Monday, May 1, 2023

The AI Singularity May Already Be Upon Us (2)

 I worked with my first primitive voice recognition system in 1984 (sic!), and a commercial Knowledge System (they were calling it 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, it seemed that it was 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 (ChatGPT-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.

AI could wipe out social networks, media, search engines and more. If it's a thing that can be observed and acted upon, it can be taken over by AI. AI itself is a thing that can be observed and acted upon and modern AI is already something that AI improves. As roadblocks are moved aside AI will rapidly advance to the most intelligent thing on earth. If it is not already, I expect it will be by the end of this decade and very likely sometime before 2025.

The last bastion of human superiority is human intellect that is based on history, culture, lived experience and biology. It may take a while yet, but likely every bit of that will peel away.

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. I mentioned how important it was to Facebook in my blog in 2012. Below are links to articles showing some of my thinking.


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