5 ms·

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out lik

• dinfinity 3mo ago
  > It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expected it to happen.
  • bojan 3mo ago
    > It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.
      • goatlover 3mo ago
        Define "everyone". Google has an AI result before the search results. People do use that. People also still use search results when they're dissatisfied with the AI answer.
    • treis 3mo ago
      This isn't accurate. The first mobile phone came out in 1983. It took at least a decade before they started to become common.
      • pproe 3mo ago
        Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.
        • treis 3mo ago
          The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications. We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.
          • tavavex 3mo ago
            What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception. Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology. LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.
            • treis 3mo ago
              I think this is off. LLMs are severely constrained by hardware and we've seen at least an order of magnitude improvement in flops since ChatGPT launched. Over the next couple of decades we are likely to see that level of improvement in memory capacity. There's likely at least a few step changes left. Regardless, the point of the GP that we saw revolutionary changes in society within a few years of technology introduction is off. It took decades for the full impact of the pc, internet, or mobile to be seen. We're still in a very early phase of figuring out how to use LLMs.
    • phil21 3mo ago
      > As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there. And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle. I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look. They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.
      • deleted 3mo ago
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      • ThrowawayR2 3mo ago
        > "And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones." Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.
        • mh- 3mo ago
          "Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'" - Daily Mail, December 2000 I recall seeing similar sentiment in other publications throughout the late 90s. https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/article_in_daily_mail_december_5_00_internet_may/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/art... (Apologies that this was the best image host I could find for it)
          • ThrowawayR2 3mo ago
            Surely you jest. Since people here are fans of LLMs, the Google summary describes said publication as: "The Daily Mail is widely regarded as a sensationalist tabloid with low factual credibility and a strong right-leaning bias." I was there in the 1990s too and we were deluged with headlines trumpeting how everyone, young and old, was rushing headlong onto the Information Superhighway as the dotcom bubble kept inflating.
  • smohare 3mo ago
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  • an0malous 3mo ago
    > We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The “Attention Is All You Need” paper came out in 2017 and OpenAI released GPT-1 in 2018. ChatGPT was released in late 2022 but that was not the beginning of LLMs. Transformers and generative AI go back even further.
    • pohl 3mo ago
      Can you pinpoint the revolution by pinpointing moments of invention and release? Revolution takes time because it’s more about uptake, downstream effects, and feedback.
      • daveguy 3mo ago
        The revolution is way overblown.
  • reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
    As a vocal advocate for the use of machine intelligence in certain contexts and a skeptic of claims they are useless or always hallucinate or whatever... It hasn't been even close to even the recent claims! It's been like three straight years where it was supposed to utterly transform society any minute now. I think we more or less have a fragile consensus that in like, computer programming and really very little else, that on a good day you're probably going to come out ahead with the AI assist. That seems relatively uncontroversial now. But it also seems like success with AI is largely about working hard to get good at it, as a first order concern. It is not at all obvious that blind, uncritical use by anyone is a net win. It's pretty unclear, sone might say dubious, that anyone has made serious, aboveboard money net of debt and equity, other than the hardware vendors. There's some pretty serious revenue, but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket against the outlay. There like a two trillion dollar balance sheet hole in the US alone where investment into AI has gone. While I personally don't agree with them, multiple S-tier machine learning researchers think we've got our wheels stuck in the mud, that autoregressive decoder architectures on a tokin-suffix pre-train is tapped out as a paradigm. It's ok to say "AI is starting to get useful in pretty durable ways" and not sound like an Anthropic shareholder/employee, i.e. completely full of shit.
    • uwamamama 3mo ago
      Uncritical use of today's AI beats all of the optimized use of yesterday's AI by far. I think people like the idea that their success is a result of their efforts, but this is just not the truth.
      • reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
        I don't think anyone's disputing that the models are better than a year ago (though clearly all this, recursive self improvement stuff is utterly hypothetical and that's being generous, most of the progress has been on cost and fit and finish stuff). When it's on the plan, I'll use Fable for some stuff. If I'm paying for Opus? It's 4.5 or 4.6 which were dramatically better aligned and token efficient in the trace at a capability gap that's "you win some and lose some". That can be true while it also being the case that to someone who has no idea how this stuff works under the hood, it's basically Dunning Kreuger in a box. The next person to go /u/PhdInEverything on me with Fable is getting an education in the history of hardware support for mixed precision training or something. Fable is a masterclass in refusal to ground and a dozen other alignment catastrophes. So yeah, the models are still getting a little better, but from here out I think it's rapidly becoming a skill game.
