Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
From the inimitable writers of AI2027, we now have...
AI2040!
https://ai-2040.com/
Typical nonsense. Among other things they are talking 6fold increase in GDP by 2032 in their scenario, MOSTLY driven by neural networks generating text (and one extra currrent GDP driven by robots) and median personal income being 1 million dollars (inflation adjusted) by 2035.
I am particularly amused that they have all the politicking happening in the next presidential administration rather than this year so they can pretend that all their governmental fantasies will happen because someone sane will naturally come to the conclusions they would.
There's a corresponding siskind post also called something something plan A, I skimmed until the part where the US and China take de facto control of chip infrasrtucture and distribution (saying "nationalise" is haram for free market types), basically imagine having to write a letter to the government to formally justify upgrading your computer, and that's all the AI fanfiction I can tolerate without ruining my breakfast.
Also clanker crankers appropriating the term 'Golden Path' from Dune is just distasteful.
Oh damn, they originally said it was gonna be called AI 2030, so they pushed it back a bit
It’s not a rehash of AI 2027 with moved-back timelines like I thought it would be, instead its what they believe should happen in regards to AI development
And in the first footnote:
According to them, preliminary analysis of the data as of July 2026 says that rate of progress is 75% of AI 2027. This says Daniel K only believes in a 25% chance of AGI by the end of 2027, their model also hasn’t changed so their medians are still shown as beyond 2027. Footnote 11 also flat-out says they have no idea how much things will keep progressing
I’m not gonna be able to go through the whole thing because busy today, but those are my observations based off a quick glance
They aren't even trying to hide the fact that their predictions have already failed but instead claiming victory.
Should’ve left in the full footnote:
So yeah you’re bang on the money. Funny how they went on a press tour hyping up Kokotajlo as a forecaster and claiming that dismissing AI 2027 as hype was a “grave mistake” to “yeah we did not expect for it to follow our predictions” and still being slower than what they predicted
Piggybacking off myself to say that the way they wrote the update on their 2025 review is weird. I’m assuming that they mean 2025 was 65% pace but 2026 crept up to 75%, but the way they wrote it makes me think that they actually meant to say “we originally thought 2025 was 65%, but new data shows it was actually 75%” which would be odd, I’m still assuming the former since it makes more sense to me (they also drop it with zero elaboration like, what metric increased with this new data since this was an overall % of pace? not to mention the real percentage was 58-66% based off their means and medians so it would actually look like 58-76% pace)
I mean no matter which way you spin it we’re still going slower than AI 2027, so hooray
(turned this into a second comment so they first one wouldn’t be a wall of text)
My favorite part was the section where they worked out the logistics of China hiding a data center inside of a mountain.
I like how Yud's rogue data center air raid task force is gradually becoming another weird rationalist accepted truth.
Considering that they think that chatbots are as important as nukes, there is a precedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/816_Nuclear_Military_Plant
2040, wasn't that Kurzweils eventual prediction?
@Soyweiser Last timer I looked (probably around 2001) I seem to recall Kurzweil was saying AGI and brain uploading by 2025. He's basically selling Christian evangelical premillennialism, minus the Baby Jeezus.