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Norion on 24 May 2026
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curl-6 said:
Norion said:

For Gary Marcus something to keep in mind is that he hasn't exactly had the best track record on this topic in the past couple years. For example a couple years ago he starting writing an essay about how the AI bubble will collapse in 2025 but then was basically like scratch that it's happening later this year (2024). There's also that back then he had doubts that generative AI would ever be able to work well and just a couple years later it's already doing big things. Sceptic voices like his are valuable but those sort of voices have not been accurate on this subject lately.

For the thinking part I don't wanna get into a semantic argument over what exactly thinking is so I'll rephrase and say that they don't just predict what the next thing is supposed to be and remix and regurgitate data. State of the art models today are more complex than that and have gotten quite powerful so are capable of doing big things like advancing the field of mathematics now.

A reason I brought it up is you said earlier in the thread that AI capabilities are overstated and it can be useful in a few specific cases which comes across as a major underestimate of the power and applications of recent top end models since the applications and general utility is already vast. While just how exactly huge of a deal AI will become long term is up in the air it already being a big deal now is firmly established at this point with its current capabilities and rate of progress. Basically in the past half year or so there's been so much advancement that the technology can't be reasonably downplayed any more.

I'm still of the view it is overhyped. 

A computer solving a maths problem isn't revolutionary; computers have been doing this since the 1950s.

According to AI companies we were supposed to have sentient superintelligence by now, yet not only has this failed to materialize, but so many of AI's applications are still riddled with problems and/or actively make things worse than they were before.

AI companies continue to hemorrhage billions, drive up the price of hardware and services, waste colossal amounts of resources, and flood the internet with garbage, while the technology itself constantly gets basic things wrong and is fundamentally unreliable.

Computers in the 1950's were not doing something as advanced as disproving something mathematicians thought was the case for close to a century. Thinking it's overhyped is fine but I do highly suggest looking up what mathematicians are saying on it if you haven't yet. There is variance in opinion with some thinking it's a bigger or smaller deal than others but it being significant has broad agreement with some worried that their degree will be mostly worthless in a few years due to AI completely taking over the field.

What AI companies said we'd have ASI by 2026? It's still flawed but top end models and in particular more powerful internal models like this OpenAI one are reliable enough now to be a big deal and do major things. Another big thing is in the Ukraine war drones are beginning to have autonomous capabilities impacting the war. More than anything a country fighting for its continued existence trusting the technology and benefitting from it proves just how big of a deal this stuff has already become I'd say.