ARTIFICIAL -SUPERINTELLIGENCE- ARCHERS * : PLATINUM ESSAY

THE HYPE CYCLE of the last few years has flourished - and generated a lot of investment - on the supposition that artificial intelligence was the kind of arms race it was possible to win. And that enormous or even monopolistic profits would flow inevitably to the winner.

The basic idea was that at a certain point, competition would somewhat naturally come to an end, when the technology would grow so powerful that it could quickly and dramatically engineer its own successor models, producing an exponential liftoff leading quite quickly to what is often called '' artificial superintelligence. ''

Beyond that threshold, the leading L.L.M.s would be so powerful, and would be improving so rapidly, that even small initial advantages would compound quickly into something like a natural monopoly on intelligence, which could then be sold to users at almost any price.

These days, as A.I. boosters have cooled their talk of a job apocalypse, you will also bear a little less about artificial superintelligence, now typically shorthanded as '' A.S.I. '' But the ongoing A.I. investment cycle is still built on the same underlying paradigm :

That history levels of capital expenditure are justified because the returns from winning the race would be unthinkably enormous.

But can the race even be won? Can any lab open up an enduring advantage over the others, let alone one sufficient to justify a monopolistic claim on A.I. revenue?

Over the last year or so, this logic has come to seem a lot more questionable, in part because, though progress has continued, no model has retained a long lasting advantage, and plenty of those cheaper, open-source alternatives have kept a pretty close pace with the best-in-class versions.

When A.I. companies began raising prices on their premium products to more closely match the cost of producing them, many of their clients balked, realizing that frontier models were not generating enough profit to justify the expense.

Partly as a result, corporate uptake of frontier models flatlined; much cheaper, open-source models exploded.

!WOW! thanks David-Wallace-Wells.