2026 predictions:
No idea, feels like we're in the AI fast takeoff scenario and most of my predictions for a 5-10 year timeline came to fruition already.
I just watched an agentic coding tool flawlessly build an app it would've taken me months to build a few years ago, even solving multiple engineering problems that I didn't have a solution for yet.
Couple this with real advances in material and biological sciences from generative models (see: rfdiffusion, mattergen) and we're in very interesting territory once agentic harnesses are applied to other fields.
If, as the people with the most understanding seem to suggest, this is just a point on the curve all bets are off. Feels like prompting as an interface is what's holding back most capability, not the actual capabilities of the models themselves (and most people don't want to do prompt engineering).
Popular sentiment is bad, but also mostly meme-driven and based on inaccuracies rather than focusing on the (very real) concerning implications, and is often ideology/trend driven (this exact trend happened with crypto opposition, and is common among many of the same people). This probably continues to increase as capabilities increase, as people start to fully understand that nothing stops this train.
This leads to negative outcomes because the counterbalances are based on incorrect mental models, and as such are ineffective, rather than presenting a balanced opposition to the worst potential excesses and eventual ownership of the technology (the left is fixated on water use memes rather than advocating for open source models with public/no ownership of the means of production, as one minor example).
The main questions remain around correct positioning for most forward-looking people, and how to allocate to maximize returns from the wider economic gains from the proliferation of technology.
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