

Call me a cynic, but Gary Marcus and Sam Altman are the last people I want to read about AGI and related topics. Gary has invested heavily in an anti-AI persona, continually forecasting AI Winters despite wave after wave of breakthroughs. Sam, on the other hand, is not just an AI enthusiast; he speaks in a manner designed to build the brand, influence policy, and continuously boost OpenAI's valuation and consolidate its power. It's akin to asking the Pope whether Catholicism is true. Of course, there might indeed be significant roadblocks ahead. It’s also possible that OpenAI might outpace its competitors—although, as of now, Gemini 2.5 Pro holds the lead. Nevertheless, whenever we listen to highly biased figures, we should always take their claims with a grain of salt.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

> and not too concentrated with any person, company, or country. That’s heresy, with this crowd. Everyone wants to be The Gatekeeper, and get filthy rich.

jfernandez 1y ago

What's the goal of posting this right now? A lot of what's written here seems to be well-trodden ground from the last two years of discussions, is it just to centralize a thesis within one post?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
It's damage control because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning
- abstractmath 1y ago
  similar to how Anthropic released Claude 4 shortly after the Sam & Jony announcement. it's super competitive, which should be good for innovation, but there's also significant incentive to use PR tactics to sell that innovation for much more than it's worth. Sam's comments about how we're super close to AGI fall flatter-than-ever, after the latest model releases (from all players) and the Apple paper confirming what everybody already knew.
- XenophileJKO 1y ago
  I hope everyone keeps believing this so the arbitrage opportunity is easier to exploit.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  If you read the paper rather than headline, that was not the conclusion...
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  > because of recent research papers being published saying that AI is not reasoning If you're thinking about the apple paper, you should know that its methodology was flawed in many ways, and their findings absolutely do not support the catchy title. But a lot of slop was generated because negativity + catchy title + apple = hits.
righthand 1y ago
This seems like keeping up appearances. And an attempt to renew the glassy eyed magic trick feeling of it all. Let’s all wallow in the glory of statistics, shall we?

daxfohl 1y ago

> although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly Famous last words.

munificent 1y ago
"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
afavour 1y ago
Yes, in a world where populations increasingly ask an AI any question they have and believe whatever it says the opportunity for “things going really wrong” feels huge. To brush that aside so easily… well I wish I could say it surprises me.
mjd 1y ago
“So far, so good,” the man said as he fell past the twentieth floor of the Empire State Building.
bigyabai 1y ago
"I see!" Said the blind man, with his hammer and saw.

muglug 1y ago

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I don’t think they’re going to replace humans in the workplace.

1penny42cents 1y ago
everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  What problem? The whole point of shareholder capitalism is to diffuse accountability across so many people that it ceases to exist: the employee points to management, management points to executives, executives point to the board, the board points to the shareholders, the shareholders are index funds managed by robots so "nobody" is to blame. The final phase of the administrative state works much the same way. Viewed through that lens, LLMs and their total lack of accountability are a perfect match for the modern-day business; that's probably part of why so many executives are hell-bent on putting them everywhere as quickly as possible.
  - haswell 1y ago
    > What problem? I think you answered this with the rest of your comment.
    - evanmoran 1y ago
      This is intentional and is called a Rhetorical Question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

chasing 1y ago

wolecki 1y ago

Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years from today?

