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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on.

But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is proof that their claims aren't true.

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> improving itself in an exponential growth

That seems like a possibly mythical critical point, at which a phase transition will occur that makes the AI system qualitatively different from its predecessors. Exponential to the limit of infinity.

All the mad rush of companies and astronomical investments are being made to get there first, counting on this AGI to be a winner-takes-all scenario, especially if it can be harnessed to grow the company itself. The hype is even infecting governments, for economic and national interest. And maybe somewhere a mad king dreams of world domination.

What world domination though? If such a thing ever existed for example in the US, the government would move to own and control it. No firm or individual would be allowed to acquire and exercise that level of power.

Explosions rely on having a lot of energy producing material that can suddenly go off. Even if AI starts self improving it's going to be limited by the amount of energy it can get from the power grid which is kind of maxed out at the moment. It may be exponential growth like weeds growing, ie. gradually and subject to human control, rather than like TNT detonating.

LLMs are already superhuman at many tasks. You're also wrong about AI not accelerating AI development. There was at least one paper published this year showing just such a result. It's just beginning.

Said another way, will a firm suddenly improve radically because they hired a thousand PhDs folks? Not quite.

Many things sound good on paper. But paper vs reality are very different. Things are more complex in reality.

This is brilliant and I can't believe I haven't heard this idea before.

The idea was first popularized in 1993 by Verner Vinge, who coined the term "singularity". You can read his paper here: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

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