Singularity Within the Next Three Months?

« Prédictions across the field range from a few months to a few decades, but experts agree: change is coming. «

It’s becoming the next betting game: When will artificial intelligence exceed the smartest human beings on planet earth. A Popûar Mechanics survey published just a couple days ago suggests the moment could arrive by 2026.

The range of predictions about when artificial super intelligence (ASI) will arrive actually spans at least 50 years. And a few of the « experts » say it’s never going to happen.

Machine intelligence, in thé form of « Large Language Models » (LLMs) has been advancing rapidly since ChatGTP from OpenAI first appeared in November 2022. It was a simple chatbot. Ask it a question, get an answer. It was engaging, surprisingly articulate, and a lot of fun. But at the time it was little more than a party game.

LLMs evolved rapidly once OpenAI’s proof of concept was introduced. Uptake of users grew rapidly — faster than any other technology since the introduction of the internet and the World Wide Web back in the mid 1990s. Bigger and bigger LLMs have arrived in rapid succession, and a genuine race is on between nations states eager to build the biggest data warehouse of all-optically-connected chips to facilitate even more massive processing of the world’s knowledge. The closest thing we can compare this to is the 1960s space race to put a man on the moon.

It is as much the speed of development and evolution of the technical training of these LLMs that makes predicting singularity such a challenging sport.

I look to the predictions of futurist Ray Kurzweil who has been modeling the advance of computing tech for the past sixty years. His prediction is that singularity arrives in 2035, and because I’ve read all his books and I trust his charts, I’m going with this date. And I can hardly wait.