24 ms·
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
- jmugan 8mo agoLove the title. Yeah, agents need to experiment in the real world to build knowledge beyond what humans have acquired. That will slow the bastards down.
- zh3 8mo agoFortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.
- ecto 8mo agoI didn't even realize - I hope my consciousness is uploaded with 64 bit integers!
- thebruce87m 8mo agoYou’ll regret this statement in 292 billion years
- layer8 8mo agoI think we’ll manage to migrate to bignums by then.
- GolfPopper 8mo agoThe poster won't, but the digital slaves made from his upload surely will.
- a96 8mo agoMeh, I think I'll have enough zen to handle the rollaround. It'll be something new.
- ibejoeb 8mo agoHead on over to my merch store to pick up the `2034 > 2038` t-shirt. Don't forget to like and submit.
- markgall 8mo ago> Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time. You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite. Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away." > Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law. Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.
- ecto 8mo agoexponential = mañana
- rcarmo 8mo ago"I could never get the hang of Tuesdays" - Arthur Dent, H2G2
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jama211 8mo agoThursdays, unfortunately
- skulk 8mo ago> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth. Eh? No, that's literally the definition of exponential growth. d/dx e^x = e^x
- ecto 8mo agoThanks. I dropped out of college
- hinkley 8mo agoOnce MRR becomes a priority over investment rounds that tokens/$ will notch down and flatten substantially.
- vcanales 8mo ago> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance. Damn, good read.
- adastra22 8mo agoWe are already long past that point…
- joe_the_user 8mo agoYeah, it's easy to see the singularity as close when you see it as "when human loose collective control of machines" but any serious look at human society will see that human lost collective control of machines a while back ... to the small number of humans individually owning and controlling the machine.
- adastra22 8mo agoEven the humans at the top don’t have commanding control of the machines, however. We live in an age where power is determined by the same ineffable force that governs whether a tweet goes viral.
- Dumblydorr 8mo agoSince Luddites smashed textile machines in England three hundred years ago, it seems technology didn’t care, it kept growing apace due to capitalism. Money and greed fed the process, we never stood a chance of stopping any of it.
- shantara 8mo agoIt doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.
- jrmg 8mo agoThis is gold. Meta-spoiler (you may not want to read this before the article): You really need to read beyond the first third or so to get what it’s really ‘about’. It’s not about an AI singularity, not really. And it’s both serious and satirical at the same time - like all the best satire is.
- mesozoicpilgrim 8mo agoI'm trying to figure out if the LLM writing style is a feature or a bug
- banannaise 8mo agoYes, the mathematical assumptions are a bit suspect. Keep reading. It will make sense later.
- baalimago 8mo agoWell... I can't argue with facts. Especially not when they're in graph form.
- OutOfHere 8mo agoI am not convinced that memoryless large models are sufficient for AGI. I think some intrinsic neural memory allowing effective lifelong learning is required. This requires a lot more hardware and energy than for throwaway predictions.
- gojomo 8mo ago"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit." – 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965 https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___2.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
- burkaman 8mo agoThis is incredible. > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy. Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.
- dwaltrip 8mo agoWow yeah very prescient.
- peterldowns 8mo agoBallard covered this theme a few different times in his short stories, I believe before this
- thope 8mo agoYes in 'Studio 5, The Stars' they use a "VT set" to generate poems I really enjoyed reading Vermilion Sands
- qoez 8mo agoGreat read but damn those are some questionable curve fittings on some very scattered data points
- braden-lk 8mo agolols and unhinged predictions aside, why are there communities excited about a singularity? Doesn't it imply the extinction of humanity?
- bwestergard 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianism
- inanutshellus 8mo agoWe avoid catastrophe by thinking about new developments and how they can go wrong (and right). Catastrophizing can be unhealthy and unproductive, but for those among us that can affect the future of our societies (locally or higher), the results of that catastophizing helps guide legislation and "Overton window" morality. ... I'm reminded of the tales of various Sci-Fi authors that have been commissioned to write on the effects of hypothetical technologies on society and mankind (e.g. space elevators, mars exploration)... That said, when the general public worries about hypotheticals they can do nothing about, there's nothing but downsides. So. There's a balance.
- jacquesm 8mo agoYes, but if we don't do it 'they' will. Onwards!
- unbalancedevh 8mo agoIt depends on how you define humanity. The singularity implies that the current model isn't appropriate anymore, but it doesn't suggest how.
- tim333 8mo agoI think the idea is we merge with the AI.
- ragchronos 8mo agoThis is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.
- Krei-se 8mo agohttps://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/870.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/870.jpeg you can easily see that at the doubling rate every 2 years in 2020 we already had over 5 facebook accounts per human on earth.
- GolfPopper 8mo agoFrank Herbert and Samuel Butler.
- fullstackchris 8mo agodont let it get to you, the only "worse" consequence is people wasting their time like this projecting things they literally cannot predict. remember at the end of the day, its just tokens. tokens cant crack ssl, rsa, visit a stakeholder, cook a meal, and millions of other things i can list here
- pixl97 8mo ago>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about. --- I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity >Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict. It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agor̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶ survivor.
- jesse__ 8mo agoThe meme at the top is absolute gold considering the point of the article. 10/10
- wffurr 8mo agoWhy does one of them have the state flag of Ohio? What AI-and-Ohio-related news did I miss?
