Comment by layer8
The slowest is a sudden and permanent plateau, where all attempts at progress turn out to result in serious downsides that make them unworkable.
The slowest is a sudden and permanent plateau, where all attempts at progress turn out to result in serious downsides that make them unworkable.
Even if this were true, it's not quite the end of the story is it? The hype itself creates lots of compute and to some extent the power needed to feed that compute, even if approximately zero of the hype pans out. So an interesting question becomes.. what happens with all the excess? Sure it probably gets gobbled up in crypto ponzi schemes, but I guess we can try to be optimistic. IDK, maybe we get to solve cancer and climate change anyway, not with fancy new AGI, but merely with some new ability to cheaply crunch numbers for boring old school ODEs.
Like an exponentially growing compute requirement for negligible performance gains, on the scale of the energy consumption of small countries? Because that is where we are, right now.