AI and Compute
I'm going to draw up some charts about hull displacement on ships from the dawn of time up until about 1950. Then we can have a really informed conversation about the naval power of countries through the ages. I think we need to be ready for the implications of there one day being a battleship the size of the Pacific that will allow its owner to rule the world.<p>Forgive the sarcasm, but I'm really put off by the aggressive weak-to-strong generalizations that are going on here. I'm also very excited about AI, but I don't understand how lines like,<p>>> <i>But at least within many current domains, more compute seems to lead predictably to better performance, and is often complementary to algorithmic advances.</i><p>can be extrapolated to anything more than a fun conversation to have over drinks, or the plot for a bad sci-fi movie about AI (which, to be fair, are also quite prevalent in the current zeitgeist). We're definitely at a new tier of "kinds of problems computers can solve", but surely experience and history in this space should tell us that we need to expect massive, seemingly insurmountable plateaus before we see the next tier of growth, and that that next tier will be much more a matter of paradigm shift than of growth on a line.<p>The systems on this graph all do different things in different ways. It's one thing to abstract over compute power via something like Moore's Law, or societal complexity via the Kardashev scale. But I think we need a <i>much</i> more nuanced set of metrics to provide any kind of insight in to the various AI techniques. Or an entirely different way of looking at 'intelligence'