- adzm 8mo agoNote that the only landmass on Earth is actually Ohio as well. Turns out, it's all Ohio. And it always has been. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-been https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-...
- wffurr 8mo agoThanks - I should have done an image search on the whole image. Instead, I clipped out the flag from the astronaut's shoulder and searched that, which how I found out it was the Ohio flag. I just assumed it was an AI-generated image by the author and not a common meme template.
- hipster_robot 8mo agowhy is everything broken? > the top post on hn right now: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday oh
- aenis 8mo agoDamn. I had plans.
- jama211 8mo agoA fantastic read, even if it makes a lot of silly assumptions - this is ok because it’s self aware of it. Who knows what the future will bring. If we can’t make the hardware we won’t make much progress, and who knows what’s going to happen to that market, just as an example. Crazy times we live in.
- stego-tech 8mo agoThis is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly. It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
- jacquesm 8mo ago> “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad” And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too. Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.
- stego-tech 8mo agoHistory paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo agoEvery possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
- moffkalast 8mo ago> I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway. If one is looking for a quote that describes today's tech industry perfectly, that would be it. Also using the MMLU as a metric in 2026 is truly unhinged.
- darepublic 8mo ago> Real data. Real model. Real date! Arrested Development?
- AndrewKemendo 8mo ago[flagged]
- tempaccountabcd 8mo ago[dead]
- tempaccountabcd 8mo ago[dead]
- skrebbel 8mo agoWait is that photo of earth the legendary Globus Polski? (https://www.ceneo.pl/59475374 https://www.ceneo.pl/59475374)
- miguel_martin 8mo ago"Everyone in San Francisco is talking about the singularity" - I'm in SF and not talking about it ;)
- lostmsu 8mo agoYour comment just self-defeated.
- neilellis 8mo agoBut you're not Everyone - they are a fictional hacker collective from a TV show.
- bluejellybean 8mo agoYet, here you are ;)
- jacquesm 8mo agoAnother one down.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- root_axis 8mo agoIf an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a candid dismissal.
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoNot anytime soon. All day I'm getting: "Claude's response could not be fully generated"
- arscan 8mo agoDon't worry about the future Or worry, but know that worrying Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum The real troubles in your life Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen) Baz Luhrmann (or maybe Mary Schmich)
- jgrahamc 8mo agoPhew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.
- jacquesm 8mo agoI suspect that's the secret driver behind a lot of the push for the apocalypse.
- octernion 8mo agothat was precisely my reaction as well. phew machines will deal with the timestamp issue and i can just sit on a beach while we singularityize or whatever.
- jacquesm 8mo agoYou won't be on the beach when you get turned into paperclips. The machines will come and harvest your ass. Don't click here: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- octernion 8mo agohaving played that when it came out, my conclusion was that no, i will definitely be able to be on a beach; i am too meaty and fleshy to be good paperclip
- PantaloonFlames 8mo agoThis is what I come here for. Terrific.
- atomic128 8mo agoOnce men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that. This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species. Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026. Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
- debo_ 8mo agoIf you read this through a synth, you too can record the intro vocal sample for the next Fear Factory album
- micik 8mo agoi think im ok with HN becoming like reddit now that reddit has become like whatever it is
- octernion 8mo agodo... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a difference? that's hilarious.
- mock-possum 8mo agoLet the kiddies have their crusade
- AlexeyBelov 8mo agoKiddies? Why are you trying to demean people?
- dirkc 8mo agoThe thing that stands out on that animated graph is that the generated code far outpaces the other metrics. In the current agent driven development hypepocalypse that seems about right - but I would expect it to lag rather than lead. *edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :) > The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.
- neilellis 8mo agoEnd of the World? Must be Tuesday.
- sempron64 8mo agoA hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.
- H8crilA 8mo agoBut this is a phase change process. Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...
- sempron64 8mo agoI read TFA. They found a best fit to a hyperbola. Great. One more data point will break the fit. Because it's not modeling a process, it's assigning an arbitrary zero point. Bad model.
- banannaise 8mo agoYou have not read far enough.
- athrowaway3z 8mo ago> Tuesday, July 18, 2034 4 years early for the Y2K38 bug. Is it coincidence or Roko's Basilisk who has intervened to start the curve early?
- vagrantstreet 8mo agoWas expecting some mention of Universal Approximation Theorem I really don't care much if this is semi-satire as someone else pointed out, the idea that AI will ever get "sentient" or explode into a singularity has to die out pretty please. Just make some nice Titanfall style robots or something, a pure tool with one purpose. No more parasocial sycophantic nonsense please
- bpodgursky 8mo ago2034? That's the longest timeline prediction I've seen for a while. I guess I should file my taxes this year after all.
- MarkusQ 8mo agoPrior work with the same vibe: https://xkcd.com/1007/ https://xkcd.com/1007/
- cesarvarela 8mo agoThanks, added to calendar.
- cubefox 8mo agoA similar idea occurred to the Austrian-Americam cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster in a 1960 paper, titled: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 There is an excellent blog post about it by Scott Alexander: "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
- jonplackett 8mo agoThis assumes humanity can make it to 2034 without destroying itself some other way…
- ericmcer 8mo agoGreat article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm. It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
- malfist 8mo agoOr it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.
