The AI Singularity May Already Be Upon Us

I worked with my first primitive voice recognition system in 1984 (sic!). commercial AI in the 1980s. I have followed along as advancements were made. For the last few years I have been telling friends and family that AI work is more advanced and advancing faster than most people realize. In fact, in my opinion it was and is advancing more quickly than even a lot of AI experts believed Last year, I wrote an article titled Coming Soon: General Artificial Intelligence.

When asked to predict if AI would soon be here, I said: 80s: No, 90s: No, 00s: No, 10s:No, 20s: maybe. I said 'maybe' at the beginning of this decade. I said, essentially, 'probably' in spring 2022. As of 2023 I would say that depending on how you are going to define it, it is already here or just about to be here this year.

All the bits and pieces are in place for astonishing AI. AI systems are already in wide use. Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4), based on foundational large language models (LLMs) tuned with supervised and reinforcement learning, gained more than one hundred million users in two months and is now being used routinely by many.

If you have the stamina to watch the video linked below all the way through, I think you will be surprised at just how far along this is. People in the know consider this to be an imminent threat. Super intelligence could happen any time now. "According to the latest available data, ChatGPT currently has over 100 million users. And the website currently generates 1 billion visitors per month. This user and traffic growth was achieved in a record-breaking two-month period (from December 2022 to February 2023)"

AI Researchers reviewing just how far along and dangerous AI has become:

https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ

AI has occupied my thinking for years now. It shows up for the first time in earnest in my blog in 2012. Below are links to a few articles showing some of my thinking.

• "One of the tools that Facebook needs to gain mastery of quickly is AI." -- The facebook singularity at $1,000,000,000,000
• "Consciousness at its heart is relatively simple. It is an awareness of oneself within the world." -- Conscious Artificial Intelligence
• [Using AI] "You design and build a pipeline that takes precursor molecules, and alters them step-wise such that multiple reactions assemble something that would otherwise be essentially impossible. " -- Enzyme Pipeline
• "Over the next couple of decades, automation will replace most jobs" What happens when we replace jobs with automation
• "Machines will become entirely more intelligent than human beings are. We will have a positive feedback loop as better AI systems design even better AI systems." -- Coming Soon: General Artificial Intelligence
• "exceed the ability of most people to do extemporaneously on their own and likely even if they had a chance to spend some time researching" -- Genuine online chat with a robot

On the strength of chats with ChatGPT and other things, I started a blog documenting conversations with AI systems:

https://aichatlog.blogspot.com/2023/04/nndlmlllmnlpnlunlgcvfrtgpt-and-ai.html