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Artificial Intelligence might be the most important technology of our time. If dreams of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are achieved, then its only a matter of time before we reach ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). Achieving ASI would be, what we call, the “Singularity” - the point where AI is sufficiently advanced to improve itself at scales and speeds unfathomable.
A superintelligent AI would be akin to a God-like being and the world would change in ways hitherto unimaginable.
While the AI community dreams up visions of superintelligent artificial intelligence, the wider world seems blissfully unaware of the goings-on within the AI space. OpenAI’s singular achievement - GPT-4 - has been reduced to a sophomoric essay writing tool and a lazy man’s Google. Text-to-image generation, once the subject of wide eyed wonder within the AI community, is now mostly used to create awful slop that clutters Facebook.
What the AI community sees as magical and cutting edge is often dismissed by the mainstream as a frivolous toy.
This disconnect has always felt jarring.
But I realized this was partly because of what AI was being used to create.
I remember the first time I showed chatGPT to my mom. I asked her to type in a prompt for an essay, and it spun out a 800-word spiel on the topic. To me, it was incredible - a computer was creating text by itself.
My mother, however, was not impressed.
“Anyone can write”, she said, and shrugged it off.