If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
Exactly! The Earth will be around long after we and all evidence of us is fossilized.
It’s a fact of course. Pluto will also remain, and every object in the Oort Cloud.
But despite our incendiary impact on this planet’s biospheres, I do think something would be lost if we vanished. Through us the universe becomes aware of itself. We’re not the only intelligent species nor the only one that could ever play this role. But these qualities are scarce. Evolution rarely selects for high intelligence because of its high cost. Self aware intelligent beings who can communicate complex abstracts at the speed of sound and operate in unison and transmit information down through generations… all from a rock. I hope we don’t destroy ourselves and every other living thing around us. I really do.
I carry that same want, however I do not carry your same hope.
I believe that self destruction is the great filter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter