S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

I found the discussion around inference scaling with the 'Wait' hack so surreal. The fact such an ingeniously simple method can impact performance makes me wonder how many low-hanging fruit we're still missing. So weird to think that improvements on a branch of computer science is boiling down to conjuring the right incantation words, how you even change your mindset to start thinking this way?

Now imagine where we are in 12 months from now. This article from February 5 2025 will feel quaint by then. The acceleration keeps increasing. It seems likely we will soon have recursive self-improving AI -- reasoning models which do AI research. This will accelerate the rate of acceleration itself. It sounds stupid to say it, but yes, the singularity is near. Vastly superhuman AI now seems to arrive within the next few years. Terrifying.

This is something I have been suppressing since I don't want to become chicken little. Anyone who isn't terrified by the last 3 months probably doesn't really understand what is happening.

I went from accepting I wouldn't see a true AI in my lifetime, to thinking it is possible before I die, to thinking it is possible in in the next decade, to thinking it is probably in the next 3 years to wondering if we might see it this year.

Just 6 months ago people were wondering if pre-training was stalling out and if we hit a wall. Then deepseek drops with RL'd inference time compute, China jumps from being 2 years behind in the AI race to being neck-and-neck and we're all wondering what will happen when we apply those techniques to the current full-sized behemoth models.

It seems the models that are going to come out around summer time may be jumps in capability beyond our expectations. And the updated costs means that there may be several open source alternatives available. The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening.

> The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening.

That's not the scary part. The scary part is the intelligence at scale that could be available to the average employer. Lots of us like to LARP that we're capitalists, but very few of us are. There's zero ideological or cultural framework in place to prioritize the well being of the general population over the profits of some capitalists.

AI, especially accelerating AI, is bad news for anyone who needs to work for a living. It's not going to lead to a Star Trek fantasy. It means an eventual phase change for the economy that consigns us (and most consumer product companies) to wither and fade away.

I agree with you and I am scared. My problem is: if most people can't work, who is going to pay for the product/services created with IA?

I get a lot of "IA will allow us to create SaaS in a weekend" and "IA will take engineers jobs", which I think they both may be true. But a lot of SaaS surive because engineers pay for them -- if engineer don't exist anymore, a lot of SaaS won't either. If you eat your potential customers, creating quick SaaS doesn't make sense anymore (yeah, there are exceptions, etc., I know).

> My problem is: if most people can't work, who is going to pay for the product/services created with IA?

A lot of those will probably go under, too. I think a lot of people are in for a rude awakening.

The only people our society and economy really values are the elite with ownership and control, and the people who get to eat and have comfort are those who provide things that are directly or indirectly valuable to that elite. AI will enable a game of musical chairs, with economic participants iteratively eliminated as the technology advances, until there are only a few left controlling vast resources and capabilities, to be harnessed for personal whims. The rest of us will be like rats in a city, scraping by on the margins, unwanted, out of sight, subsisting on scraps, perhaps subject to "pest control" regimes.