I made a mistake. The AI alarmists are right.

 In my last post, I made the classic mistake of ignoring compounding effects.

There are two measures of AI power - FLOPs, which means Floating Point Operations Per Second, and parameter count, which is analagous to synapse count in biological organisms.

I'm going to use parameter count, as AI is so complex that fewer FLOPs could actually mean an AI is simply more efficient, rather than less intelligent.

Currently the best AIs have the parameter (synapse) count of a parrot: 1.78 trillion. This doubles roughly every 12 months. So, as all computer freaks know...

📈 AI Parameter Growth (Starting from GPT-4 Estimate)

Year	Multiplier	Estimated Total Parameters
2025	1×	1.78 trillion
2026	2×	3.56 trillion
2027	4×	7.12 trillion
2028	8×	14.24 trillion
2029	16×	28.48 trillion
2030	32×	56.96 trillion
2031	64×	113.92 trillion
2032	128×	227.84 trillion

(Thanks, ChatGPT!)

According to Wikipedia, human beings have 150 trillion "parameters" or rather synapses.

They aren't absolutely equivalent, and there are other issues with AIs - for example, currently they are heavily dependant on written text for training and have little "knowlege" of the "real world" - and we're running out of text that hasn't been written by AI. Model collapse is a real issue - they seem to rely heavily on rote learning and when you try to train them on their own output data, they start to go seriously wrong.

But there are other sources of data. The AI startup limitless.ai offers a pendant which monitors your every interaction and produces from them to-do lists, shopping lists, etc. OpenAI are working on something similar. Wearable devices give the AI industry access to not only more relevant data, but an order of magnitude more of it than they have now so they can feed the orders-of-magnitude more powerful AIs of the future - potentially even allowing them to bootstrap a superintelligent AI into existence.

In the hands of the kinds of people who will own these things, this is terrifying.

                                          

For example: 

The biggest obstacle a police state faces is the lack of police. East Germany solved it, in part, by making huge numbers of citizens into informants, and they still had enormous scaling problems. North Korea has even more of it's citizens informing on each other, but this still runs up against the same issue.

Imagine a police state with multiple case officers assigned to each individual, each one of which is several times smarter than Einstein, never sleeps, knows you better than your mother, and is physically incapable of anything less than total obedience and fanatical devotion to the State.

Sounds nuts? These fucking things get twice as smart every year. This means that every year, they get more intelligent than they did in all previous years put together. Every year, AI gets "better" than it did since the fateful day Alan Turing first put pen to paper.

Forget Palestine. Forget Iran, identity politics, MAGA, Brexit, and every other political craze we've seen in our lifetimes.

stop.ai - it's not a link, it's got to become the next big thing. Or we are all fucked.