AI LLMs have been pretty shit, but the advancement in voice, image generation, and video generation in the last two years has been unbelievable.

We went from the infamous Will Smith eating spaghetti to videos that are convincing enough to fool most people... and it only took 2-3 years to get there.

But LLMs will have a long way to go because of how they create content. It's very easy to poison LLM datasets, and they get worse learning from other generated content.

LOL... you did make me chuckle.

Aren't we 18months until developers get replaced by AI... for like few years now?

Of course "AI" even loosely defined progressed a lot and it is genuinely impressive (even though the actual use case for most hype, i.e. LLM and GenAI, is mostly lazier search, more efficient spam&scam personalized text or impersonation) but exponential is not sustainable. It's a marketing term to keep on fueling the hype.

That's despite so much resources, namely R&D and data centers, being poured in... and yet there is not "GPT5" or anything that most people use on a daily basis for anything "productive" except unreliable summarization or STT (which both had plenty of tools for decades).

So... yeah, it's a slow take off, as expected. shrug

Things just don't impend like they used to!

I think we might not be seeing all the advancements as they are made.

Google just showed off AI video with sound. You can use it if you subscribe to thier $250/month plan. That is quite expensive.

But if you have strong enough hardware, you can generate your own without sound.

I think that is a pretty huge advancement in the past year or so.

I think that focus is being put on optimizing these current things and making small improvements to quality.

Just give it a few years and you will not even need your webcam to be on. You could just use an AI avatar that look and sounds just like you running locally on your own computer. You could just type what you want to say or pass through audio. I think the tech to do this kind of stuff is basically there, it just needs to be refined and optimized. Computers in the coming years will offer more and more power to let you run this stuff.

how do you grow zero exponentially

Computers are still advancing roughly exponentially, as they have been for the last 40 years (Moore's law). AI is being carried with that and still making many occasional gains on top of that. The thing with exponential growth is that it doesn't necessarily need to feel fast. It's always growing at the same rate percentage wise, definitionally.

This is precisely a property of exponential growth, that it can take (seemingly) very long until it starts exploding.

When people talk about AI taking off exponentially, usually they are talking about the AI using its intelligence to make intelligence-enhancing modifications to itself. We are very much not there yet, and need human coaching most of the way.

At the same time, no technology ever really follows a particular trend line. It advances in starts and stops with the ebbs and flows of interest, funding, novel ideas, and the discovered limits of nature. We can try to make projections - but these are very often very wrong, because the thing about the future is that it hasn't happened yet.

A few years ago I remember people being amazed that prompts like "Markiplier drinking a glass of milk" could give them some blobs that looked vaguely like the thing asked for occasionally. Now there is near photorealistic video output. Same kind of deal with ability to write correct computer code and answer questions. Most of the concrete predictions/bets people made along the lines of "AI will never be able to do ______" have been lost.

What reason is there to think it's not taking off, aside from bias or dislike of what's happening? There are still flaws and limitations for what it can do, but I feel like you have to have your head in the sand to not acknowledge the crazy level of progress.

A major bottleneck is power capacity. Is is very difficult to find 50Mwatts+ (sometime hundreds) of capacity available at any site. It has to be built out. That involves a lot of red tape, government contracts, large transformers, contractors, etc. the current backlog on new transformers at that scale is years. Even Google and Microsoft can't build, so they come to my company for infrastructure - as we already have 400MW in use and triple that already on contract. Further, Nvidia only makes so many chips a month. You can't install them faster than they make them.