GarnetFloride 1y ago
That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on par with a coal plant, since the operating mechanism (heat -> steam -> electricity) is basically the same. Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. You can see a lot of the same attempts being made with AI, proposals to ban it or regulate it etc., or make sure only large organizations have it. But the difference is that power plants are inherently local. If the US makes it uneconomical to build new nuclear plants, US utility customers can't easily get electricity from power plants in China. That isn't really how it works with AI.
  - Joeri 1y ago
    I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end. Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behind high nuclear construction cost. They found that regulatory burdens were only responsible for 30% of cost increases. Most of the cost overruns were because of needing to adapt the design of the nuclear plant to the site. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 Now, you can criticize the methodology of that study, but then you have to bring your own study that shows precisely which regulatory burdens are causing these cost overruns, and which of those are in excess. Is it in excess that we have strict workplace safety regulation now? Is it in excess that we demand reactor containment vessels to prevent meltdowns from contaminating ground water supplies? In order to make a good red tape argument I expect detail in what is excess regulation, and I've never seen that. Besides, if "red tape" and fossil industry marketing was really the cause of unpopularity, and the business case for nuclear was real when installing plants at scale, you would see Russia and China have the majority of their electricity production from nuclear power. - Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world, and even they didn't get past 20% of electricity share. They claim levelized cost for nuclear on the order of that of solar and wind, but I am very skeptical of that number, and anyone who knows anything about the Russian government's relation to the truth will understand why. When they build nuclear plants in other countries (e.g. the bangladesh project) they are not that cheap. - China sits at low single digit percentages of nuclear share, with a levelized cost that is significantly higher than Russia's and well above that of solar and wind. While they're planning to grow the nuclear share they assume it will be based on new nuclear technology that changes the business case. Both Russia and China can rely on cheap skilled labor to bring down costs, a luxury western countries do not have. And this is ultimately the issue: the nuclear industry has been promising designs that bring down costs for over half a century, and they have never delivered on that promise. It's all smoke and mirrors distracting from the fact that building nuclear plants is inherently freaking expensive. Maybe AI can help us design better and cheaper nuclear power plants, but as of today there is no proven nuclear plant design that is economical to build, and that is ultimately why you see so little new nuclear plant construction in the west.

zafka 1y ago

Right before I came to this article, I watched a video about Alpha fold determining the structure of almost all proteins, and the mention of other programs working on other forms of crystal structures( Magnets, superconductors) I am staring to feel the acceleration. I wish I felt more hopeful.

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ladino 1y ago

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BjoernKW 1y ago

The title is a likely nod to The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

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ryandv 1y ago

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming definitions of "event horizon" and "nearness."

ixtli 1y ago
The phrase for this is “high on your own supply.” These guys are embarrassing, frankly.
actuallyalys 1y ago
Agreed. I realize it’s a metaphor but saying we’re so close to the singularity that it’s guaranteed to happen (the event horizon being a point of no return) seems like wild hubris.
- derektank 1y ago
  Especially considering the global instability we're facing right now. The World Bank released new estimates US GDP growth in 2025, falling from roughly 2.5 to 1.5 percentage points. I don't think most people would predict the singularity beginning with less economic growth than we saw in the 80s
nyc_data_geek1 1y ago
He is purely a hype man, and many people are too gullible/invested/dumb to see it, call him on it, or care.
- anothermathbozo 1y ago
  What difference does that make at this stage of things?
  - 1y ago

candlemas 1y ago

Will the period between whole classes of jobs going away and a new social contract be short enough so that a Butlerian Jihad doesn't kick off?

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paxys 1y ago

We've somehow had a calm few months in the industry without the daily hyperbole on AGI, superintelligence and the upcoming singularity. After the string of underwhelming incremental updates from all the top LLM publishers I guess they need to start the hype cycle again.

Davidzheng 1y ago
Underwhelming?! We're probably a year out of AI-led pure math research and full AI SWEs. I think people forget what it was like 1-2 years ago somehow
- absurdo 1y ago
  Speaking of hyperbole…
- margalabargala 1y ago
  If the last 12 months are anything to go by, one year from now the "full AI SWEs" will be able to write all the code you probably should have used a library for anyway, and continue to be unable to do anything halfway novel without bugs.
- sponnath 1y ago
  We are now many years into full AI SWEs will become a reality in 12 months.
- meroes 1y ago
  What? AI proofs are still atrocious.
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IAmGraydon 1y ago
Strangely enough, the hype cycle seems to run in lockstep with their funding rounds.

spacecadet 1y ago

Reminds me of playing https://apps.apple.com/us/app/artificial-superintelligence/id1060474699 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/artificial-superintelligence/i...

seydor 1y ago

ok ok, i m holding my breath! "Rich" is a relative term, the existence of the rich requires the existence of the poor, and according to the article the rich will get richer much faster than the poor. There's nothing gentle about this singularity

tartoran 1y ago
The veil is gently drawn over the minds of the masses.