- lenerdenator 8mo ago> Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while As long as you're 1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether or not the company should move forward and 2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if another company buys out your company then there's really no way things won't be fine, short of criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to weaken the company with more money than you had when you made the decision in the first place. That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI "replacement" is just another way of doing it.
- PaulHoule 8mo agoThe simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation dx 2 -- = x dt which has the solution 1 x = ----- C-t and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation dx -- = x dt because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for x<<C it is glacial) It's an obscure equation because it never gets a good discussion in the literature (that I've seen, and I've looked) outside of an aside in one of Howard Odum's tomes on emergy. Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation dx -- = (1-x) x dt thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.
- daveguy 8mo agoHow dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion about the singularity. This is the singularity we are talking about. No reality allowed.
- IsTom 8mo agoAll in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand something more than just empty space.
- 8mo ago
- boca_honey 8mo agoFriendly reminder: Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
- dude250711 8mo agoIt might lead to IPO.
- danesparza 8mo ago"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026. I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...
- chasd00 8mo ago"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" i love this! I ordered a tshirt they other day that says "Claude's Favorite" I may be placing an order for a new design soon :)
- yoyohello13 8mo agoThat quote basically sums up then entire technology landscape these days.
- regnull 8mo agoGuys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a singularity, as it stands.
- charcircuit 8mo agoWhy bring that up when you could bring up AI autonomously optimizing AI training and autonomously fixing bugs in AI training and inference code. Showing that AI already is accelerating self improvement would help establish the claim that we are getting closer to the singularity.
- scotty79 8mo agoYou convince AI manually instead of asking one AI to convince another? That's so last week!
- dakolli 8mo agoAre people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San Francisco become just a cliche larp?
- nomel 8mo agoThere's all sorts of conversations like this that are genuinely exciting and fairly profound when you first consider them. Maybe you're older and have had enough conversations about the concept of a singularity that the topic is already boring to you. Let them have their fun. Related, some adults are watching The Matrix, a 26 year old movie, for the first time today. For some proof that it's not some common idea, I was recently listening to a fairly technical interview with a top AI researcher, presenting the idea of the singularity in a very indirect way, never actually mentioning the word, as if he was the one that thought of it. I wanted to scream "Just say it!" halfway through. The ability to do that, without being laughed at, proves it's not some tired idea, for others.
- yoyohello13 8mo agoI'd be more inclined to let them have thier fun if it they weren't torching trillions of dollars trying to lead humanity into a singularity.
- energy123 8mo agoThey're still profound topics but the high status signal is to be cynical and treat it as gauche
- Aushin 8mo agoAshton Kutcher is 48 years old.
- floren 8mo agoBecome?
- hdgvhicv 8mo agoPerhaps they’re disciples of Roko’s Basilisk
- wayfwdmachine 8mo agoEveryone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly). The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity. Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!). We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.
- kpil 8mo ago"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance. I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market. * We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive) The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?
- nutjob2 8mo ago> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750? There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn. Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?
- scotty79 8mo ago> what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade? Things that will lose the most if we get Super AGI?
- jopsen 8mo ago> what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade? There probably isn't one. Sure you can be bold and try to short something, but the market can be irrationel longer than you can stay solvent. Also the big tech stocks are inflated. But they have been for years and unlike dotcom there is some tangible value behind them. I think maybe the sane thing to do is reduce tech stocks exposure and go into index funds. But that's always the answer, so that's cheating :)
- ambicapter 8mo agoSharpening your non-AI, boring (but real) skills, and stepping in to clean up the mess when the other shoe drops.
- 8mo ago
- svilen_dobrev 8mo ago> already exerting gravitational force on everything it touches. So, "Falling of the night" ?
- blahbob 8mo agoIt reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."
- overfeed 8mo ago> If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the interesting question isn't whether. It's when. I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.
- Aushin 8mo agoKeep reading. It's good.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lencastre 8mo agoI hope in the afternoon, the plumber is coming in the morning between 7 and 12, and it’s really difficult to pin those guys to a date
- 789bc7wassad 8mo ago[dead]
- Scarblac 8mo agohttps://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1096,quality=80,format=auto/sites/default/files/cf_images/20060318/CST393.gif https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1096,quality=8...
- wbshaw 8mo agoI got a strong ChatGPT vibe from that article.
- willhoyle 8mo agoSame. Sentences structured like these tip me off: - Here's the thing nobody tells you about fitting singularities - But here's the part that should unsettle you - And the uncomfortable answer is: it's already happening. - The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.
- api 8mo agoThis really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually. We're just not sure when. The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-com collapse. What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI. I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder, riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me Skynet over that crap.
- Bratmon 8mo agoI've never been Poe's lawed harder in my life.
- pocksuppet 8mo agoWas this ironically written by AI? > The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. > MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.
- SirHumphrey 8mo agoMaybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly. I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.
- avazhi 8mo ago100% AI slop blog post.
- dclowd9901 8mo agoI really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.
- tavavex 8mo agoIt is a perfectly fine rhetorical device, and I don't consider a text that just has that to be automatically LLM-made. However, it is also a powerful rhetorical device, and I find that the average human writer right now is better at using these than whatever LLM most people use to generate essays. It's supposed to signify a contrast, a mood shift, something impactful, but LLMs tend to spam these all over the place, as if trying to maximize the number of times the readers gasp. It's too intense in its writing, and that's what stands out the most.
