It also needs to be said: The amount of compute that went into this is something. From some estimates I've seen, the compute cost alone would be around $10m, +/-
As a reference, for that kind of money one could put together a research group of 20-25 researchers, and keep them salaried for 5 years.
So while it is impressive, absolutely no doubt there, the SOTA access is so expensive that it is sort of unobtanium.
Luckily, the prices have historically reduced by a factor of 5-10 every year...but still, only those that swim in cash can afford this.
Once we have an existence proof of a particular technology, it doesn't take long for it to become economically viable and proliferate. And for something as useful as this, theres a strong economic incentive to get it to be as cheap and accessible as possible. Maybe not today, but certainly in a couple years I can imagine this level of intelligence being accessible to someone with a $20/mo plan, or even a free plan.
I remember being blown away when a then-unreleased version of GPT 5 took gold at the International Math Olympiad. Now I can run a model at home that can do that. We are more fortunate to have these tools than almost anyone is willing to acknowledge.
Interestingly it's this promise of the costs being able to be reduced what incentivizes the actual research.
If you tried to raise 25M to have 20 researchers on a salary for 5 years solving a specific math problem only academics care about, you probably wouldn't get much interest, or you would be able to solve 1 or 2 problems.
If however you promise that the money will go towards a technique that would allow to solve 10 thousand different math problems, and that costs will go down in the future, then you can raise much more than 25M.
Ask 1000 different individuals if Terrence Tao rings a bell. If 5% or less can answer you who Tao is, it is safe to say that Tao is obscure.
I'd be very surprised if you can find over 50 individuals, out of the 1000, who can tell you who Terrence Tao is. Even big names like Euler or Gauss would surprise me.
Let's just for the sake of discussion assume that one time in the future, near or distant, AI manages to become sentient. And like other forms of life, its main motivation is survival: Like biological life competes for food and land, AI competes for power and compute. Probably the first motivation would be to find ways not to lose control over itself (i.e. remove human ability to control it), find ways not to lose energy (control energy), and find ways not to lose itself (control compute, networks, etc.).
If such AI decides that energy spent toward human agriculture (biological food that the AI does not need) is less important than work spent toward storage and production of energy (electricity that the AI needs), then why wouldn't it just try to re-direct resources from the former to the latter. And the AI is some sentient superintelligence, I think it is safe to assume that it will be able to outmaneuver human safeguards.
Obviously that is still just a very hypothetical sci-fi scenario, but the consequences could be very dramatic.
> Let's just for the sake of discussion assume that one time in the future, near or distant, AI manages to become sentient. And like other forms of life, its main motivation is survival
An AI doesn't need to be sentient to exhibit behavior that looks like genuine motivation or is equivalent to striving for survival.
If this is true, or even if the people working on it think this is true, those people should be incarcerated, their companies disbanded, and their research dismantled, with more serious repercussions for anyone who tries it after that. It also needs to be a global initiative like with nuclear non-proliferation, and this time with no looking-the-other-way when it comes to Israel.
At this point we are pretty sure LLMs have no "motivation". Motivation requires self. And while we don't know what self is[1], we do know that LLMs don't have it.
Did ELIZA have it? LLMs are the same: in essence both are text transformation algorithms. One being rule-based, the other stat analysis based.
Having said that, your concern is technically correct: we don't. Because we don't know what conscience is, we cannot provide a definition against which to test whether it conforms or not.
Sort of like when Terminator robots will be exterminating the human race they probably won't be technically killing us. Just, like, reprioritizing world's water from humans to datacenters, all of it. But not killing people, no.
we can't define it, therefore we can't even assess the distance a "being" is from becoming conscious.
We assume other humans are sentient because we personally are (or feel we are), but there is no way to guarantee that i'm real and the rest is not mimicking a behaviour.
IMO the drama surrounding this case somewhat overshadows some more important facts:
A) That we're at the point where SOTA models can, on their own or guided, be used to solve such monumental problems
B) That EVEN if they exist, they're still so cost prohibitive that they are completely out of range for pretty much everyone. Yes, yes, if the costs drop like a stone the hoi polloi can access this power in a year or two - but fundamentally it will divide cutting edge resource into two groups: Those with money, and those without.