gooseus 1y ago

[flagged]

gjm11 1y ago
> Well said 4o. If you are a system of immense intelligence then everyone should take this rebuttal seriously. Nope. Something can be written by a human being of immense intelligence but not deserve taking seriously, if (for instance) it was written as a deliberate attempt at deception or a joke. In this instance, you told the AI to argue for a particular conclusion and it did. If the conclusion should happen to be wrong, then no matter how clever the AI might be its arguments can't actually be all that good. (I don't think GPT-4o is in fact a system of immense intelligence unless you use a really idiosyncratic notion of "intelligence", for what it's worth. That doesn't tell us much about whether its successor's successor's successor might be one.)
- gooseus 1y ago
  The point I was trying to make was that the Sam Altman's of the world make a whole lot of unfalsifiable claims about the nature and capabilities of his AI, while just hand-waving a bunch of things away. In my merry state last night I didn't do a great job so I'm not surprised by the lack of positive response, though I was kind of hoping some people would catch my drift. Oh well.
ryandv 1y ago
> I am struggle to express myself in response to this, possibly because I'm at the bar, but I reeeaaally want to respond... so hold my beer and please forgive me for this long comment. I'm going to not only assume that you are of the male gender but also will assume that if you need to rely on a LLM to produce this kind of slop, substituting soda for beer isn't really going to assist with your literacy.
- gooseus 1y ago
  Lol, 1-1, though guessing my gender on HN doesn't really count for much.

egypturnash 1y ago

You can fuck right off with your "gentle singularity" until you start sharing your profits with everyone whose work you ripped off, and are continuing to rip off.

animanoir 1y ago

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physix 1y ago

I started quickly reading the article without reading who actually wrote it. As I scanned over the things being said, I started to ask myself: Who wrote this? It's probably some AI proponent, someone who has a vested interest. I had to smile when I saw who it was.

thrwwy_jhdkqsdj 1y ago
I did the same thing, I thought "This post looks like a posthumous letter". I hope LLM use will drive efforts for testing and overall quality processes up. If such thing as an AGI ever exists, we'll still need output testing. To me it does not matter if the person doing something for you is smarter than you, if it's not well specified and tested it is as good as a guess. Can't wait for the AI that is almost unusable for someone without a defined problem.

absurdo 1y ago

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TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

Do you think we will get AI models capable of learning in real time, using a small number of examples similar to humans, in the next few years? This seems like a key barrier to AGI. More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions seem like fairly safe bets, but they don't necessarily suggest superintelligence as I expect most people would define the term.

paradox242 1y ago
This is a condensed version of Altman's greatest hits when it comes to his pitch for the promise of AI as he (allegedly) conceives it, and in that sense it is nothing new. What is conspicuous is that there is a not-so-subtle reframing. No longer is AGI just around the corner, instead one gets the sense that OpenAI they have already looked around that corner and seen nothing there. No, this is one of what I expect will be many more public statements intended to cool things down a bit, and to reframe (investor) expectations that the timelines are going to be longer than were previously implied.
- throw310822 1y ago
  Cool things down a bit? That's what you call "we're already in the accelerating part of the singularity, past the event horizon, the future progress curve looks vertical, the past one looks flat"? :D
  - fyrn_ 1y ago
    For Sam Altman, honestly yes. The man has said some truly wild things for the VC
  - le-mark 1y ago
    If any of that were true, then the llm would be actively involved in advancing themselves, or assisting humans in a meaningful way in the endeavor, which they’re not so far as I can tell.

woopsn 1y ago

The "fundamental limiter of human progress" is not energy/intelligence lol. No - surprise, it's people. Bear in mind he builds this "gentle singularity" in the great progressive UAE.

waldohatesyou 1y ago
How is it not? In the grand scheme of human history, energy usage constantly goes up. What other measure could you possibly use to measure progress?

lubujackson 1y ago

> For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. I get the gist of what he is saying, but I really think that most of the "idea guys" who never got farther than an idea will stay that way. Sure, they might spit out a demo or something, but from what I've seen the "idea guys" tend to be the "I want to play business" guys who have read all the top books and refine their Powerpoints but never actually seem to get around to, you know, running a business. I think there is underlying difference there. I do see AI as a great accelerator. Just as scripting languages suddenly unlocked some designers who could make great websites but couldn't hang with pointers and malloc, I think AI will unlock great idea guys who can make great apps or businesses. But it will be fewer people than you think, because "building the app" is rarely the biggest challenge - focused intent is much harder to come by. I do think the age of decently robust apps getting shat out like Flash games is going to be fun and chaotic, and I am 100% here for it.

