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.
Bedroom superweapons? Algorithmic propaganda? These things have humans in the loop building them. And the problem of "human alignment" is one unsolved since Cain and Abel.
AI alone is words on a screen.
The sibling thread details the "mass unemployment" scenario, which would be destabilizing, but understates how much of the current world of work is still physical. It's a threat to pure desk workers, but we're not the majority of the economy.
Perhaps there will be political instability, but .. we're already there from good old humans.
But at some point (still quite far away) I'm sure we'll start training a more general purpose model, or an LLM self-training will break outside of the "you're a language model" bounds and we'll end up with exactly that;
An LLM model in a self-training loop that breaks outside of what we've told it to be (a Language model), becomes a general purpose model and then becomes intelligent enough to do something like put itself out onto the Internet. Obviously we'd catch the feelers that it puts out and realise that this sort of behaviour is starting to happen, but imagine if we didn't? A model that trained itself to be general purpose but act like a constantly executing LLM, uploads itself to Hugging Face, gets run on thousands of clusters by people, because it's "best in class" and yes it's sitting there answering LLM type queries but also in the background is sending out beacons & communicating with itself between those clusters to...idk do something nefarious.