What if AI doesn’t get much better than this?

THE NEW YORKER

“The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we’re back in the age of wonder and discovery once again,” Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s founders, told Reuters in November.

“Everyone is looking for the next thing.” A contemporaneous TechCrunch article summarized the general mood: “Everyone now seems to be admitting you can’t just use more compute and more data while pretraining large language models and expect them to turn into some sort of all-knowing digital god.”

But such observations were largely drowned out by the headline-generating rhetoric of other A.I. leaders.

“A.I. is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. In an interview with Axios, he predicted that half of entry-level white-collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years. This summer, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, claimed that their companies were close to developing superintelligence.

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