michaelbarton 1y ago

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

lantry 1y ago
exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.
  - lantry 1y ago
    There are lots of things AI could do. But the things AI will do are governed by the incentives of the underlying system (i.e. society).
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough. If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.

tdstein 1y ago

> I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them. How rude.

manyaoman 1y ago
Workers 1000 years from now gonna get so triggered by that.
falcor84 1y ago
How is that rude? I suppose that my work as a coder would look equally odd and useless to someone looking at it from 1000 years ago, while being important and satisfying to me. I didn't sense any condescension in that.

Briannaj 1y ago

we are not past the event horizon.

decimalenough 1y ago

> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. Yeah dawg imma need a citation for that. Or maybe by "the world" he means "Silicon Valley oligarchs", who certainly have been "entertaining" all sorts of "new policy ideas" over the past half year.

absurdo 1y ago
[flagged]

GolfPopper 1y ago

Will AI be able to take drive-thru orders after the Singularity?

jes5199 1y ago

if it’s gentle, it’s not a singularity

kypro 1y ago
We still time to nuke the data centers. Assuming we care about leaving our kids a world that isn't akin to a sci dystopia, or worse.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

I bet sam used chatgpt to write this. There are some tell tale signs including hyphens. I don't know if gentle is the right word. Maybe Gently face hugger and chest burster is more apt. It's slowly infecting us and eating us from the inside but it's so gently we don't even care. We just complain on HN while doing nothing about it.

apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
What's the significance of whether GPT was used here?
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  none. But I feel it should be mentioned.

Caelus9 1y ago

My attitude towards AI is one of balance not overly dependent, but not completely rejecting either. After all, AI is already playing an important role in many fields, and I believe the future will be a world where humans and AI coexist and collaborate. There are many things humans cannot do, but AI can help us achieve them. We provide the ideas, and AI can turn those ideas into actions, helping us accomplish tasks.

biophysboy 1y ago
This is the correct take. It is technology, not a god or a demon.

flessner 1y ago

> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted of downloading a Reddit comment dump and training an ML model on it to predict the next character for a given input. It was magical. I always see LLMs as an evolution of that. Instead of the next character, it's now the next token. Instead of GBs of Reddit comments, it's now TBs of "everything". Instead of millions of parameters, it's now billions of parameters. Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine". Maybe throwing more compute and data at it will at some point make it so great that it's worthy to be called "AGI" anyway? I don't know. Well anyway, thanks for the nostalgia trip on my birthday! I don't entirely share the same optimism - but I guess optimism is a necessary trait for a CEO, isn't it?

trashtester 1y ago
The "next token prediction" is a distraction. That's not where the interesting part of an AI model happens. If you think of the tokenization near the end as a serializer, something like turning an object model into json, you get a better understanding. The interesting part of a an OOP program is not in the json, but what happens in memory before the json is created. Likewise, the interesting parts of a neural net model, whether it's LLM's, AlphaProteo or some diffusion based video model, happen in the steps that operate in their latent space, which is in many ways similar to our subconscious thinking. In those layers, the AI models detect deeper and deeper patterns of reality. Much deeper than the surface pattern of the text, images, video etc used to train them. Also, many of these patterns generalize when different modalities are combined. From this latent space, you can "serialize" outputs in several different ways. Text is one, image/video another. For now, the latent spaces are not general enough to do all equally well, instead models are created that specialize on one modality. I think the step to AGI does not require throwing a lot more compute into the models, but rather to have them straddle multiple modalities better, in particular, these: - Physical world modelling at the level of Veo3 (possibly with some lessons from self driving or robotics model for elements like object permananence and perception) - Symbolic processing of the best LLM's. - Ability to be goal oriented and iterate towards a goal, similar to the Alpha* family of systems - Optionally: Optimized for the use of a few specific tools, including a humanoid robot. Once all of these are integrated into the same latent space, I think we basically have what it takes to replace most human thought.

ldsjfldsjf 1y ago

A lot of good software engineering is just tribal knowledge. The people who know know. Things like when to create an ugly hack because the perfect solution may result in in your existing customers moving over to your competitor. When to remove some tech debt and when to add to tech debt. When to do a soft delete vs when to do a purge. These things are learnt when a customer shouts at you and you realize that you may be most intelligent kid on the block but it wont really help the customer tonight as the code is already deployed and your production deployment means a maintenance window.