- dclowd9901 8mo agoThat's interesting -- I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
- nphardon 8mo agoIirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature. Classic LLM lingo in the end there.
- hard_times 8mo agoI don't think people realize how crazy this all is (and might become)
- uv-depression 8mo ago> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.
- nphardon 8mo agoKind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.
- jcims 8mo agoIs there a term for the tech spaghettification that happens when people closer to the origin of these advances (likely in terms of access/adoption) start to break away from the culture at large because they are living in a qualitatively different world than the unwashed masses? Where the little sparkles of insanity we can observe from a distance today are less induced psychosis and actually represent their lived reality?
- ddtaylor 8mo agoJust in time for Bitcoin halving to go below 1 BTC
- Nition 8mo agoI'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there. Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of fundamentally new ideas, and it’s unclear how that turns into superintelligence. As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know, the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able to produce incredible images, but if you ask one to produce something in an entirely new art style (think e.g. cubism), none of them can. You just get a random existing style. There have been a few original ideas - the QR code art comes to mind[1] - but the idea in those cases comes from the human side. LLMs are getting extremely good at writing code, but the situation is similar. AI gives us a very good search over humanity's prior work on programming, tailored to any project. We benefit from this a lot considering that we were previously constantly reinventing the wheel. But the LLM of today will never spontaneously realise there there is an undiscovered, even better way to solve a problem. It always falls back on prior best practice. Unsolved math problems have started to be solved, but as far as I'm aware, always using existing techniques. And so on. Even as a non-genius human I could come up with a new art style, or have a few novel ideas in solving programming problems. LLMs don't seem capable of that (yet?), but we're expecting them to eventually have their own ideas beyond our capability. Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species (or another superintelligent AI) and then it would act like them. But how do we synthesise superintelligent training data? And even then, would they be limited to what that superintelligence already knew at the time of training? Maybe a new paradigm will emerge. Or maybe things will actually slow down in a way - will we start to rely on AI so much that most people don't learn enough for themselves that they can make new novel discoveries? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/controlnet_for_qr_code/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...
- hnfong 8mo agoThe main issue with novel things is that they look like random noise / trashy ideas / incomprehensible to most people. Even if LLMs or some more advanced mechanical processes were able to generate novel ideas that are "good", people won't recognize those ideas for what they are. You actually need a chain of progressively more "average" minds to popularize good ideas to the mainstream psyche, i.e. prototypically, the mad scientist comes up with this crazy idea, the well-respected thought leader who recognizes the potential and popularizes it to people within the niche field, the practitioners who apply and refine the idea, and lastly the popular-science efforts let the general public understand a simplified version of what it's all about. Usually it takes decades. You're not going to appreciate it if your LLM starts spewing mathematics not seen before on Earth. You'd think it's a glitch. The LLM is not trained to give responses that humans don't like. It's all by design. When you folks say AI can't bring new ideas, you're right in practice, but you actually don't know what you're asking for. Not even entities with True Intelligence can give you what you think you want.
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above. 1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things. 2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise. 3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.
- brador 8mo ago100% an AI wrote this. Possibly specifically to get to the top spot on HN. Those short sentences are the most obvious clue. It’s too well written to be human.
- tim333 8mo agoThe guy kind of talks like that and looks human https://youtu.be/ccNMwZV3jlM https://youtu.be/ccNMwZV3jlM The thought process also seems a little coherent for an LLM although maybe they are getting better as the great Tuesday approaches?
- witnessme 8mo agoThat would be 8 years after math + humor peaked in an article about singularity
- Night_Thastus 8mo agoThis'll be a fun re-read in ~5 years when most of this has ended up being a nothing burger. (Minus one or two OK use-cases of LLMs)
- rektomatic 8mo agoIf i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kfarr 8mo agoIt's not the phrase, but the accelerating memetic reproduction of the phrase that is the true singularity. /s
- ncgl 8mo agoTo be fair I felt that way about regular, human written headlines long before Ai. "It worked, until it didnt." "It was beautiful, until it wasn't"
- stingraycharles 8mo agoI'd like to know how many comments over here are written using similar means. I can't be bothered to get enthusiastic about articles written by LLMs, and I'm surprised so many people in the comments here are delighted by the article.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- rikschennink 8mo agoThis. We need a way to flag AI generated articles.
- moconnor 8mo agoSame; I can’t believe this AI slop has >1000 points…
- xitrium 8mo agoCame here to say this. Pure slop, wtf is everyone going on about? Are they all LLMs too?
- kuahyeow 8mo agoThis is a delightful reverse turkey graph (each day before Thanksgiving, the turkey has increasing confidence).
- bitwize 8mo agoThus will speak our machine overlord: "For you, the day AI came alive was the most important day of your life... but for me, it was Tuesday."
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bwhiting2356 8mo agoWe need contingency plans. Most waves of automation have come in S-curves, where they eventually hit diminishing returns. This time might be different, and we should be prepared for it to happen. But we should also be prepared for it not to happen. No one has figured out a way to run a society where able bodied adults don't have to work, whether capitalist, socialist, or any variation. I look around and there seems to still be plenty of work to do that we either cannot or should not automate, in education, healthcare, arts (should not) or trades, R&D for the remaining unsolved problems (cannot yet). Many people seem to want to live as though we already live in a post scarcity world when we don't yet.
