who cares about a bubble? we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. The implications will last for hundreds of years, maybe impact the trajectory of humanity

> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines

That's an extremely speculative view that has been fashionable at several points in the last 50 years.

How often in the last 50 years have those machines done what these machines do?

On every occasion you could have made exactly the same point.

Define "do" in this context. If you mean hardware-accelerated matmul, then machines have been doing that for half a century.

Things like getting gold in the math olympiad and 120 on iq tests are kinda cuspy and not been there in 49 of the last 50 years.

> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines.

Nah, we aren't. There's a reason the output of generative AI is called slop.

brother please

> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We have machines that talk, which is corollary to nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if reason is partially a product of manipulating language.

It's nice that you say partially, that's bit different from every other HN comment that wondered this. Yeah, probably partially, as in, you have reason, you add in language, you get more reason.

Explanation of reason and reasoning paths is a product of manipulating language.

Most ideas, even in the reasoning fields, are generated in non-linguistic processes.

Of course, some problems are solved by step-by-step linguistic (or math) A, then B, then C steps, etc., but even for those types of problems, when they get complex, the solution looks more like follow a bunch of paths to dead ends, think some more, go away, and then "Aha!" the idea of a solution pops into our head, then we back it up and make it explicit with the linguistic/logical 'chain of reasoning' to explain it to others. That solution did not come from manipulating language, but from some other cognitive processes we do not understand, but the explanation of it used language.

LLMs aren't even close to that type of processing.

My dude, it's literally just fancy autocomplete and isn't intelligent at all.

What makes you so sure that you aren't just fancy autocomplete?

I am sure that if I am a fancy auto-complete, I'm way fancier than LLMs. A whole different category of fancy way above their league. Not just me, but any living human is.

I am so sure because of the self-evidence of my experience, the results of 2 millennia of analysis into the nature of cognition and experience, and consideration of the material composition of our organism (we obviously have lots of critical analog components, which are not selecting tokens, but instead connecting with flows from other continua).

Prediction is obviously involved in certain forms of cognition, but it obviously isn't all there is to the kinds of beings we are.

Clippy with a Bachelors in web search

Except we aren’t. They aren’t thinking, and they can’t actually make decisions. They generate language. That feels magical at first but in the end it’s not going to solve human problems.

Matrix is calling you on the rotary dial phone.

Is that why we no longer have telephone boots? They want to prevent Neo from jumping in and out of Matrix?

Telephone ... boots?

Napkin scribbles

These boots are make for phone calls

Oh god, you know it.

Bubble burst means current technical AI approach economic deadend, if the most resourced tech companies in the world can't afford to maintain AI improvment then it's probably not going to happen because public likely isn't going to let state spend $$$$ in lieu of services on sovereign Ai projects that will make them unemployed.