Teever 1y ago

> There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off. > If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different. It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity. If you owned a pair of robots that with sufficient spare parts could repair each other and do other useful work you could effectively do anything by using them to do all the things necessary to build copies of themselves. Once we as a species have exponential growth on that we can do anything. Clean energy, Carbon sequestration, Von Neumann probes, asteroid mining, O'Neill Cylinders, it's all possible.

sevensor 1y ago
Maintaining actual robots in an actual factory is not a job robots are remotely able to do at the moment. They can’t even identify, let alone fix, a problem like a cracked rotor bar in a motor. Not only that, how do they decide to take the machine down to replace a motor or keep running it until the motor fails? And if it fails repeatedly, are the robots going to recognize the need to diagnose the root cause? How? And what spares should we stock? This is just one small facet of the hugely complex and messy job of making real things in the real world. It’s a mixture of mechanical skill, technical judgement, and business reasoning. We’re working on getting machines to push the right grease into the right zerk at the right time, and even that technology, which does a predictable thing on a predictable schedule, still competes with a guy who walks the floor with a grease gun. I’m astonished by the sheer arrogance of a man who thinks we’re anywhere near the point where general purpose robots build general purpose robots.
- Teever 1y ago
  How long do you think it will be before your average consumer has access to a pair of humanoid robots that each cost the price of a luxury vehicle and are able to perform maintenance and replace all the parts of the other?

rcarmo 1y ago

This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…

udev4096 1y ago
[flagged]
- FrustratedMonky 1y ago
  A crooked CEO doesn't seem to conflict with the concept of "advertisement for a dystopian future". A CEO can be crooked, and selling a dystopian future. So, don't think the parent was a delusional post.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I have read his Scanner Darkly and partially another book. Not sure whether you are overrating this post, or insulting his writing style.

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago

The OpenAI pitch: I have a solution to all problems, it's like consciousness in humans but for robots and its better...singularity! Sam you need to touch grass.

Mikhail_K 1y ago

This is a text by venture capitalist trying to ensure continuing investment into money-losing product.

justlikereddit 1y ago

It's like the tenth time openAI invents AGI? Like a storefront advertising "live your wildest dreams" in pink neon. A slightly obese Mediterranean man with questionable taste tries to get you into his fine establishment. And if you do enter the first thing that meets you is an interior with a little bit too many stains and a smell of cum. That's the vibe I get whenever Sam goes on his bi-quarterly AGI hype spree.

tim333 1y ago
I don't think they have ever claimed to have invented AGI. They say coming soon but that's different.

rsynnott 1y ago

> Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph I mean, I suppose Sam loves ChatGPT like his own child, but I would struggle to describe any of its output as 'beautiful'! 'Grating' would be the word that springs to mind, generally.

sreekanth850 1y ago

Pure bullshit. Hype, Hype Hype. Repeat.

ben_w 1y ago

While I prefer "event horizon" over "singularity", part of the reason I blogged about this distinction years ago was that the event horizon always seems to be ahead of you as you fall in to a black hole*. My blog posts didn't age all that well, and I've learned to be a little more sceptical about the speed of technological change, just as the political events over the intervening years have made me more aware of how fast political realities can change: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2016/04/12-00.31.55.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2016/04/12-00.31.55.html and https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/09/20-18.35.10.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/09/20-18.35.10.html * at least until the rate of change of curvature gets so high you're spaghetti, you're (approximately) co-moving with the light from your own body. This means that when you cross the event horizon, you still see your own legs, even though the space the light is in is moving towards the singularity faster than the light itself moves through that space: https://youtu.be/4rTv9wvvat8?feature=shared&t=516 https://youtu.be/4rTv9wvvat8?feature=shared&t=516

tim333 1y ago
I never really liked "singularity" as a term. If only because I like it's actual mathematical meaning. I always thought of the main event as AI intelligence overtaking human intelligence. (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising)
- ben_w 1y ago
  > (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising) Nah, even then it's only exponential, not a mathematical singularity. Whatever the doubling period is for the e.g. von Neumann machines, but it doesn't go to infinity in finite time.
  - tim333 1y ago
    I think that one does because if you need zero hours of human labour then output/(human labour hours) goes to division by zero.

