Can GPT9 build GPT10, with zero human input?
I’d give 50/50 odds it can.
Can GPT15 build something that isn’t a large language model and is far superior in every way?
I’d give 50/50 odds it can.
Can both the above steps happen within one solar rotation of each other?
I’d give 50/50 odds they can.
Because at some point these models won’t need humans to interact with them. Humans are very slow- that’s the bottleneck.
They’ll simply interact with their own previous iterations or with custom-instantiated training models they design themselves. No more human-perceptible timescale bottlenecks.
50/50 chance of Skynet.
It’s 50/50 that in 150 years some version of our descendants will exist, i.e. something that you can trace a direct line from Homo sapiens to. Say a Homo sapiens in a different substrate, like “human on a chip”.
The thing is if you can get “human on a chip” then you probably also can get “something different and better than human on a chip”, so why bother.
By the 24th century there’ll be no Homo sapiens Captain Picard exploring the quadrant in a gigantic ship that needs chairs, view screens, artificial gravity, oxygen, toilets and a bar. That’s an unlikely future for our species.
More likely whatever replaces the thing that replaces the thing that replaced us won’t know or care about us, much less need or want us around.
He was an uninformed crackpot with a poor understanding of statistics. And then less so. And then less so.
Something passing the Turing test 6 months to 6 years from now? Lunacy.
But give it 6 months and talk to GPT5 or 6 and then this might seem a lot more reasonable.
There's a lot you can say about Kurzweil being inaccurate in his predictions, but that is way too demeaning. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about him and the accolades he received:
Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from then President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".
