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.
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.
How would that work? If there are no consumers then why even bother producing? If the cost of labor and capital trends towards zero then the natural consequence is incredible deflation. If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Our society isn’t really geared for handling double digit deflation so something does need to change if we really are accelerating exponentially.
> If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Imagine you're a billionaire with a data centre and golden horde of androids.
You're the consumer, the robots make stuff for you; they don't make stuff for anyone else, just you, in the same way and for the same reason that your power tools and kitchen appliances don't commute to work — you could, if you wanted, lend them to people, just like those other appliances, but you'd have to actually choose to, it wouldn't be a natural consequence of the free market.
Their production is, indeed, pointless. This doesn't help anyone else eat. The moment anyone can afford to move from "have not" to "have", they drop out of the demand market for everyone else's economic output.
I don't know how big the impact of dropping out would be: the right says "trickle down economics" is good and this would be the exact opposite of that; while the left criticism's of trickle-down economics is that in practice the super-rich already have so much stuff that making them richer doesn't enrich anyone else who might service them, so if the right is correct then this is bad but if the left is correct then this makes very little difference.
Unfortunately, "nobody knows" is a great way to get a market panic all by itself.