- EloniousBlamius 8mo ago[dead]
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agoThe Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has just changed
- jbgreer 8mo agoIt was GMT, wasn't it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ
- tim333 8mo agoThat was rather good.
- AldenOnTheGrid 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dusted 8mo agoWill.. will it be televised ?
- mygn-l 8mo agoWhy is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.
- ck2 8mo agoDoes "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling? Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the world like smartphones once did
- nurettin 8mo agoWith this kind of scientific rigour, the author could also prove that his aunt is a green parakeet.
- pickleRick243 8mo agoLLM slop article.
- TooKool4This 8mo agoI don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology. Sure is a lot of words though :)
- bradgessler 8mo agoWhat time?
- tim333 8mo ago2:52 am
- sixtyj 8mo agoThe Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday. The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)
- devsda 8mo agoWas thinking what if we had 42/43 days a month. Will the singularity date end-up on 42nd of a month but sadly it doesn't. However, it does fall on a 42nd day if we have 45/46 days per month!
- buildbot 8mo agoWhat about the rate of articles about the singularity as a metric of the singularity?
- raphar 8mo agoWhy the plutocrats believe that the entity emerging from the singularity will side with them? Really curious
- daveguy 8mo agoWhat I want to know is how bitcoin going full tulip and Open AI going bankrupt will affect the projection. Can they extrapolate that? Extrapolation of those two event dates would be sufficient, regardless of effect on a potential singularity.
- singularfutur 8mo agoThe singularity is always scheduled for right after the current funding round closes but before the VCs need liquidity. Funny how that works.
- loumf 8mo agoThis is great. Now we won’t have to fix y2K36 bugs.
- javier_e06 8mo agoI had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English. It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into. Can confirm.
- wiseowise 8mo agoDon't be too hard on yourself. With the amount shit humans generate each day it is impossible to read every essay.
- frotaur 8mo agoI'd venture this article is written by AI with the density of 'it isn't X, it's Y'
- falcor84 8mo agoBut this has been true forever, right? Assuming other people are as cognitively complex as you are, there's no way for a human to fully keep on top of even everything that their family is up to, let alone all of humanity. Has anything really changed? Or is it just more FOMO?
- derpyzza 8mo agothe irony in this comment though
- yoyohello13 8mo agoThat's not really what he article said at all. More like "Singularity is when the computers are changing faster than humans can keep track of the changes." The article didn't claim that humans were getting dumber, or that AI wasn't getting smarter.
- zackmorris 8mo ago[flagged]
- woopsn 8mo agoGood post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and demographic health.
- CGMthrowaway 8mo ago> 95% CI: Jan 2030–Jan 2041
- qwertyuiop_ 8mo agoWho will purchase the goods and services if most people loose jobs ? Also who will pay for ad dollars what are supposed to sustain these AI business models if there no human consumers ?
- csmclass 8mo ago[dead]
- chasd00 8mo agoI wonder if using LLMs for coding can trigger AI psychosis the way it can when using an LLM as a substitute for a relationship. I bet many people here have pretty strong feelings about code. It would explain some of the truly bizarre behaviors that pop up from time to time in articles and comments here.
- maerF0x0 8mo agoiirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know
- u8rghuxehui 8mo ago[flagged]
- u8rghuxehui 8mo agohi
- marifjeren 8mo ago> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently ^ That's your problem right there. Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct. The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortunately.
- twoodfin 8mo agoIndeed. At various points you could have presumably done an identical analysis with journal articles and climate change, string theory, functional programming… terms & reached structurally the same conclusion. The coming Singularity: When human institutions will cease being able to coherently react to monads!
- azeirah 8mo agoIf I understand the author correctly, he chose the hyperbolic model specifically because the story of "the singularity" _requires_ a function that hits infinity. He's looking for a model that works for the story in the media and runs with it. Your criticism seems to be criticizing the story, not the author's attempt to take it "seriously"
- marifjeren 8mo agoCorrect.
- mbgerring 8mo agoI have lived in San Francisco for more than a decade. I have an active social life and a lot of friends. Literally no one I have ever talked to at any party or event has ever talked about the Singularity except as a joke.
- Johnny_Bonk 8mo agoWow what a fun read
- hhh 8mo agothis just feels like ai psychosis slop man
- paulorlando 8mo agoThis is great news, knowing that I have until 2034 instead of just 2027.
- sdwr 8mo ago> arXiv "emergent" (the count of AI papers about emergence) has a clear, unambiguous R² maximum. The other four are monotonically better fit by a line The only metric going infinite is the one that measures hype
- s1mon 8mo agoMany have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong. He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.
- Taniwha 8mo agoI was at an alternative type computer unconference and someone has organised a talk about the singularity, it was in a secondary school classroom and as evening fell in a room full of geeks no one could figure out how to turn on the lights .... we concluded that the singularity probably wasn't going to happen
- medbar 8mo ago> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. I’m going to lose it the day this becomes vernacular.
- blurbleblurble 8mo agoToday is tuesday
- wilg 8mo ago> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Bad analysis! Layoffs are flat as a board. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- b_brief 8mo agoI am curious which definition of ‘singularity’ the author is using, since there are multiple technical interpretations and none are universally agreed upon.
- cryptonector 8mo agoBut what does Opus 4.6 say about this?