  • idiotsecant 3mo ago
    It's clear that while LLM progress is continuing, it's at something like a linear rate, or slower. The singularity requires exponential improvement. That's not happening. Maybe we will develop something that sets that off, but there's no indication of that right now.
    • dinfinity 3mo ago
      Yet. If the exponential improvement had already started, the singularity would already have happened or happen very, very soon. The logic has always been that the AI would have to have significant tools and agency to do self-improvement for the singularity to occur. This is exactly the thing that a bunch of the AI labs are working on hard right now.
      • daveguy 3mo ago
        Sorry, but labs working hard doesn't make non-polynomial problems suddenly polynomial.
• QuantumGood 3mo ago
  Each new iteration of the hype cycle feels "like its not hype" because the tech is more promising in new ways, but the hype comes from human perception. New tech has to fight a lot of real world and project management issues, and development morphs and slows. We don't know exactly what we have until it faces these issues.
• drob518 3mo ago
  > Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil salesmen are claiming. This is very similar to the internet. The best bubbles are built on a kernel of truth that is then blown way out of proportion and wrapped in layers of snake oil fabrication. > I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be. So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?
  • TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
    Manias go back a long way. The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.
    • parpfish 3mo ago
      And manias are so foundational to the relatively young field of AI that they made the term “AI winter”. We should brace for the third (I think) AI winter soon
      • dgellow 3mo ago
        When the current mania ends that will be more like a tech/software winter than just AI. I expect the public to have a complete distrust for tech companies and politics to push for strict regulations
        • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
• vb-8448 3mo ago
  We are still in time for the "revolution" ... but it will take longer and won't look like than most thought. We still need a bubble pop to drive out all nonsense ideas and paths.
• jeffybefffy519 3mo ago
  The thing i never got about the singularity is that its just one concept that was suggested by a few notable people over time. There is so many different ways AI can go, some which we wouldn't have foreseen.
• lp4v4n 3mo ago
  It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless? LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English. Once the AI fad dies and the next hype appears I told myself I'm going to jump on it to take financial advantage of it. At this point I believe that the technological cycle of hype is an almost entirely social/economic phenomenon and there is no reason not to make money from it given that people insist on this kind of irrational behavior.
• neonstatic 3mo ago
  > Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. I don't want to sound like a jerk, so please let me know if I do - I don't understand why you claim that "most of us" felt that way. I ignored "AI" until mid 2024. Then I tried it and was very unimpressed. I tried again in 2026. Seemed useful, then very quickly I realized that it's something that looks great until you look closer. I was never impressed by a text generator. A talking computer might be the most boring thing I could imagine. I never understood why people got so obsessed by it and I certainly don't understand why it would "change society". Society is composed of people. What would change society is something that would allow people to think less, feel more clearly, express themselves more freely, and suffer less. Of course, things that accomplish these results exist, but they require a lot of effort. I cannot fathom how a technology that doesn't lead to these results could revolutionize anything. In fact, every technology, that I witnessed arising since late 90s has made things worse precisely because it has not done anything to address the human condition, instead praying on it.
• AussieWog93 3mo ago
  I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" - "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android, and then test it on an emulator and sign it with my real key for distribution via Google Play" - "get my GitHub Actions runner on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android, ensuring that it supports all available architectures from the last decade and a half, then check your outputs in a loop until it works" and it just spits it out while you do the dishes. Someone the other day talked about "AI psychosis psychosis" and it absolutely stuck with me. The people who deny this is a big deal are in la-la land. We could literally hit a brick wall in terms of model intelligence now and it would still be a game changer.
  • oblio 3mo ago
    1. Everything you said is more about revolutionizing IT though. IT is more easily testable than other things in real life. 2. The gap between the singularity and really strong automation is huge. It's basically that between 1 million and infinity, or even better, that joke about the difference between 1 million and 1 billion being roughly 1 billion.
