Comment by imiric

"The Mother of All Demos" was a showcase of an early generation of technology that existed and had a practical purpose. There was never a question if and how the technology would improve. It was only a matter of time and solid engineering.

On the other hand, improvements to "AI" of similar scales are very much uncertain. We have seen moderate improvements from brute force alone, i.e. by throwing more data and compute at the problem, but this strategy has reached diminishing returns, and we have been at a plateau for about a year now. We've seen improvements by applying better engineering (MCP, "agents", "skills", etc.), but have otherwise seen the same tech demos in search of a problem, with a bit more polish at every iteration.

There's no doubt that statistical models are a very useful technology with many applications, some of which we haven't discovered yet. But given the technology we have today, the claim that something like it could be used to generate interactive video which could be used instead of traditional software is absurd. This is not a matter of gradual iterations to get there—it would require foundational breakthroughs to work even remotely reliably, which is as uncertain as LLMs were 10 years ago.

In any case, whatever sama and his ilk have to say about this topic is hardly relevant. These people would say anything to keep the hype-driven valuation pump going.