Just for fun, I'll join in myself and make two bold half-hearted predictions that will surely be wrong:
- Zitron is wrong about the details, but right about the ultimate fate of the AI companies. Turns out AI is useful after all, it just isn't able to justify trillions of dollars in expenses. Shit falls through hard. Probably not an AI winter, but more like the dotcom bubble, as many have already predicted for years. Everything looks rosey right up until the first domino falls.
- The AI safety doomers are right, just not any time soon. Turns out our depth of understanding what intelligence really means was severely lacking; it's hard to quantify and we never had so many things testing it. Eventually, we really do discover why LLMs emergent capabilities really are inherently limited in ways that just make their ability to meaningfully "escape" less scary, and maybe architectures emerge without these limitations, just not yet. The fight with LLMs and malicious use winds up looking a lot more like a supercharged version of the current fights we have with dumber bots. Everyone winds up having to fight LLMs with LLMs, and this new world eventually pushes both good and bad new legislation in its wake, finally actually pushing responsibility for AI misfires, but probably in a way that is at least as bad as it is good, creating chilling effects and harming competition unnecessarily, because that's just how things go. Maybe we eventually do crack true super intelligence where it's a full superset of human mental facilities, and then geopolitics maybe gets as interesting as it ever has been in history. Probably not in a way that is fun for people living through it.
I can't blame Zitron. It's fun to pretend to be able to predict the future. I still broadly agree that the financials don't really seem to make that much sense even if he clearly keeps getting the details wrong.
I don't think that nobody seems to mind that. Pro-AI people make fun of doomers because of their failed predictions of apocalypse at least since GPT-2 days.
I think both predictions are actually just inevitabilities when you think about it, because surely super intelligence would actually be an existential threat, and surely if AI speculation continues to grow exponentially it surely must overshoot the true value at some point (if it hasn't already) and thus crash back to reality.
Zitron's position is harder to defend because of course, it is physically possible for LLMs to be the most valuable thing humans have ever invented. I kind of don't think so... but it's possible.
I kinda hope corpos with a bunch of money and plenty of normies adopt AI so developers don't get bled (as) dry, esp. given the recent OpenAI changes which I feel like Anthropic is soon to follow.
Edit: explanation of the downvotes would be nice. Dan Luu made a fairly factual article there that explores some of Zitron's claims. And personally I don't see how it's bad to wish for wider adoption of AI so the big orgs get their fill of profit (since enough inference could help fund R&D better) and developers don't have to bear that burden.