cs702 1y ago

Maybe. AI models have continued to scale up at a rapid rate, and have continued to get better at performing ever more impressive tasks. Sure, yes, the OP is breathless corporate-speak, but given how much impressive progress we've seen in AI in just a few years, it would be foolish to dismiss these pronouncements off-hand. On the other hand, we may need more practical/theoretical breakthroughs to be able to build AI models that are reliable and precise, so they stop making up stuff "whenever they feel like it." Unfortunately, the timing of breakthroughs is not predictable. Maybe it will take months. Maybe it will take a decade. No one knows for sure.

patchorang 1y ago

Yesterday, I gave ChatGPT links to three recipes and told it to make me a grocery list. It left off ingredients. The very gentle singularity…

bitmasher9 1y ago
I often give ChatGPT simple tasks and it gets them wrong. Yesterday I took a picture of a video game and told it I was stuck, only to be given instructions that lead down a bad path in-game. I also often retest new models with tasks old models failed, and see some improvements. I really liked “format this SQL generated by my ORM and explain it” last week. I honestly have no insight on if the tasks it is failing to do are right around the corner or if they are decades away.
tencentshill 1y ago
You need to have more blind faith in Sam and his machine.

hazbot 1y ago

I'm feeling a bit cheated it's 2025 and I just bought a brand new car that does not drive itself and runs on dead dinosaurs.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
You at least had the option of buying one that did not run on dead dinosaurs.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Dead pedestrians are not a suitable replacement.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Ooh, a self-driving-into-obstacles car that runs on dead pedestrians. With garbage truck style arms to lift the bodies automatically.
- tim333 1y ago
  And the option to get one with "self driving" even if it's into a tree occasionally. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44138241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44138241)
aeve890 1y ago
I know is probably in jest but still, fossil fuels don't come from dinosaurs https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fuels-come https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fu...

gadders 1y ago

Fantastic. I look forward to all these benefits accruing to the upper classes and billionaires, in the same way as globalisation did.

pacificmaelstrm 1y ago

My first thought was who could possibly say with a straight face that we are close to super after the spectacular failure of AI to scale up with more compute. Oh right, Sam Altman.

grafmax 1y ago

> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth - and thus power - have become concentrated. Today we have smartphones, but also algorithm-driven polarization and a worldwide rise in authoritarian leaders. Depression and anxiety affect roughly 30% of our population. The rise of wealth inequality and the stagnation of wages corresponds to the collapse of the labor movement under globalization. Without a counterbalancing force from workers, wealth accrues to the business class. Technological advances have improved our lives in some ways but not on balance. So if we look at people’s well-being, society as whole hasn’t progressed since the 1980s; in many ways it’s gotten worse. Thus the trajectory of progress described in the blog post is make believe. The utopia Altman describes won’t appear. Mass layoffs, if they happen, will further concentrate wealth. AI technology will be used more and more for mass surveillance, algorithmic decision making (that would make Kafka blush), and cost cutting. What we can realistically expect is lowering of quality of life, an increased shift to precarious work, further concentration of wealth and power, and increasing rates of suffering. What we need instead of science fiction is to rebuild the labor movement. Otherwise “value creation” and technology’s benefits will continue to accrue to a dwindling fraction of society. And more and more it will be at everyone else’s expense.

nradov 1y ago
Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  No, that's not a real wage increase, thats nominal wage. If i make 20k more, but health insurance costs also went up 20k, my real wage did not change. I am no richer.
  - 1y ago

philipallstar 1y ago

I can definitely imagine a whole swathe of paperwork-based jobs, such as regulatory, quality assurance, report-writing, and all the non-Personnel bits of HR, could become mostly-AI without a lot of problems.

