The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

I can’t be the only one who has watched this all unfold with a sense of inevitability, surely.

When the first serious CUDA based ML demos started appearing a decade or so ago, it was, at least to me, pretty clear that this would lead to AGI in 10-15 years - and here we are. It was the same sort of feeling as when I first saw the WWW aged 11, and knew that this was going to eat the world - and here we are.

The thing that flummoxes me is that now that we are so obviously on this self-reinforcing cycle, how many are still insistent that AI will amount to nothing.

I am reminded of how the internet was just a fad - although this is going to have an even greater impact on how we live, and our economies.

What makes you think AGI is either here or imminent?

For me the current systems still clearly fall short of that goal.

They do fall short, but progress in this field is not linear. This is the bit that I struggle to comprehend - that which was literally infeasible only a few years ago is now mocked and derided.

It’s like jet engines and cheap intercontinental travel becoming an inevitability once the rubicon of powered flight is crossed - and everyone bitching about the peanuts while they cruise at inconceivable speed through the atmosphere.

Just like supersonic travel between Europe and America becoming common place was inevitable. Oh, wait.

Optimism is good, blind optimism isn't.

It is yet inevitable - but it wasn’t sustainable in the slightest when it was first attempted - Concorde was akin to the Apollo programme, in being precocious and prohibitively expensive due to the technical limitations of the time. It will, ultimately, be little more remarkable than flying is currently, even as we hop around on suborbital trajectories.

It isn’t a question of optimism - in fact, I am deeply pessimistic as to what ML will mean for humanity as a whole, at least in the short term - it’s a question of seeing the features of a confluence of technology, will, and knowledge that has in the past spurred technical revolution.

Newcomen was far from the first to develop a steam engine, but there was suddenly demand for such beasts, as shallow mines became exhausted, and everything else followed from that.

ML has been around in one form or another for decades now - however we are now at the point where the technology exists, insofar as modern GPUs exist, the will exists, insofar as trillions of dollars of investment flood into the space, and the knowledge exists, insofar as we have finally produced machine learning models which are non-trivial.

Just as with powered flight, the technology - the internal combustion engine - had to be in place, as did the will (the First World War), and the knowledge, which we had possessed for centuries but had no means or will to act upon. The idea was, in fact, ridiculous. Nobody could see the utility - until someone realised you could use them to drop ordnance on your enemies.

With supersonic flight - the technology is emerging, the will will be provided by the substantial increase in marginal utility provided by sub-hour transit compared to the relatively small improvement Concorde offered, and the knowledge, again, we already have.

So no, not optimism - just observance of historical forces. When you put these things together, there tend to be technical revolutions, and resultant societal change.