Whenever I see comments like this I wonder if anyone making them has taken a course in Thermodynamics.

Just explaining what 'singularity' means. Thanks for slanging me for no reason! Always raised the level of conversation.

My bad. I misread your comment as someone suggesting this stuff could scale forever.

Sorry for responding rudely as well. That didn't help either.

Like the folks pushing the grey goo panic? In my experience, nope.

Everything’s possible until you have to actually make it work, then surprisingly the actual possibilities end up quite limited.

That said, despite micro-nuclear propulsion being a fantasy, the bomb was real.

AI is real too, but the computational capacity of the human race is not limitless. AI is expensive as hell to run, and more advanced systems might require more and more computation. We can only build so many GPUs, and the rate at which those GPUs get faster is likely to slow down over the next decade in the absence of new physics. Infinite is impossible.

I also have to wonder how far throwing a shitload of data at a statistical machine will get us, without a much stronger understanding of how these systems work and what the goals should be to achieve "AGI", whatever that means.

That depends on what you mean by AI, no?

Sure, but it seems fairly safe to assume that better models or more sophisticated training algorithms will require more compute.

I agree with you about thermodynamics. When people use words like “limitless,” it’s hard to take what they are saying seriously.

But,

> AI is expensive as hell to run, and more advanced systems might require more and more computation. We can only build so many GPUs

While certainly not using techniques like LLMs, we do know you can get some decent intelligence out of a 23 watt analog computer, the human brain.

So it is plausible that we could find algos + hardware which use 100W of power, and are quite a bit smarter than a human. Multiply that times a multi-megawatt datacenter, and the availability of some level of super intelligence might appear to be relatively “limitless.”

Unfortunately the human brain can't be powered by a 23 W windmill. We have to run an enormous infrastructure project (agriculture and logistics) that most of the world seems to be dedicated to, so people can think about making fart-joke TikToks.

Could you explain what you mean by this? Not sure if this is even what you're talking about, but I can't imagine how a thermodynamic limit could apply here. Isn't there virtually infinite negentropy we can borrow from nearby to use in the places that matter to us most?