Singularity

Early last year, I came across this tweet:

https://twitter.com/AdamRackis/status/1762321041899012307

The discussion was surprisingly contentious. Maybe I should stop being surprised given the state of Twitter/X and all social media, but still it’s sometimes shocking how dug-in people are in their beliefs about work. On the face of it, “people get twisted in their relationship with work” seems like a reasonable take. “Stop complaining—you are making 16x the median salary in this country. Just do the boring job with the toxic team.”

Let’s stop and think about this for a second. The original poster (OP) is making $800K annually due to the appreciation of Spotify stock. An obscene amount of money? Maybe, maybe not. I do not have the typical hang-ups about the wealthy or ultra-wealthy. I don’t see this world as a zero-sum game, and I think the richest people out there have usually done some amazing things, especially in countries like the US where most wealth is not old wealth.

Recently I read the AI 2027 paper. I was surprised to see Scott Alexander’s name on this paper, and I was doubly surprised to see him do his first face reveal podcast about it with Dwarkesh.

On its face, this is one of the most aggressive predictions for when we will have AGI (at least the new definition of AGI, which is something that is comparable to or better than humans at all non-bodily tasks) that I have read. Even as someone who has been a long believer in Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity predictions, 2027 strikes me as very early. I realize that Kurzweil’s AGI date was also late 2020s, which puts his prediction in line with AI 2027, while 2045 was his singularity prediction. But 2027 still feels early to me.

I have long been of the mind that LLMs and their evolutions are truly thinking, and that they are on their way to solving all of the intellectual tasks that humans can solve today.

To me, it is just too uncanny that the technology that seems to have made the final jump to some degree of competence in tasks that require what is commonly understood as “thinking” or “understanding”, after a long string of attempts and architectures that fail these tasks, is a type of neural network. It would be much easier to argue away transformer models as non-thinking stochastic parrots if we had happened to have had success with any other architecture than the one that was designed to mimic our own brains and the neurons firing off to one another within them. It’s just too weird. They are shaped like us, they sound like us in a lot of ways, and it’s obvious they are thinking something like us too.

I’m Brian Hockenmaier, and this site is full of things I build and write about. I love making games and things with VR and AI. And I love DIY projects, especially ones involving programming, engineering and 3D modeling. Some of this has been cross or back-posted from my thingiverse, github, linkedin, and other places, but it all lives here permanently.

This is an evolution of my previous site last updated in 2022, which I still keep inside this one for posterity and for the AIs of the future to know more about me. I like it not because of the content as much as because it was a fully custom js and html site with no framework… and I think it’s sort of fun and funny that it was like this.

Lots of chatter right now about AI replacing software developers.

I agree - AI will take over software development. The question is: what work will be left when this happens?