We can make some educated guesses and extrapolate some trends. But you are right that most of the people currently claiming to know what's going to happen in 3 years were fast asleep when chat gpt launched, which is almost 3 years ago. And I include myself in that group. Most in the industry did not see that coming. Not even a little bit.
At this point we have half the industry being overly pessimistic and the other half being unreasonably optimistic. The median truth would be in the middle. But I don't think that's a very sound position to take either.
The reason is that I think we're actually dealing with a severe imagination deficit in society. That always happens around big technological changes. And this definitely looks and feels like such a thing. Ten years from now it might all seem obvious in retrospect. But right now we have the optimist camp predicting what boils down to the automotive equivalent of "faster horses" (AGI, I robot, self driving cars, and all the rest). It's going to be this wonderful utopia where no-one works and everything runs by itself. I'm not a big believer in that and I don't think that's how economies work.
And we have a bunch of pessimists predicting that it's all going to end in tears. Dystopia, everybody is going to be unemployed, and a lot of other Luddite nonsense.
The optimists basically lack imagination so they just reach for what science fiction told them is going to happen (i.e. rely on other people's science fiction). And then the pessimists basically are stuck imagining the worst always happens and failing to imagine that there might be things that actually do work.
It's fairly easy to predict/bet that both sides are probably imagining things wrong. Just like people did three years ago. Including myself here. So, not making a prediction here. But, kind of curious to see how the next few years will unfold. Lots of amazing stuff in the past three. I'll have some more of that please.
>But you are right that most of the people currently claiming to know what's going to happen in 3 years were fast asleep when chat gpt launched, which is almost 3 years ago. And I include myself in that group. Most in the industry did not see that coming. Not even a little bit.
The researchers responsible for LLMs didn't see them coming either. The architecture is quite basic, if they knew it would have this success they'd do it way sooner as a PoC, even when hardware wasn't quite up to it.
I’m not sure it was so much folks “not seeing it coming” with ChatGPT, only that anyone with anything beyond surface-level understanding of ML workloads and data science wouldn’t have thought to attempt to package such an immense, expensive, and potentially powerful product as a “chat bot”, and certainly nobody would have thought it would be a good idea to then heavily market it as some sci-fi notion of “artificial intelligence”, and proceed to gaslight the entire planet with what it might eventually be capable of. Only because, with the exception of Sam Altman, such a person would have been laughed out of a career. The only real surprise with LLMs seems to be that unscrupulous people have managed to raise so much goddamn money lying about its potential, that it’s got a real chance of crashing the global economy once everyone realizes it’s never actually gonna replace any meaningful jobs.
I agree with you. The downfall will not be caused by the AI working/not working. It will be caused by all the damn lies all these money hungry snakes are shouting.