Shortly before publishing this newsletter, I spoke with Gil Luria, Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson, and asked him whether the capital was there to build the 17 Gigawatts of capacity that OpenAI has promised.
He said the following:
No of course there isn't enough capital for all
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AGI, at our current tech level, is arguably impossible. None of our LLMs can “think” or “reason” - they’re basically just really advanced predictive text, like when you start typing on your phone and the phone “predicts” what word it thinks you want next based on statistics. We’ve emulated VERY, VERY simple minds - bacteria, invertebrates. Emulating a thinking, living, INTELLIGENT being is a whole other order of magnitude harder. We barely even know how thought works, or physically how memories are stored, or a multitude of other things that would be very very important to actually building a thinking non-human intelligence.
Besides, what they think is going to happen is incredibly dumber. These techno-cultists think that simply by dumping enough data into their LLM model, somehow, through some measure, it’ll just spontaneously develop intelligence. By dumping enough processing power and data into what is a glorified chatbot, it’ll somehow manifest as either some form of incredibly intelligent life, or a real actual Machine God, omnipotence included (because we all live in a Simulation, and this Machine God will basically be the Architect, Neo, and Agent Smith rolled into one).
At the rate things are going, the amount of data and money in the world may not be enough to build ASI yet
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I understand the potential of ASI if someone actually manages to build it, I’m just highly skeptical that the current technology we have for doing AI can even scale to proper AGI, let alone ASI. I’m more concerned that these tech companies will waste a ton of resources trying to build it out of a tech that doesn’t have what it takes to get there through just throwing more energy and data at it.