I don’t have many long stretches of time where someone doesn’t mention the existential crisis that many people in intellectual fields are going through: whether AI will take their jobs or not. And what's crazy to me is how dystopian these people make the future out to be. I think that even if we extrapolate timelines based on current rates of progress, there’s still so many interesting problems that will need to be solved post-AI. At the highest level, I don’t believe AI is the last “big” thing. Problems like inference, robotics, energy, or even world hunger will persist, and will require significant innovations beyond the current state-of-the-art systems. AI is currently, and has been, really really good at solving well-defined problems in the digital world, but as soon a problem does not satisfy these two properties, AI falls flat. At a slightly more controversial level, the thing that these models are optimizing for does not make them capable of solving problems in the real worl...
Posts on the last day of every month