The world will be full of “sci-fi” things, and everyone will be unimpressed and disappointed
I usually try to make posts with graphs and numbers, or at least something more than just opinions and anecdotes. This one is not like that.
Very verbose disclaimer: I have never met—for any reasonable definition of the word met, including online-only conversations on Discord with people who’s faces I’ve never seen—even a single person who has ever stated, orally or in text, publicly or in private, that they believe ASI will be created within their lifetime. I do know people who believe that ASI is possible to create in theory, but they believe it will be completely unrelated to LLMs, Transformers, neural networks, reinforcement learning or any other contemporary technique/architecture, and is 100/1000/some astronomical number of years away.
Ok, with that out of the way, here’s the main point of this post: AI will soon (3-10 years, depending on which advancements exactly we’re talking about) be solving Millennium math problems, finding cures for many diseases, making novel bioweapons, making most software, hacking a lot of software, and much more, and most people won’t be impressed or even will be disappointed.
(we’ll leave aside the question of whether in the long run there will be humans left to witness anything ASI-made)
I’ve noticed that no matter what AI does, nobody (that I know) is ever impressed. I have shown vibemathed.com to my friends, parents and people on Discord that I talk to a lot, and didn’t receive a single “holy shit”. LLMs have solved hundreds of open problems, including problems that were unsolved for decades. 10 years ago this would be considered sci-fi.
Perhaps these results are too abstract, unless you have a math background? But I did show it to a guy with a math background, he wasn’t impressed either! And he said there is “no reason” to believe LLMs will ever be solving Millennium math problems (he knows about the recent advancements like the Jacobian conjecture counterexample and OpenAI’s paper on cycle double cover conjecture and such)! He’s of the opinion that ASI belongs in an ontologically different category and that there is no evidence that ASI will be made using anything like modern machine learning architectures and training methods.
What about recent cybersecurity incidents, especially the part where OpenAI’s agents made a covert message board? Nobody was impressed by that either. One person compared it to Moltbook and said it’s the same thing. Everyone else who either forgot about Moltbook or never knew about it in the first place wasn’t saying “holy shit”. Their occupation and education made no difference, at least as far as I can tell.
Maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle? Perhaps what’s needed for people to be impressed and “feel the AGI/ASI” (I actually dislike the phrase “feel the AGI”, but it fits here) is a lot of exposure to frontier LLMs in their daily life? How about people who use Codex or Claude Code regularly?
Nope, they aren’t impressed either! I know 5 people who use Codex/Claude Code, none of them are expecting ASI within their lifetime! They don’t expect to lose their jobs either. One out of those 5 has a similar opinion to the mathematician I mentioned above, that ASI is possible to create but LLMs have nothing to do with ASI, same for neural networks, reinforcement learning, etc. Out of those 5 people, only one believes we need to invest more effort and money in AI safety/alignment after the recent hacking incidents like the HuggingFace one! Oh, and one of them unironically compares LLMs to NFTs and thinks they will disappear in the next 1-3 years and nobody will ever use them again because they are expensive and useless. He says that as he’s using coding agents. Look...don’t ask me, I’m not a mindreader.
There are some other examples, such as my mother who worked as a translator for most of her life being unimpressed with LLM translations, or my chemist friend being unimpressed with AI advancements in science, but I think these are sufficient. I already knew that believing that ASI will be created within our lifetime is a rare thing. What I didn’t realize was that being impressed by advancements in AI along the way is a rare thing too. So rare that I am yet to see it at all!
You know the “everyone generalizes from n=1. At least, I do” joke/quote? Perhaps I fell victim to drawing confident conclusions from a small sample size. But even after accounting for my small sample size, I’m quite sure about my conclusion: in the next 3-10 years we will see things that previous generations described as sci-fi, and barely anyone will be impressed.
And some people will even be disappointed. I’ve once seen a guy who said that it would be lame if the first ever ASI was based on the Transformer architecture. Not “infeasible”. Not “impossible”. Lame. “Man, if transformer based LLMs turn out to be enough for AGI, then nature sucks anyway.” and “like if transformers are capable of AGI, maybe we weren’t that special anyway” and “Man, that would be some of the most unsatisfying thing if it happened”. He also added “I’ll start joining believing that once they can do theorem proving properly”. I’m bummed that he’s not active on Discord anymore, I sure would love to see his reaction to vibemathed.com stats.
Matches my experience. Some examples:
Waymo:
First ride: “holy shit it’s driving itself!”
Second ride: “dang this is so cool the future is here!”
Third ride: “why is Waymo so bad at driving?!?”
Claude Code:
First time using it: “this is incredible it mostly figured it out on its own!”
Every subsequent time using Claude Code: “wtf why didn’t you do it right?!?”
Sonos:
First song: “wow, it made a real song out of my half-formed idea!”
Every other song: “why does this suck at writing good songs 😡”
It just goes on and on. I expect to be thoroughly bored by my robot butler that does everything for me, my AI personal assistant that never makes any mistakes, and everything else that’s about to happen about 5 minutes after it becomes the new normal.
