State of AI (I)

We're already in the intelligence era, and most of us have no idea.

The 2000s brought us the internet. The 2010s brought us smartphones. The 2020s are ushering in intelligence, and the speed and scale at which intelligence is becoming smarter and widely available is unprecedented. The rate at which we're accelerating is unprecedented. AI is here, not sci-fi anymore, very real and very much around us, in our hands, and in our pockets. Most of us are still not aware of the gravity of the situation. I'm not being an AI doomer. I'm not arguing that AGI is here, and I'm not even talking about ASI, and that you should absolutely be concerned about it(example). But I'm saying that the pace at which we're moving, the pace of innovation, and the pace at which we're building has started to skyrocket, and the ramifications of this are far reaching, beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Jarvis is already on your phone. Have you tried it? Your ai assistant can not just do tasks for you, now it can see, hear and understand the world. Take a picture around you and ask your assistant questions. It can translate for you. It has knowledge. More than us, if we're talking general knowledge. It can reason. It can search the internet. It fits in your glasses. Let's try to brainstorm about some consequences.

[A black box]

Let's start with jailbreaking. With LLMs, there's a whole new way of jailbreaking systems. Models like gpt, llama, claude, grok etc can be now pwned by simple mind tricks. Really. You can reason with the ai to extract information out of it. That was sci-fi till 5 years ago. The ai knows everything it's trained on. It's choosing to reveal only some information, but we can still coax it to reveal that knowledge to us, and it works. It can tell you how to make drgs/bmbs, to hack systems, to do anything. This is all already possible. And things will only get harder to control from here. Prompt jailbreaking, is just one way among a sea of undiscovered ways to manipulate and bend the ai to our wills. AI security will be harder to achieve as time goes on. Same goes for AI safety, and that's chilling.

[New realities]

It has become trivial to manipulate reality: everything can be faked, and everything can be created. The kind of progress we're seeing in terms of fidelity of generative content is unprecedented. What is reality anymore? This is not just limited to video and audio. You can convert a basic idea to a prototype in hours if not minutes. A storyboard, or a presentation, or mood board, or a sketch, or a look test, all in minutes. You see what's happening? We're accelerating towards a world where ideas can be materialized in the blink of an eye. We'll need to catchup to stay in loop with the world's goings on. Its only going to get harder.

Voice, likeness, the way you express, words, tone and evrything: so in essence what you are to the world can be faked. We are partially able to bring people back from the dead. We can get their voices already, its already as simple as consumer software. Oh, we can get their faces too. We can mimic how they talk/express themselves too (insert podcast)? If it looks like a dog, acts like a dog, and barks like a dog, it wouldn't matter for most people if its real or not. This is weird way singularity is attained. Dead people kept alive in the form of an ai is not too far from being a consumer product. Making a copy of the way you express isn't a hard problem to crack anymore, especially with llms. Kal-Els dad talking to him as a software in Man of Steel is possible with tech today. Someone just has to assemble it right. (here's a killer idea: make a voice, avatar and text clone of yourself, with general knowledge, your personal diary, logs etc. to save it in case of you dying. Your loved ones will be able to remember you, your grand kids will be able to know you and feel like they know you, and you can live on in their memories). (better yet, this could be a nice display at the museum; talking voices and avatars of historical figures).

[Darker tones]

There are copyright cases, plagiarism cases, privacy cases etc but the issue is hard because we can claim the machine has learnt things instead of copying things Most people have no idea what's happening with the speed of ai. Chaos will ensue, no doubt, and the world will come to a standstill very soon and struggle to grasp the reality of the situation. The tools to desecrate ideals, faith, morals and values by making grotesque imagery is already in the hands of everyone. Laws will be passed really soon to outright ban/sue AI use in numerous fields, or the lawmakers will be too late to catchup. It's already hard to distinguish the fake from reality. The tools to cause chaos are already here, and the malicious actors are already here. What's changed is that anyone with brains can leverage these tools in intelligent ways with just natural language. It's really scary.

[Jobs]

The job market will be in total uncertainty with companies starting to restructure workforce to accomodate the ai tools that will start taking up the less intelligent work. We're not talking just about a specific market. We're talking about tools eating into so many more kinds of work that if you're in any job market, you'll need to catch up. New ideas are turning into insane software and products and most of us are not aware of them unless we're on X.

[Software development]

will be trivial. There is already an extraordinary intern co-pilot working with you if you use ai for coding. Try cursor. It's really good. It'll only get better. Those who can leverage ai for work will be at a definite advantage. The companies which aren't familiar with what speed is possible in development today, will quickly fade away. It's always happened, but the pace which you're required to keep up will soon be incomprehensible. That's the story so far here.

[Acceleration]

Companies working with AI like Tesla, nvidia and meta are going to dominate the next wave of industrialization. Energy intensive ai companies thrive. There are impending concerns that will be raised, and protests that will happen questioning the indiscriminate use of energy. The energy demands will be impossible to meet without nuclear. [Update: Companies are building nuclear reactors] There will be a generational shift once nuclear is sorted out and we aren't energy concerned. Science will boom. When intelligence is cheap, we're not in the same world anymore. The future will be incomprehensible.

I'll end the first part here, but there's a lot more to talk about, more than ever.