Meditations on AI's Near-Term Impact

Dec 27, 2024

AI Will Eventually Surpass Human Intelligence

  • Our brain is just a mathematical function (inputs: 5 senses + memory and outputs: actions + memory updated).
    • Brain(senses,memoryt)→ActionVector+memoryt+1Brain(senses, memory_t) \rightarrow Action Vector + memory_{t+1}
    • Action Vector contains our various muscle fibers (vocal box muscles/skeletal muscles, etc.) and their contraction.
  • Intelligence is just sophisticated pattern detection and action selection.
    • All we need to do is try and fit this function.
    • Try and learn from data that humans learn from: visual data (what we see), textual data (what we read), auditory data (what we hear), kinesthetic data (what we feel), odourous data (what we smell).
      • We already have sophisticated multimodal models that have 3 of those senses.

Intelligence Will Be Cheap & Readily Accessible

  • A human has a reward system, and in todays world we get people to do what we want by incentivizing them (giving them positive rewards)
  • This is especially costly since human expectations keep increasing and you have to give them many things to satisfy them (a salary etc)
  • AI can be incentivized too but with just numbers, not cars or houses etc - Reinforcement Learning

Robots Won't Be That Readily Available At First

  • Making physical things is costly and supply chains will have to be built → will take time
  • Comparing with pure intelligence like ChatBots, not embodied
    • Software is fast to make and easily replicable.
    • The internet and billions of devices (phones, laptops, desktops) already exist as infrastructure.

Test Time Compute Is the Next Wave of Advancements

If I ask you what continent France is in, you can answer in a jiffy.

If I ask you what is x in the equation 32x2+2x+13=432x^2 + 2x + 13 = 4, that’s gonna take you a bit longer.

You’ll have to use chain of thought

Why expect AI, then, to do 2+2 or to cure cancer within the same time period

AI Will Become Agentic

Will be able to control your computer, this is already done by Anthropic in a demo they posted, but this will become ubiquitous

Verification of Reality

We’ll develop technology to verify that an image/video was actually taken on a real life camera which detected light rays that hit a sensor. Assume AI doesn’t own phones, because as I mentioned before, it’ll take a while before AI is embodied

Neighborhood AI Box: Local Intelligence for Everyone

  • I’m thinking what if we have a box in your local neighbourhood. Inside the box you have a generator, GPUs, etc and just like a mailbox, people have access to it, they can access the SSD that stores their data like chat history. Governments or organizations in San Francisco won’t have control over your intelligence, it’s yours and you and your neighbourhood can defend it. This ensures you have access even if WW3 turns the internet off, or maybe a power outage.

Talent Scouting Improves

  • Better talent scouting since you can ask anyone to upload verified media (we know it’s not a deepfake through some technology) and then an AI talent detector can flag promising candidates for football players for example.
  • This will be a revolution in sports since a common complaint is that people just never had the chance to be detected. Now after automating scouting, everyone has a chance.

Search Video Content Using Natural Language

  • A 2-hour podcast between Joe Rogan and Kim Kardashian and you want to find the part where they talk about Kanye? Just search it.

Faster and Easier Idea Execution

  • Much easier for people to bring ideas to fruition Copilot/Cursor already speeds up programmers
  • Soon non-programmers will be able to make websites
  • Soon you’ll be able to ask a 3d printer to print an object that you describe since the 3d file can be generated on the fly

You get an AI, you get an AI, everyone gets an AI

  • AI Personal Trainers:
    • A box with a camera and an in build AI, no data being broadcased to any servers
    • Gives feedback on your form, counts reps, helps with progressive overload, implements periodization
  • AI Stylists:
    • See your wardrobe → come up w/ combinations + recommend clothes to buy according to your taste
  • AI Babysitters:
    • If your baby is doing anything dangerous an alarm can be rung

Collaborating w/ AI in the Metaverse

  • Unlocks a new world for demonstrating creativity.
  • Can create amazing rooms, experiences, games, etc.

Self-Driving Cars

  • May or may not be ubiquitous at first but companies like Uber/Amazon will start using them as a cheaper option since wages are a big cost
Farrukh Saif