AI felt like the gold rush of the mid 1800s. People scrambling to get a shovel in the ground to find a nugget of gold. And to use those proceeds to expand. They are known for not being profitable, continually piling money into R&D, electricity costs and infrastructure on the chance that it pays off.
There have been claims that we have achieved Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and yes, prodding at the latest and greatest thing - it does seem smart. It has amazing reasoning and logic capabilities. Faster at doing tasks than humans and better in most cases.
However it doesn’t exhibit that semblance of life. It doesn’t appear to posses self curated agency. It feels that it is missing that spark of life and interacts with the world in a reactive manner rather than a proactive manner.
I understand that tooling is built to serve and has guard rails implemented to keep it on course as a product.
We’ve traversed this path so far:
Symbolic → Connectionist → Reinforcement → Evolutionary → LLM/Hybrid
Where
Symbolic: Intelligence built from explicit rules and logic.
Connectionist: Intelligence learned through neural pattern recognition.
Reinforcement: Intelligence grown by trial, error, and reward.
Evolutionary: Intelligence evolved via mutation and natural selection.
LLM/Hybrid: Intelligence emerging from scale and integration of data, reasoning, and context.
I think of human language as an encoding mechanism (storing information). I feel that GPTs are like a hologram, in that we encode knowledge via language into a holograph. Then a users requests causes a light to shine through the holograph into a hologram, projecting the answer. That shining of light to cast a shadow of knowledge is instigated by a human, not the AI itself.
It is a useful mechanism for capturing and interfacing with knowledge. Unfortunately it covers 33% of knowledge scenarios. Yes it covers known-knowns. It does nothing for the other two types - known-unknowns, unknown-unknowns.
The next step would be to have agency from the AI itself.
Given that Mathematics is the language of the Physical layer of the Universe we live in, or you could say the quantitative plane of existence. (In my opinion) Mathematics is universal on that plane we live in and is uncovered not invented.
A really helpful next step would be for AI to go off and find us some new knowledge.
Help expand mankind! After all - evolution is the ultimate satisfaction of the Universal fitness function.
A self driven known-unknown and unknown-unknown machine with agency!
I think the euphoria of achieving comprehensive tooling for known-knowns is wearing off.
Thought leaders like Andrej Karpathy and Yan LeCun are seeing the diminishing returns on continuing to head down the Transformer model of processing.
My comments from way back is that we have two paths ahead of us. An AI fueled “industrial revolution” or World War.
I believe the current form of AI will give GDP a significant boost (as well as take jobs from a good portion of the population). But maybe not enough to carry us forward.
Given that AI companies are not profitable, it makes no sense to invest in them. I think the general stock market itself (ignoring money printing) will benefit from the advances. All industries and sizes included. Energy production and hardware infrastructure are akin to the shovels.
My hope is we somehow figure how to take AI to the next level.
The irony of AI is that it is a wrecking ball to the orthodoxy of the existing corporate structure. Pre-AI, the person perceived to be the most intelligent ascended up the corporate ladder by being able to quickly and accurately perform the thinking processes AI can now automate almost instantly.
Now that AI can do most of that executive thinking in a near automated fashion, it means the executives whose jobs were to think and make sound decisions are now redundant.
That's why there's so much pushback in the corporate space against AI. CEOs, VPs, Directors, they all know they are easily replaceable by well trained AI agents.
The greater irony is that the what AI lacks is the unconscious intelligence of the human nervous system that processes information through presence, not language.
Ergo, the ones who will create AI agents that make everyone from the Director to the CEO redundant are the ones who aren't paid to think, but rather, paid to be present.
Those are the rank and file employees.