This week was full of important news, but probably, even if not strictly related to AI, the successful starship launch of today is the event that stays in front of everything else.
An incredible launch, a beautiful sunrise, the manifest of human ingenuity at his peak, opening a new era for space transportation, closing the gap and the timeline for the next launch to the Moon and Mars. A truly incredible experience to watch, even at distance.
Then we had also the We Robot event at Tesla, with the demo of fully autonomous cars and robots serving drinks at the party.
And we had a long and very well written article by Amodei, where, among many other important insights, two stood out for me:
1.the belief that in 2 years we may reach the “Powerful AI” stage, defined as a millions of super-intelligent-Nobel-Price-level AIs, capable to perform actions in the digital and real world, able to reason for an extended time frame, able to perform research and create new scientific knowledge.
2.the belief that after that point, for a short time, humans will still be required to perform certain jobs, but in the long term they will not, thus we will have to rethink entirely our economy.
I believe that for those of us outside the labs it is very difficult to assess if these predictions (Powerful AI in 2 years) are somewhat solid, or done just to drive more attention and investor’s money to Anthropic, Open AI or other players of the industry (training and inference are very expensive). But regardless the specific time frame, what it is clear is that:
1. the rate of progress is accelerating
2. we should plan considering not the today’s available technology, but factoring the technological progress. This will change completely both the opportunities and the risks to consider.
The reality in which we are living is changing fast, we will be able to guide it looking well ahead in front of us, and moved not only by fear, and awareness of the risks, but also by awe and optimism.
For companies this will imply moving away from the “strategic procastination” to the “strategic anticipation” paradigm for strategic impactful decisions regarding AIs and rapidly evolving technologies.
For policy makers this will imply factoring in not only the risks, but also the benefits and the opportunities of the technological acceleration, and plan accordingly.