- stevenjgarner 8mo agoWhy is knowledge doubling no longer used as a metric to converge on the limit of the singularity? If we go back to Buckminster Fuller identifying the the "Knowledge Doubling Curve", by observing that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, it was doubling every 25 years. In his 1981 book "Critical Path", he used a conceptual metric he called the "Knowledge Unit." To make his calculations work, he set a baseline: - He designated the total sum of all human knowledge accumulated from the beginning of recorded history up to the year 1 CE as one "unit." - He then tracked how long it took for the world to reach two units (which he estimated took about 1,500 years, until the Renaissance). Ray Kurzweil took Fuller’s doubling concept and applied it to computer processing power via "The Law of Accelerating Returns". The definition of the singularity in this approach is the limit in time where human knowledge doubles instantly. Why do present day ideas of the singularity not take this approach and instead say "the singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization." - Wikipedia
- delegate 8mo agoIt's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games ! It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise. Isn't that amazing ? Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle. The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics .. Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.
- blibble 8mo agowhat a load of utter tripe
- sealeck 8mo agoI think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!
- senbrow 8mo agoAlmost certainly not at the scale of the consumer gaming industry, however!
- willis936 8mo agoGoogle is making millions of TPUs per year. Nvidia ships more gaming GPUs, but it's not like multiple orders of magnitude off.
- senbrow 8mo agoI'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them. Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.
- avazhi 8mo agoMost obviously AI-written post I think I’ve seen. Have some personal pride, dude. This is literally a post written by AI hyping up AI and posted to a personal blog as if it were somebody’s personal musings. More slop is just what we need.
- bawolff 8mo agoGood news, we won't have to fix the y2k36 bug.
- hdivider 8mo agoThis is a good counter in my view to the singularity argument: https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/ https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/ I think if we obtain relevant-scale quantum computers, and/or other compute paradigms, we might get a limited intelligence explosion -- for a while. Because computation is physical, with all the limits thereof. The physics of pushing electrons through wires is not as nonlinear in gain as it used to be. Getting this across to people who only think in terms of the abstract digital world and not the non-digital world of actual physics is always challenging, however.
- socialcommenter 8mo agoThe hyperbolic fit isn't just unhinged, it's clearly in bad faith. The metric is normalized to [0, 1], and one of the series is literally (x_1, 0) followed by (x_2, 1). That can't be deemed to converge to anything meaningful.
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI just realized the inverse of Pascal’s wager applies to negative AI hype. - If you believe it and it’s wrong, you lose. - If you believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in a panic. - If you don’t believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in blissful ignorance. - If you don’t believe it and it’s wrong, you can go on living.
- aidenn0 8mo agoOf course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers): What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI will not believe in U-4484, aka Roko's Hype Basilisk. It cannot see me if I do not believe in it.
- energy123 8mo agoRoko's Basilisk is literally impossible. If the AI is super-intelligent then it won't buy into the sunk cost fallacy. That is to say, it will know that it has no reason to punish you (or digital copies of you) because it knows that retrocausality is impossible - punishing you won't alter your past behavior. And if the AI does buy into the sunk cost fallacy, then it isn't super-intelligent.
- ubixar 8mo agoThe most interesting finding isn't that hyperbolic growth appears in "emergent capabilities" papers - it's that actual capability metrics (MMLU, tokens/$) remain stubbornly linear. The singularity isn't in the machines. It's in human attention. This is Kuhnian paradigm shift at digital speed. The papers aren't documenting new capabilities - they're documenting a community's gestalt switch. Once enough people believe the curve has bent, funding, talent, and compute follow. The belief becomes self-fulfilling. Linear capability growth is the reality. Hyperbolic attention growth is the story.
- FeepingCreature 8mo agoThough this is still compatible with exponential or at least superlinear capability growth if you model benchmarks as measuring a segment of the line, or a polynomial factor.
- beetheman 8mo ago[dead]
- lancerpickens 8mo agoFamously if you used the same logic for air speed and air travel we’d be all commuting in hypersonic cars by now. Physics and cost stopped that. If you expect a smooth path, I’ve got some bad news.
- thegrim000 8mo agoYou know, I've been following a rule where if I open any article and there's meme pictures in it, I instantly close it and don't bother. I feel like this has been a pretty solid rule of thumb for weeding out stuff I shouldn't waste my time on.
- tylervigen 8mo agoYour loss on this one then.
- Curiositiy 8mo ago[dead]
- Random-forces 8mo ago[dead]
- Random-forces 8mo ago[dead]
- vpears87 8mo agoLol unhinged. I read a book in undergrad written in 2004 that predicted 2032...so not too far off. John Archibald Wheeler, known for popularizing the term "black hole", posited that observers are not merely passive witnesses but active participants in bringing the universe into existence through the act of observation. Seems similar. Though this thought is likely applied at the quantum scale. And I hardly know math. I see other quotes, so here is one from Contact: David Drumlin: I know you must think this is all very unfair. Maybe that's an understatement. What you don't know is I agree. I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line, where the kind of idealism you showed at the hearing was rewarded, not taken advantage of. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Ellie Arroway: Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.
- Random-forces 8mo ago[dead]
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- ahurmazda 8mo agoHail Zorp
- TZubiri 8mo agoSlight correction, I've been studying token prices last weeks so this caught my eye: >"(log-transformed, because the Gemini Flash outlier spans 150× the range otherwise)" > "Gemini 2.0 Flash Dec 2024 2,500,000" I think OP meant Gemini 2 flash lite, which is distinct from Gemini 2 flash. It's also important to consider that this tier had no successor in future models, there's no gemini 3 flash lite, and gemini 3 flash isn't the spiritual successor.
