i'm finding it increasingly difficult to participate in modern discourse to the point that i don't really know what to do or how to talk to people
over the past few years, i've seen the capabilities of ai continue to improve, and all the goalposts of what ai should/shouldn't be able to do constantly shift
it's completely obvious that we've discovered a way for machines to learn things. they're now at the capabilities in math and coding where they outcompete most humans on most task.
it should be clear to you that the fundamental barriers that you thought would prevent ai from getting better haven't actually prevented ai from getting better.
it was only a year ago that you said that their capabilities would flatline because we're running out of training data. that sentiment peaked around september last year, and for all the lamentations about data walls or efficient compute frontiers, new paradigms (in RL and others) *have worked*
machines continue to get better. we don't know where they'll stop. and the methods by which they think (cot, scratch pads, python tools) which have barely existed nanoseconds on the cosmic calendar, already *do* show forms of reasoning that allow them to reach impressive conclusions
if we don't agree about this, that machines will continue to learn, and we'll continue to explore paradigms for them in which to think, and that it is atleast quite likely that they'll continue to get better, i already don't know how to converse with you
if you still observe this from a "oh the statistical parrot machine spat out a token in a sequence that was likely, wow, such reasoning!" point of view, i already don't know how to converse with you
and here's where things get more complicated
if you're with me this far, it should be reasonable to describe our current world as one where a new form of possibly superior intelligence is arriving and is steadily improving
now, where things get completely bizarre for me is where *you* think that your opinions of what this new form of intelligence can and cannot do matter or are relevant. and this bleeds into topics like quantum and everything else for me
from my point of view, you are now a chimpanzee on planet earth, studying the arrival of "humans"
you climb up every tree on earth and jump down from it, and you establish that gravity seems to work equally on all surfaces of the earth, and from this experiment you establish that regardless of how smart this new "human" is, it will not be possible for it to master space travel.
because *you* understand gravity
if you don't approach the world from a point of view that you don't actually know anything about what an intelligence smarter than you is capable or not capable of doing, i already don't know hot to converse with you
and i'm not talking about a leap in intelligence that requires something impossible that has never happened in history before. i'm just talking about the difference in intelligence between chimpanzees and humans. which has happened before. and led to space travel.
the only thing that was required for this superior form of intelligence to evolve on the planet (from molecules to *us*) was for a rock (earth) to get hit by an ice ball and then spin around the sun a bunch of times. the ingredients that produce intelligence are not complex, they only require iterations and feedback from the universe
and it appears that this exact process is now happening in machines which do not require the thousand-year process of evolution, because we have invented a way for rocks to think in silicon, and the substrate of intelligence (the matter on which it runs) have shifted to something where it's far more malleable and the iterations are much faster
to me, all of these things are rather simple, easily observable phenomena. they're all ongoing and they're real.
but in all conversations, basically no matter where i look, everyone is still stuck in a "but hoomans can't do space travel because muh gravity"-type of reasoning and are incapable of embracing the very realistic prospects that all our models are quite likely to soon be broken
i tire of the conversation, and find that i do not have much to add to what you are currently talking about, because it appears that we are so diametrically opposed from each other in our understanding of what is happening in the world that we can not begin to have a useful exchange on current topics