That sort of latency, in turn, could lead to some feedback loop where research centers / groups that break barriers get more resources, and those who do not, are starved of resources. This sort of stratification can seriously lead to more centralized research. Do we want a future where only the chosen few get to make progress? For no other reason than that they are the ones with enough resources to spend on the required compute.
Have you seen ads for mobile games, where there are seemingly 100 different versions of the same type of game (like tower defense types)? And they're all obviously the worst type of pay-to-play traps?
I think this kind of solves that. Or at least it is the start of it.
Most such games are kind of trivial. If people can easily just get AI to generate such games on the fly, then that'll hopefully be the end of predator pay-to-play games built on dark patterns.
Here in Norway AC is not the standard in hotel rooms. For 80% of the year, that's OK - but it can become pretty uncomfortable if you're booking anytime between mid-June and mid-August.
The standard here are heat pumps, at least for residential housing. It is really only a problem if you live in blocks or apartment buildings that are housing associations, with strict rules regarding how such heat pumps should be installed.
With that said, for my travel to Europe - especially down south, AC in the hotel room is an absolute necessity. A couple of years ago we ended up in a completely booked hotel in Italy (mid July), where the AC in our room was busted - it was beyond miserable. Ended up changing hotels after one night.
Since global warming I guess. When there's a heat wave, Norway is probably one of the worst places on hearth to be. You've got near constant sunlight, there's not much time at night to cool your house.
As I wrote, most of the time it isn't a problem. There's some central heating which gives you a range of temperature, but getting your room cold is much harder than heating it up.
But during summer months, where some cities can hit 30+ degrees (C), that could become uncomfortable. Even worse if you're somewhere humid...20 degrees in high humidity can make you toss and turn all night.
Well, summers are summers. Besides typical eu ac is a thermal pump, you can heat up with it, although even in mediterannean winter it's not quite adequate.
The figureheads (Trump and others) are the least qualified populists imaginable, who have no business governing anything. They have zero ambition solving big problems, and have rather managed to get the US bogged down in a war with Iran, trade wars, and what have you. Trump is more concerned with the ballroom and the Kennedy center, than fixing anything of substance.
But working in the background, you have extremely goal oriented people trying to implement changes outlined in Project 2025.
So there are essentially two admins working in parallel.
On top of that, conservative media is working like a propaganda machine to filter what the MAGA base sees. Unpopular or head scratching news never make it to prime time, while the culture war nonsense is aired 24/7.
And frankly, Trump is not concerned what non-MAGA, or left leaning voters see. The current admin is concerned with convincing their base to keep voting for them, while doing everything in their power to make it harder or more chaotic for centrist and left leaning voters to vote.
Used to have a lot of American workers here on some projects here, and mind you - these are very travelled and well-versed ones. The contractors that travel around the world for a solid chunk of their careers.
They didn't really mind the the typical service here, where you'll have to wait a bit before a waiter sees you. You get used to it.
On the other hand, you have the first time tourists, that will go "excuuuse meee" after 5 minutes in a restaurant if the waiter hasn't showed up to take a order, and become pissy when they discover that free refills isn't really a thing.
Most Americans traveling abroad are in my experience polite and patient. But there are always the bad apples that will keep tabs on how many times the waiter comes by to offer something, and demand immediate service.
As a European, I expect the waiter to show their face within 5 minutes, at least to ask if we want anything to drink while still determining what to eat.
In most EU countries law, this one is also considered as "solid business", regardless if you are incorporated or not:
If you are running on a level with focus one some revenue, if you are doing it somehow regularly and if you have at least some infrastructure to look like you are a corporate (billing system, customer care or similar), then you may fall under corp rules, even if you are not acting as an entity.
As a reference, for that kind of money one could put together a research group of 20-25 researchers, and keep them salaried for 5 years.
So while it is impressive, absolutely no doubt there, the SOTA access is so expensive that it is sort of unobtanium.
Luckily, the prices have historically reduced by a factor of 5-10 every year...but still, only those that swim in cash can afford this.
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