AI 2025-2028 Potential for Mayhem

"This is not another social media. This is not another smartphone. This is something altogether different. Titanic things, beyond everyone’s grasp, are happening."

This is a concluding quote from a portion of Dean W. Ball's (of Hyperdimensional) take on the current status of AI.  Read it below and and then think about it for a minute. All the expected vast change in the next couple of years will be managed by the same politicians (worldwide) that "handled" Covid, Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, etc. There is no effective large-scale crisis management, and Trump's governance is a global crisis. That's the scary part... so much potential for mayhem.

Novus Ordo Seclorum--Reflections on DeepSeek by Dean W Ball

"I predicted that a Chinese lab would credibly replicate OpenAI’s o1 model within a few months in my first analysis of o1 back in September. For me, this was priced in. But it was not priced in for many others, and I did not remotely anticipate how much panic, hype, and hyperbole it would stir.

How could China “catch up” so fast? Who the hell is DeepSeek? Why did their model cost so little to train? Did they steal America’s intellectual property? Did they smuggle chips? Why are they number one on the App Store? Does compute matter anymore? Did America’s lead vanish? Is OpenAI going to go bankrupt? Did six hundred billion dollars of Nvidia simply disappear in front of our eyes?

One can have a level-headed discussion about all these things, and I have tried. But that’s not the point. The point is that a lot of people are just not used to the speed and the turbulence of it all—triumphant this month, anxious the next. Partially this is just because this is a field dominated by internet discourse, and this is the pace of the internet. But more importantly, it is because we are riding an exponential. Change will happen abruptly, and before you know it, it will happen again.

We are used to internet-driven culture having this velocity, but it’s a relatively new industrial phenomenon. Algorithmic efficiency gains of 400-500% can be expected annually. The performance of AI chips has been increasing by around 130% per year. Companies buy vastly more of those chips every year, and that will continue for at least the next year or two.

And on top of all this, we’ve found a way to make the models think. A good language model, when placed into a well-designed reinforcement learning environment, given hard problems to solve, and simply allowed to generate words (tokens), “naturally” learns to start self-reflecting, planning alternative strategies when it encounters a dead end, and correcting errors it has made. The models are learning to think. And at this too they appear to be improving on a similar trajectory.

The shocking thing is not especially that DeepSeek achieved this trend; the shocking thing is that this is the trend we are on. And there is no end in sight.

This is not another social media. This is not another smartphone. This is something altogether different. Titanic things, beyond everyone’s grasp, are happening.

We do not quite know where we are going, but that has always been the case."