I’m sceptical that AI runs away into a vertical singularity. I’m expecting it to scale horizontally rather than vertically. Although I never see anyone talking / thinking about it like this. People are still stuck in the framework of IQ is a vertical scalar, therefore all intelligence will scale vertically as IQ does. Even though we have learnt this is not the case at all when building enterprise level applications. The tech industry still can’t see the wood for the trees. Wrt AI. Repeating all the vertical scaling assumptions / mistakes of the 1990’s. Generalisation won’t be achieved with a vertical monolith. It will be achieved through massive parallelisation of discrete specialisations. ie horizontally and not vertically. I built large industrial AI models to make physical world predictions from petabytes of laser interferometry data and there were massive strategic learnings from doing that. I still never see anyone else in public thinking and understanding the space as strategically as we were in 2018. I presume people somewhere have a handle on this, but it’s all behind closed doors. Much of the public consensus is just flat wrong, we went through all the same learnings 5 years ago. There are some big surprises on the road ahead. Lots of capital is going to be misallocated.

Replies (4)

Yudkowski and his ilk are 21st century luddites. That someone with no education and no discernible skills would be worried about AI eating their lunch should surprise no one. There will be a lot of bumps in the road but AI will make all of our lives better.
I commented earlier that hardware is the only place I see anyone working out a commercial advantage at the moment because the software will be distributed . You’ve got a lot more insight to that obviously which id be keen to hear. And agree there will be a lot of misallocations in capital 😂 Google looks bad now but MS won’t look any better. When printer goes brrr and the VCs go wild it could be really entertaining!
IMO AI is only good if we are ruled by a pro-White fascist government, but otherwise it has the potential to destroy everything. Unfortunately we are ruled by the most evil possible group of people instead.