Technology

An inordinate amount of our attention is afforded to absurdly rich children

You are missing the very crucial part about how this is generalised. That's like saying we don't need to teach math to people anymore, we have calculators now. The AI isn't too capable currently, but dismissing it would be like dismissing consumer PCs, because what are people gonna do with computers?

Valley bullshit aside, I do have to defend the expensive exploration of the generalized AI space purely because it's embarassingly parallel. That is, it just gets so much better the more money and resources you throw at it. It couldn't solve math without a few million dollars worth of supercomputer training time. We didn't know it would create valid VHDL-to-csv-to-VBA scripts, but I got phind(.com) to make me one. And I certainly can't tell Wolfram Alpha to package the math solution it generated as a Javascript function.

Deep Mind is actually delivering shit like an estimate of the entire human proteome structure and creating the transcendently greatest go player of all time.

Not to mention the huge advances in Chess AI. LeelaChessZero is the open-source implementation of the original AlphaZero idea Google came out with, and is rivaling Stockfish 15. Meanwhile, Torch is a new AI being developed that is now kicking Stockfish's ass.

Grandmasters and notices alike are learning a lot from chess AI, figuring out better ways to improve themselves, either by playing them outright, using them for post-game analysis, or watching two bots play and see the kind of creative strategies they can come up with.

While I agree that a lot of the hype around AI goes overboard, you should probably read this recent paper about AI classification: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

Systems like DeepMind are narrow AI, whereas LLMs are general AI.

Nicely put.

A calculator does most of it too, but this is a LLM that can do lots of other things also, which is a big piece of the "general" part of AGI.

Richard Feynman said “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

We are close to a point where a computer that can hold all the problems in its "head" can test all of them against all of the tricks. I don't know what math problems that starts to solve but I bet a few of them would be applicable to cryptology.

But then again, I have no idea what I'm talking about and just making bold guesses based on close to no information.