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Jan 23Liked by Daniel Nest

-Zooming out a bit, these changes all seem pretty incremental and not revolutionary

Yea, I feel we’ve reached a kind of plateau. On one hand I’m glad we’re not in a yudkowskian doom loop. On the other hand, I think AI will have at least as much influence on our lives as the internet itself. From now on, I expect only incremental developments. But I look forward to reading about every single increment along the way. Cheers to the future!

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Yeah there's lots of chatter about whether LLMs have more or less peaked at GPT-4 levels with our current approach, etc. But as Ethan Mollick frequentlly highlights: Even if we never get a more powerful model in the future (highly unlikely), we have many years of benefits from simply absorbing GPT-4's potential and intregrating it into more areas of society.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the potential of AI, althugh we do need to get a bunch of things right.

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Zooming out a bit, these changes all seem pretty incremental and not revolutionary (apart from maaaaaybe the "alpha everywhere" concept). It seems like we're due for a few months of consolidation and small improvements on the glut at attempted revolutionary software from last year.

Then, I'm reminded that "revolutionary" and "incremental" aren't mutually exclusive. A watched pot never boils. These minor changes can make an enormous difference over time.

If you buried your head in the sand in the middle of 2023 and came up for air just now to look around, I think you'd see revolutionary change since mid-2023, especially with image and video generation (and the LLM understanding how to do images).

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True. I think another part of it is elevated expectations for what constitutes a major breakthrough. We're so used to seeing near-weekly milestones, so nowadays things that might've been major news are par for course.

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100%. In the "before times", I would get really excited about these smaller breakthroughs that seemed like they could be revolutionary. That was the way it was from at least 2010 through 2020.

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