AI makes it cheap (eventually almost free) to traverse the already-discovered and reach the edge of uncharted territory. If we think of a sphere, where we start at the center, and the surface is the edge of uncharted territory, then AI lets you move instantly to the surface.
If anything solved becomes cheap to re-instantiate, does R&D reach a point where it can’t ever pay off? Why would one pay for the long-researched thing when they can get it for free tomorrow? There will be some value in having it today, just like having knowledge about a stock today is more valuable than the same knowledge learned tomorrow. But does value itself go away for anything digital, and only remain for anything non-copyable?
The volume of a sphere grows faster than the surface area. But if traversing the interior is instant and frictionless, what does that imply?
In a stage interview (a bit after the "sparks of agi in gpt4" paper came out) he made 3 statemets:
a) llms can't do math. They can trick us with poems and subjective prose, but at objective math they fail.
b) they can't plan
c) by the nature of their autoregressive architecture, errors compound. so a wrong token will make their output irreversibly wrong, and spiral out of control.
I think we can safely say that all of these turned out to be wrong. It's very possible that he meant something more abstract, and technical at its core, but in the real life all of these things were overcome. So, not a luddite, but also not a seer.
They can and are improved (papered over) over time. For example by improving and tweaking the training data. Adding in new data sets is the usual fix. A prime example 'count the number of R's in Strawberry' caused quite a debacle at a time where LLM's were meant to be intelligent. Because they aren't they can trip up over simple problems like this. Continue to use an army of people to train them and these edge cases may become smaller over time. Fundamentally the LLM tech hasn't changed.
I am not saying that LLM's aren't amazing, they absolutely are. But WHAT they are is an understood thing so lets not confuse ourselves.