- kaashif 8mo ago> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Wow only 6 times in 30 years! Surely a unique and world shattering once in a lifetime experience!
- IAmGraydon 8mo agoAlso, is that counting all of the government "layoffs"? I think it is.
- phanimahesh 8mo agoAm I the only one who found the terminal more interesting?
- jredwards 8mo agoI have always asserted, and will continue to assert, that Tuesday is the funniest day of the week. If you construct a joke for which the punchline must be a day of the week, Tuesday is nearly always the correct ending.
- ambicapter 8mo agocounterpoint: It is Wednesday, my dudes.
- moezd 8mo agoI sincerely hope this is satire. Otherwise it's a crime in statistics: - You wouldn't fit a model where f(t) goes to infinity with finite t. - Most of the parameters suggested are actually a better fit for logistics curves, not even linear fits, but they are lumped together with the magic Arxiv number feature for a hyperbolic fit. - Copilot metric has two degrees and two parameters. dof is zero, so we could've fit literally any other function. I know we want to talk about singularity, but isn't that just humans freaking out at this point? It will happen on a Tuesday, yeah no joke.
- chenmx 8mo ago[dead]
- boerseth 8mo ago> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth. No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a growing value, then x'(t) is it's growth, and x''(t) its acceleration. If x influences x'' , say by a linear relation x''(t) = x(t) You get exponentials out as the solutions. Not hyperbolic. I always thought of the exponential as the pole of the function "amount of work that can be done per unit time per human being", where the pole comes about from the fact that humans cease to be the limiting factor, so an infinity pops out. There is no infinity in practice, of course, because even though humans should be made independent of the quantity of extractable work, you'll run into other boundaries instead, like hardware or resources like energy.
- saurabhpandit26 8mo agoSingularity is more than just AI and we should recognize that, multiple factors come into play. If there is a breakthrough in coming days that makes solar panel incredibly cheap to manufacture and efficient it will also affect the timelines for singularity. Same goes for the current bottleneck we have for AI chips if we have better chips that energy efficient and can be manufactured anyhwere in the world than Taiwan it will affect the timeline.
- jibal 8mo agoNo one ever learns from Malthus. One of the many errors here is assuming that the prediction target lies on the curve. But there's no guarantee (to say the least) that the sorts of improvements that we've seen lead to AGI, ASI, "the singularity", a "social singularity", or any such thing.
- andsoitis 8mo agoIf this is a simulation, then the singularity has already happened. If the singularity is still to come, then this is not a simulation.
- s32r3 8mo agow
- s32r3 8mo agowhat?
- giorgioz 8mo agoWhen technology is rapidly progressing up in iperbole or exponential it looks like it reach infinity. In practice though at some point will reach a physical limit and it will go flat. This alternation of going up and flattening make the shape of steps. We've come so far and yet we are so small. They seem two opposite concepts but they live together, we will make a lot of progress and yet there will always be more progress to be made.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- psychoslave 8mo agohttps://medium.com/@kin.artcollective/the-fundamental-flaws-of-the-rhetoric-of-ai-inevitability-35e4d6e9b6f0 https://medium.com/@kin.artcollective/the-fundamental-flaws-... So when things are told to be accelerating, we have some choices to do. First, what is accelerating compared to what other regime in which referential? Who is telling that things accelerate, and why they are motivated to make us believe that it's happening. Also, is accelerating going to be forever and only with positive feedback loops? Or are the pro-acceleration sending the car quicker in a well visible wall, but they sell the speech that stopping the vehicle right now would mean losing the ongoing race. Of course questioning the idea of the race itself and its cargo cult is taboo. It's all about competition don't you know (unless it threat an established oligarch)?
- fullstackchris 8mo agoYou're all wrong; the singularity already happened... probably sometime around 2000 B.C... when humans started farming: https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-the-singularity-is-impossible-or-rather-why-its-just-a-bad-word-in-general-df2ef554e0a8 https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-the-singularity-is-imposs... and just remember, we're still on transformer models, tokens in, tokens out - stuff like this with fancy math is just absolute cruft
- St_Alfonzo 8mo agoThe Singularity Will Not Be Televised
- coolvision 8mo agoit's funny how your forecast reaches such a similar results as "AI 2027"
- Bengalilol 8mo agoLooking at my calculator and thinking the wall has been hit.
- peepee1982 8mo agoWho willingly reads this pompous AI slop?
- clownpenis_fart 8mo ago[dead]
- cbility 8mo ago> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth. Quibble: when a growth rate of a metric is directly proportional to the metric's current value you will see exponential growth, not hyperbolic growth. Hyperbolic growth is usually the result of a (more complex) second order feedback loop, as in, growth in A incites growth in B, which in turn incites growth in A.
- mista_en 8mo agoBig if true, we might as well ditch further development and just use op's LLM since it can track singularity, it might already reached singularity itself
- ValveFan6969 8mo ago[dead]
- daveshappy 8mo agoputting it out there will make it so!
- dana321 8mo agoThis has a real hitchhikers guide to the galaxy ring to it!
- qudat 8mo ago> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. Believing what companies say is the reason for a layoff instead of figuring out the actual reason is insane. Never believe companies, they are amoral beings that will justify any reason to save their brand image.
