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.
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).
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.
This isn’t true. The biggest companies are all rich because they cater to the massive US middle class. That’s where the big money is at.
It is true, but I can see why you'd be confused. Let me ask you this: if members of the "the massive US middle class" can be replaced with automation, are those companies going 1) to keep paying those workers to support the middle-class demand which made them rich, or are they going to 2) fire them so more money can be shoveled up to the shareholders?
The answer is obviously #2, which has been proven time and again (e.g. how we came to have "the Rust Belt").
> That’s where the big money is at
Now, but not necessarily in the future. I think AI (if it doesn't hit a wall) will change that, maybe not instantaneously, but over time.