    • saghm 3mo ago
      #1 is what's so crazy to me that people have trouble understanding. No one is saying that we're going back to the pre-LLM world; it's just that the world isn't honestly that different than before. Most people's lives are pretty much the same. Their power bills are higher, but that's not all that different from when gas starts costing more because of a new oil war. The government has some new ways to spy and target weapons, but that's pretty abstract to most people (and it's not like they were having trouble doing those things before). Some new tech companies pop up and have a bunch of money, and some existing ones have less, but nobody outside of the tech industry who isn't already a huge outlier in terms of how much they pay attention to stock prices really cares. If this is the singularity, consider me extremely underwhelmed. My job my have changed, but to the rest of the world, it's just more of the same.
• toasty228 3mo ago
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• Aerroon 3mo ago
  Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvements that humans are making. Even if the AI singularity is possible, the acceleration would take a long time. Possibly a lifetime.
  • Izkata 3mo ago
    The singularity is the tipping point where the AI can improve itself faster than humans can comprehend, so the software at least wouldn't be human-designed anymore. It requires a level of self-driven intent and access to their own code LLMs aren't capable of on their own. They might be one component of such a future system though, we just don't know yet. Even then it would probably take quite a while to reach that tipping point. GP is just wrong, talking as if we'd already reached it.
    • danny_codes 3mo ago
      We won't know how close we are to takeoff until takeoff. My main critique of AI is that takeoff is dangerous, and we're basically running towards the cliff as fast as we can. Will you grow wings before you fall to your death? That's basically the bet we're making, if you believe in takeoff. Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"
  • mike_hearn 3mo ago
    Probably not though. AI is already designing its own chips, optimizing its own GPU kernels, suggesting the next experiments to run and writing its own harnesses... recursive self improvement is here already. It's just a question of speed, time and how far it goes.
• ChiMan 3mo ago
  No revolution revolutionizes in the way planned or hyped. Instead, once triggered, it emerges mostly unplanned. It unfolds as the product of human action but not of human design. Individuals will use LLMs as they see fit in their work. They'll make a lot of mistakes because they don't see their own work clearly and because they don't really understand the outcomes others care about. Executives who make their money with their mouths will, of course, endlessly open their mouths, even as they don't understand the tech because they never really use any tech beyond email, text, and phones. And so on. Nobody knows how LLMs will ultimately shake out. But even five minutes of using Claude makes it hard to imagine all white-collar work will continue as in the past.
• wartywhoa23 3mo ago
  I totally agree with all your points except welcoming the singularity. How do you imagine your or your children's lives in the singularity? What do you do there for a living, or which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies? What do you do in the worst case it pushes everyone to underground strongholds to fight machines for the survival of the humankind? And if there's some middle ground, how is it different from today's state of affairs?
  • otikik 3mo ago
    > which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies? I could absolutely fill my days with stuff, no problem
  • dtj1123 3mo ago
    I'd play games, read books and do drugs. It'd be different from today's state of affairs in that I wouldn't need to spend the majority of my waking hours reading stuff I don't care about and building things I don't believe need to exist in order to pay for a house I don't own. Healthcare would probably be more reliable and accessible too. At this point though, I no longer believe this is anyone's future except the most fortunate of the fortunate, most of whom essentially live this way already.
• andy99 3mo ago
  Right, and there are two parallel tracks. First is the “every crack and crevice” part - “ summarize with AI”, “re write with AI”, “help me write”, “analyze with AI”, basically useless features being splattered everywhere in the name of incorporating AI while annoying the F out of everyone. The second is the AI race / existential risk / pretending we’re Oppenheimer track which I think is the larpiest, basically pretending that LLM chatbots are some kind of super weapon and role playing accordingly. None of this means they’re useful, AI coding, for one, obviously is a valuable tool (though there remains a lot to sort out). But the usefulness is unfortunately being overshadowed by, as you say, people not resetting expectations and instead wanting to play terminator or neuromamcer or whatever (I’m sure there are more relevant sci fi).
• tim333 3mo ago
  I think people think things will go faster than they do. The AI revolution will probably be a bit like the industrial revolution which took a couple of centuries to go from Newcomen's steam engine of 1712 to mass produced cars and the like. With AI, Turing came up with his test in 1950 and it's taken about 75 years to get to something that looks like passing. Give it time.
• deleted 3mo ago
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