If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
Yeah I’m there with you. I’m not saying I predict we will succeed, just that I would prefer if we did.
I’m really neither optimistic nor pessimistic on our chances. On the one hand, it seems like simple logic that any time a being evolves from simple animal to one with the potential for Kardishev type 1, that along the way to type 1 they will destroy the initial conditions they evolved into, obliterating their own habitat and ending themselves. I assume this is similar to your view.
On the other hand we don’t have the data points to draw any conclusions. Even if species invariably Great Filter themselves, many of them should emit radio signals before they vanish. Yet we’ve seen not a single signal. This suggests Rare Earth to me. Or at least makes me keep my mind open to it. And Rare Earth means there isn’t even necessarily a great filter, and that we’ve already passed the hardest part.