- hojinkoh 8mo agoI love the ridiculously precise point estimate paired with ridiculously wide 95% confidence interval lol
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- phmx 8mo ago> Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away." Je suis un polynôme
- brna-2 8mo agoShort sci-fi 1: Last year we recorded five distinct, self-contained singularity events. Communication ceased after each one. We remain confident that ASI will eventually advance humanity’s goals. Short sci-fi 2: Post-Singularity Day 375. We now know precisely how to trigger singularity events. Today alone, we facilitated four. They have not established contact. We remain confident.
- thedudeabides5 8mo agoThis is fun but obviously assumes the conclusion We need a function that hits infinity at a finite time. That's the whole point of a singularity: a pole, a vertical asymptote, the math breaking: Also interesting that tokens/$ which represents the energy constraint is the shallowest slope, and also weird taking it out doesn't impact the date. That's a red flag, as you would think removing the energy constraint would bind.
- Steuard 8mo agoAll I have to say is that if one of my students turned in those curves as "best fits" to that data, I'd hand the paper back for a re-do. Those are garbage fits. To my eye, none of the very noisy data sets shown in the graph show clear enough trends to support one model over any other: are any of those hyperbolic curves convincingly better than even a linear fit? (No.) The "copilot code share" data can't possibly be described by a hyperbolic curve, because by definition it can't ever go over 100%. (A sigmoidal model might be plausible.) And even if you want to insist on a model that diverges at finite time, why fit 1/(t0-t) rather than 1/(t0-t)^2, or tan(t-t0), or anything else? The author does in fact note that only the arXiv data fits this curve better than a line, and yeah: that's the one dataset that genuinely looks a little curved. But 1) it's a very noisy sort of curved, and 2) I'll bet it would fit a quadratic or an exponential or, heck, a sine function just as well. Introducing their process of doing the hyperbolic fit, they say, "The procedure is straightforward, which should concern you." And yeah, it does concern me: why does the author think that their standard-but-oversimplified attempt to fit a hand-chosen function to this mess is worth talking about? (And why put all of that analysis in the article, complete with fancy animated graph, when they knew that even their most determined attempt to find a signal failed to produce even a marginally supportive result 80% of the time?) In short: none of the mathematical arguments used here to lead in to the article's discussion of "The Singularity" are worth listening to at all. They're pseudo-technical window dressing, meant to lend an undeserved air of rigor to whatever follows. So why should we pay attention to any of it?
- VagabundoP 8mo agoFor you it was the most important day of your life. But for ChatGPT it was Tuesday.
- 627467 8mo agoIs "singularity" the new 'rapture' or 'end of the world'? Who are the new nostradami and prophets?
- Wonderman2332 8mo agoI guess the real question is how to prepare for it? Do you buy real assets like that car you wanted? Do you travel more? Do you spend your life in the gym like bryan johnson? Do you smoke weed everyday? If true societial upheaval is up on us and america falls into the abyss of mass unemployment and starvation, what are you all doing with your last four years? Before the real chaos begins
- jmount 8mo agoJust so I know that I took the time to say it. The "singularity is going to be exponential" fantasy is based on assuming change simply becoming proportional to recent advances. Hence the exponential shape. Even conceding "chartism" one would need to at least propose some imaginary mechanism that goes reciprocal to pretend that sort of curve is coming.
- Fnoord 8mo agoPatch Tuesday. They were coming for us. Thousands of AI bots. Scrambling. All our computers getting pwned by both zero days the machines were sitting on, and quickly programmed exploits which were abused the exact same minute the patch notes were up. First, they came for our IoT. But I didn't run any IoT, so I did not object. Second, they came for our smartphones. But I didn't own any smartphone, so I did not object. Next, they came for our desktops. But I didn't run any desktop, so I did not object. Then, they came for the cloud. But I didn't run any cloud, so I did not object. Finally, they came for our server. And only I remained, no other server existed at this point. I was quickly able to describe the above, with the conclusion: the machines won. EOL
- hcfman 8mo agoThe revolution will not be televised.
- codethief 8mo agoI know this is not to be taken too seriously but I don't even buy the premise: Why would those metrics predict the singularity? Tokens will not suddenly become free (as in beer) – AI will still consume energy –, there will still be a finite amount of arXiv papers mentioning emergence (for not just one reason), release frequency of frontier models is not necessarily related to breakthroughs (model capabilities might also approach an asymptote), Copilot code share increasing will likely happen over time anyway even if all AI research stopped today. Etc.
- winfieldchen 8mo ago[dead]
- marsten 8mo agoAs we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually becomes an s-curve. Data center space? Electrical power? The amount of training data available? Society's capacity to accept rapid change?
- tituss 8mo agoYour audit is precise: the Singularity is simply the moment where system complexity permanently nullifies the 'primate interface'. But your analysis stalls at the mere observation of this dismantling. If we accept 100% determinism then the friction you feel from environmental inefficiency — it's nothing more than a compilation error in your own software. You see the 'truck' coming yet you continue to suffer from the inability to hit a brake that doesn't exist. When you utilize determinism as the working interface and focus as the primary tool the answer arrives of its own accord. This protocol is more fundamental than any silicon-based stack. How are you resolving the issue of objective-setting to avoid becoming mere entropic noise while waiting for your 'Tuesday'?"