AI Hype machine

Industry leaders don’t have a good track record of predicting AI developments. … As an example, Sutskever had an incentive to talk up scaling when he was at OpenAI and the company needed to raise money. But now that he heads the startup Safe Superintelligence, he needs to convince investors that it can compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, despite having access to much less capital. Perhaps that is why he is now talking about running out of data for pre-training, as if it were some epiphany and not an endlessly repeated point.

Agreed. While I have found myself amazed by each iteration of the latest models, and the benchmarking that has sprung up around it, and subsequent industries. I can’t help but notice that AI sucks at second level thinking, is disastrous for anything but superficial scripting (programming) and is fundamentally a prediction machine bound by its training data. No amount of letterNumber-omega-version-person-noun naming masks the reality that AI can only do so much.

_{Quote Citation: ARVIND NARAYANAN AND SAYASH KAPOOR, “Is AI progress slowing down? Making sense of recent technology trends and claims”, DEC 18, 2024, https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-progress-slowing-down}