Yeah, the brightest minds instead of building useful tech to fight climate change, spend their life building vanity AI projects. Computational resources instead of folding proteins or whatever are wasted on some gradient descent of some useless model.
All while working class wages are stagnant. And so your best career advice is to go get a random tech degree so you could also work on vanity stuff and make money.
This is cryptocurrency equivalent. It's worse than CEOs buying yachts. The latter actually leads to some innovation.
"Nobody is trying AGI" is simply just not true. If you think what they're doing will never lead to AGI, then that's an opinion you're free to have, but it's still just that; an opinion. Our current LLM's are by far the closest resemblance of AGI that we've ever seen. That route may very well be a dead end but it may also not be. You can't know that.
No, LLM will not lead to AGI. But even if they did, applying existing tech to a new problem only to fail cuz you're dumb at estimating the complexity does not, in fact, improve the underlying technology.
To paraphrase in a historical context: no matter how many people run around with shovels digging the ground for something, it will never lead to an invention of the excavator.
The larger issue that people always fail to remember is the energy consumption. We are see massive amounts of electricity.
One peer-reviewed study suggested A.I. could make up 0.5 percent of worldwide electricity use by 2027, or roughly what Argentina uses in a year. Analysts at Wells Fargo suggested that U.S. electricity demand could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven in part to A.I.
The wealthy are under sailing like always. Just like we did with cigarettes or burning fossil fuels. We should have learned but it by the time we do, it might be to late.
I’m willing to bet the vast majority of that money is changing hands among tech companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, AWS, etc. Only a small percentage would go to salaries, etc. and I doubt those rates have changed much…