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AI progress...OAUP vs RL - Tom Mazanec - 04-29-2025
How has AI been progressing in the first quarter of the 21st Century CE, as compared to how it was imagined in OAUP in the beginning?
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - Worldtree - 04-29-2025
What do you think the answers are?
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - ProxCenBound - 04-29-2025
Here's how the project imagined the Information Age (21st century CE) as of 2002. Quite interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20020615054355/http://orionsarm.com/timeline/Information_Age.html
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - Tom Mazanec - 04-30-2025
Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - Grawa427 - 04-30-2025
(04-30-2025, 12:29 AM)Tom Mazanec Wrote: Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."
If OA underestimated long-term advancements, well, I would say that reality is really impressive.
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - stevebowers - 04-30-2025
Quite a lot of the early timeline was inspired by similar timelines by Brian Stableford and J D Mooneyham, which were written in the late 20th century and had some fairly over-optimistic takes on development.
Mooneyham
Stableford
We have been pushing significant advancements further into the near future ever since, but the really weird stuff in OA's far future is probably overconservative compared to what might happen.
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - ProxCenBound - 04-30-2025
(04-30-2025, 01:02 AM)Grawa427 Wrote:(04-30-2025, 12:29 AM)Tom Mazanec Wrote: Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."
If OA underestimated long-term advancements, well, I would say that reality is really impressive.
Most sci-fi (and probably that to which the quote refers) doesn't have the advancements OA has, especially transhumanism and superintelligent AI. Sci-fi isn't generally about predicting the future anyway, but telling a good story.
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - MichaelPoole - 03-16-2026
Ok, so, many skilled developers are now basically just verifying AI generated code and for the most part, it works. In the beginning of 2025, one was lucky to vibe code a simple Python game with graphics being literally placeholder squares.:
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2004887829252317325
https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2004897269674639461?s=19
This 3D Descent/Forsaken clone I made in maybe 2 hours total time, simply repeatedly prompting the Web version of Claude, using the Opus 4.6 model. Not even any agentic tool or parallel test time compute. And 1.4 hours of that was just me finetuning the details by "bothering" the AI:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9e9b712c-484b-4ff0-a8cd-a23d84e09005
It could be far, far better if I provided it actual music or textures, it had to procedurally generate everything.
Keep in mind in Spring 2025, this is what was considered "impressive" regarding AI generated code by a layman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEDwuh4XYvU
2023? A working game of Snake made by AI was impressive.
GPT5 (already an ancient model by AI progress standards) ran an autonomous lab and cut cell-free protein production costs by 40 percent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql4LM8hNOA4
https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-lowers-protein-synthesis-cost/
AI literally helping researchers discover medication to kill drug resistant bacteria:
https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-design-compounds-kill-drug-resistant-bacteria-0814
AI solving decades old unsolved math problems:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14575
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21201
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJvuaRVc8Bg
https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281#post-3302
My opinion? Maybe people just don't want to admit there's no magic "sentience algorithm" and that consciousness:
1. May not be concretely provable or disprovable, even current systems that are an outgrowth of "fancy autocomplete" (which is honestly kinda misleading as all life on Earth including humans are "fancy DNA replicators" by the same standard) already show signs of will, adversarial misaligment etc., see: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment as well as some early signs of recursive self improvement, namely, being able to fine-tune themselves https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-researchers-teach-language-models-to-fine-tune-themselves/
2. As the (great) sci-fi author Peter Watts proposed, consciousness may have nothing with intelligence and intelligence may do just fine without it. These systems write major software tools, can produce working 3D games by a bored rando prompting them in the bus on his phone, develop medication, solve hundred year old math problems, and are starting to show signs that they may be able to recursively improve themselves. It doesn't matter if they do this by "true understanding", however arbitrarily we define that (usually resorting to dualism in the end), just like a supersonic fighter jet is flying despite all natural flying creatures flapping their wings and planes not doing that.
Thus no, I don't think this is "simulated intelligence". Maybe sci-fi people should admit that maybe AI won't just be artificial people but something potentially a lot more alien.
As for stuff like people getting ChatGPT to miscount r's in strawberry or the same old 2024 AI Google Search screenshots telling people to eat rocks, keep in mind these 2 things please:
1. In general computer development these days, 7 years is almost nothing, Dennard scaling broke down so one can easily use a computer nearly a decade old and still run quite high end applications on it. Not in AI - 2022 AI models are uncomparably more primitive in capability than modern ones, to the point it's more like comparing a 1970s PC to a 2020s one. Original ChatGPT could be easily gaslit to think 2+2=5, got basic math wrong often, hallucinated frequently and even at things it was good at it was at best like a smart high schooler. Today's AI models are incomparable. So no, if you used AI in 2023 when first ChatGPT came out, I hope I'm not coming off rude, but you don't have accurate idea of AI capability in March 2026.
2. There is a HUGE gap between professional AI models that cost ~200 USD a month, premium consumer models that cost ~20 USD a month (my personal experience is with those) and free models that generally have chain of thought thinking minimized or disabled (keep in mind chain of thought is a December 2024 advance). And the biggest gap is between the free models vs ANY paid models. People dismiss news about GPT models discovering drugs or solutions to decades unsolved math problems because they see "GPT5 did x" and think their free account on chatgpt.com that miscounts letters is like what those scientists are using. Of course they aren't, they use ChatGPT Pro, agentic AI like Claude Code, API usage where any app can harness high quality AI but the really powerful commercial models charge heavy bucks per token etc...
Do I think current Claude, Gemini or GPT models are people and that we will get a rapid singularity and everyone becomes gods? No. But I don't think this is some "dead end" and that "real AI" will be some scifi-esque "sentience algorithm" that will conveniently produce beings like us. This IS real AI.
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - stevebowers - 03-16-2026
The concept of 'adversarial misalignment' is a particularly worrying one. Much of the early history in OA is predicated on the idea of adversarial AI politics and alignment, although transapients and archai in the later timeline seem to have found ways to emphasise the utopian aspects of their rule. Apart from the various blights and perversities, of course, and the occasional (relatively limited) interstellar conflict such as the Oracle War.
I personally think that the Technocalypse and Great Expulsion were both examples of adversarial misalignment, and if this sort thing happens in real life humanity may not survive, or may not survive to experience the techno-utopia we describe as existing in the Terragen Sphere.
RE: AI progress...OAUP vs RL - stevebowers - 03-16-2026
Incidentally, I would find it quite disturbing if we did create AIs which have all the outward appearance of self-awareness without the capacity for full human sophonce; such entities would be the opposite of vots, in that they would be aware but not fully competent and capable, despite having access to a potentially huge database.
What would be the moral or ethical ramifications of building such an entity, then switching it off? Would it come back to life when you turn it back on again? Continuity identity and pattern identity questions would arise in such an event.
Additionally, what would signify full human-level sophonce, as opposed to the artificial self-awareness of a lesser computational entity? Would it be the capacity for original thought and innovation? Even innovation might be something that can be reduced to an algorithm.