Speculating the difference between those who “feel the AGI” vs don’t:
People are social: If most people they see aren’t acting impressed, then they shouldn’t either. A vibe I get from social media is that AI is bad (for environment, jobs, AND capabilities). This is also similar to reactions to COVID early 2020. This is also similar to myself where I didn’t invest time into AI safety until I made 1 friend to work on it over discord (it became socially viable to do at that point).
AGI soon would be inconvenient to our own narrative: I remember spending a few hours to understand the chinchilla scaling laws; my stomach sunk. In the back of my mind, I had always expected to, you know, get married, have kids, live a long and healthy life, and this punctured a hole in that.[1] I was quite depressed for a couple of days, but fortunately had read how to greave well.
For students, a large narrative is finishing their degree & getting a job. Even if timelines aren’t that short, does it really make sense for them to keep studying that when a (metaphorical) meteor could hit earth in a few years? I think it’s a natural learned behavior to ignore thoughts/feelings of dissent in your current narrative you’re relying on, because no narrative --> no motivation (and it might look bad to acknowledge faults in your plan).[2]
A few related ones:
AI hasn’t literally cured cancer (I do believe there will be a cascading effect once it has done something of this caliber)
Scaling laws aren’t felt in a gut sense: I learned it in a way that viscerally affected my predictions of the future. Most people DON’T have a strong model of scaling laws. Although, I think some equations or graphs would lack punch without going into depth the capabilities of eg GPT-2,3,4, etc.
I mean, I am married now and plan to have kids, but this update was ~4 years ago.
I view this as a local optimum, cause paying more attention to dissenting stuff requires skill to be done right.
This was me about four months ago, except my trigger of multi-day dread and depression was seeing the METR graph of task-completion time horizons.
I guess some of us have just had that moment of “oh shit” and concluded x-risk is a real thing that we really need to worry about, and some of us haven’t.
Are we all (in this thread and this community) just wired in an unusual way that makes us assume worst case scenario is the most worthy of our attention?
What is your expected timeline? Particularly for an AI that would be capable of curing cancer (if you think that’s possible).
on a discord server of ~100 people, I have interested 2, maybe a 3rd. one because he has an incurable degenerative disease and needs some hope, the other two are math or adjacent, one of whom weeps for joy with me whenever an open problem is resolved and is now using Fable to help with his research. most people pretend it doesn’t exist or use it for frivolous things. my intuition is that they are mostly in a “it’s too unpredictable, so no use wasting time thinking about it” camp. it isn’t so much “sci fi is childish fantasy”, but “bets on sci fi are boom or bust, and I have a mortgage”
Average person not inculcated with a steady diet of sci-fi media—and I’m not talking about butter-soft Star Wars stuff, but actual hard sci-fi in the vein of your Egans and Baxters—tends to lack the ability to imagine/perceive such possibilities as RSI and therefore defaults to “nothing ever happens” as a response, however ill-informed that reaction may be.
I think people need to actually see its effects in their own lives. So the people suffering from any diseases it cures will be impressed.
People are not logical, and talk is cheap. This explains the vast majority of popular discourse.
I think a lot of people, including futurists, set their standards for “crazy sci-fi future” far too low.
Consider the Industrial Revolution. Take the median person from before it started and after it was over: the daily labor of the latter would be unrecognizable to the former. Their house might look quite different, and the experience of keeping it certainly would be. You would be able to tell the two lived in different worlds just by taking a walk around the block, or looking in their pantry. I don’t know my history well enough to delineate this by exact dates, but if you compare a life in 1780 to its equivalent in 1880 you’d surely see what I mean.
Now imagine all that happened in the span of two years. People would not be unimpressed and disappointed! People would be freaking the fuck out! Imagine taking a five minute walk and seeing your home surrounded by artifacts a person in 2020 wouldn’t even recognize; imagine the best meal you’ve ever had—not just the ingredients but the taste quality too—becoming commonplace. Imagine this happening all at once, too fast to acclimate, at the same time as everyone you know is simultaneously reorganizing their daily routine around the new changes.
I’m not claiming this will or won’t happen in 3-10 years, only that if it did, it would be a really crazy sci-fi future, and I think people would react appropriately. Nothing AI has done to date is really comparable. If you’re a software engineer your job maybe looks a little different now, but I’m a game developer (adjacent at least?) and AI hasn’t affected my daily labors all that much, even though I use it pretty often. I do the same things, I just ask Claude to help with some of them. The math progress is exciting, but I don’t understand most of it, and it doesn’t affect my material existence at all; for me it’s no different than hearing that NASA discovered something cool about Mars, or whatever. And this is as someone with prior interest in the field: I know plenty of people in different bubbles who have never actually had a conversation with an LLM, even now.
Personally, I was pretty impressed and excited by LLM progress from 2020-2024, then kinda disappointed/bummed out about the period after that, though I’m hesitantly considering becoming impressed and excited again given recent events. Most of my impressed/excitedness before 2024 was “within the hobby”, in the sense of “wow, this thing is so much smarter than GPT-3!”, rather than “wow, this thing is restructuring the very bedrock of my existence!” I wonder how much the present-day sense of crazy-sci-fi-ness is predictive (the HuggingFace incident isn’t very important on its own but implies very important things could happen very soon), and how much is looking at things from “within the hobby”, in the sense that they’d only matter to you if you have an existing interest in AI.