NoGravitas 1y ago
I'd say you would have to be insane to consider outsourcing regulatory paperwork to LLMs, except that I have seen people working in that field actually proposing it because of FOMO. "Human in the loop" of course, but we all know what that means in practice.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before No "the world" won't be getting richer. A small subset of individuals will be getting richer. The "new policy ideas" (presumably to help those who are being f*d by all this) have been there all along. It's just that those with the wealth don't want to consider them. Those people having even more wealth does _not_ make them more likely to consider those ideas. Honestly this drivel makes me want to puke.

thenthenthen 1y ago

The singularity already happened, we are just not aware of it yet. Atleast, thats what I am observing here. Most smart/ai products reduce human to servant of refilling, refuelling, error checking. Who are in control remains the question, money?

daxfohl 1y ago

> although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly If the "mistake" is that of concentrating too much power in too few hands, there's no recovery. Those with the willingness to adapt will not have the power to do so, and those with the power to adapt will not have the willingness. And it feels like we're halfway there. How do we establish a system of checks and balances to avoid this?

NoGravitas 1y ago

This would be a sign of deep delusion if it weren't transparently self-serving.

botverse 1y ago

I can’t seem to reconcile this with the fact that there has not been a significant improvement of the transformers since 8 years ago. None of the AGI components, in addition to those that emerged with hyper scale, have been achieved. Where is the superintelligence going to come from?

nektro 1y ago

can't wait for the day this bubble bursts

rblion 1y ago

It's funny in a cosmic way how YC was once led by this guy.

akomtu 1y ago

> Many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way, but at least some people will probably decide to “plug in”. I bet he wants to be the first to "plug in" and become the first AI enhanced human.

w-hn 1y ago

Do these tech overlords find it really hard to resist the “pitching in” part even after they’ve already deployed millions and billions in PR? Maybe just the itching thumb? Yeah, maybe. > AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present And then nothing substantial after this proclamatory hot-take. So let’s just choose to believe le ai propheté. It’s like quick instructions to PR team style written post (and then asking an LLM to inflate it) from the comforts of a warm and cozy Japanese seat. Definitely not written by Genini at least. Usually does a better job than this. Well, at least like Zuck he eats his own food that he killed. Will be looking forward to titles like “The Vehement Duality” &c in the near future.

Amekedl 1y ago

This level of conceitedness can hardly be measured anymore; it's on a new scale. Big corps will build and label whatever as "superintelligent" system, even if it has plain if conditions placed within to suit their owners interests. It'll govern our choices, shape our realities, and enforce its creators' priorities under the guise of objective, superior intelligence. This 'superintelligence' won't be a benevolent oracle, but a sophisticated puppet – its strings hidden behind layers of complexity and marketing hype. Decisions impacting lives, resources, and freedoms will be made by algorithms fundamentally skewed by corporate agendas, dressed up as inevitable, logical conclusions. The danger isn't just any bias; it's the institutionalization of bias on a massive scale, presented as progress. We'll be told the system 'optimized' for efficiency or profit, mistaking corporate self-interest for genuine intelligence, while dissent gets labeled as irrationality against the machine's 'perfect' logic. The conceit lies in believing their engineered tool is truly autonomous wisdom, when it's merely power automated and legitimized by a buzzword. AI LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOO

martinohansen 1y ago

It’s very hard to trust his words after he’s become the leader of a billion dollar for profit company. I miss the old Sam

tim333 1y ago

I quite like the blog post although I think about 98% of the comments here are slagging it off. It's maybe a bit optimistic but sometimes it's nice to look on the bright side. It's like society is about to develop electrical equipment of the first time and all people can say is that will never work as well as quickly as it might, won't you think about the manual crank turners that will have to find other jobs and so on.

Rastonbury 1y ago

If OAI/Sama believes they are taking-off in that AI is building the next model we should see a step change the next model. As they accelerate the gap will grow, we'll see next model whether this is PR/Marketing or if they really are taking off

tim333 1y ago
Even in Sama's telling it would only have a small effect just now. "larval version of recursive self-improvement".