I don't think AGI is right around the corner

but also just taking what we have now with some major power usage reduction and minor improvements here and there already seems like something which can be very usable/useful in a lot of areas (and to some degree we aren't even really ready for that either, but I guess thats normal with major technological change)

it's just that for those companies creating foundational models it's quite unclear how they can recoup their already spend cost without either major break through or forcefully (or deceptively) pushing it into a lot more places then it fits into

> Meta Invests $100 Billion into Augmented Reality

that fool controls the board and he seems to be just desperately throwing insane ad money against the wall hoping that something sticks

for Altman there is no backing out either, need to make hay while the sun shines

for the rest of us, i really hope these clowns fail like it's 2000 and never get to their dystopian matrix crap.

Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.

Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.

Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.

The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.

The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.