this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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The actual survey result:
So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe
Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.
The bigger loss is the ENORMOUS amounts of energy required to train these models. Training an AI can use up more than half the entire output of the average nuclear plant.
AI data centers also generate a ton of CO². For example, training an AI produces more CO² than a 55 year old human has produced since birth.
Complete waste.
The same investors that poured (and are still pouring) billions into crypto, and invested in sub-prime loans and valued pets.com at $300M? I don't see any way the companies will be able to recoup the costs of their investment in "AI" datacenters (i.e. the $500B Stargate or $80B Microsoft; probably upwards of a trillion dollars globally invested in these data-centers).
Right, simply scaling won’t lead to AGI, there will need to be some algorithmic changes. But nobody in the world knows what those are yet. Is it a simple framework on top of LLMs like the “atom of thought” paper? Or are transformers themselves a dead end? Or is multimodality the secret to AGI? I don’t think anyone really knows.
It's becoming clear from the data that more error correction needs exponentially more data. I suspect that pretty soon we will realize that what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and a better search engine.
I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.
They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).
With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.
Yeah, it does some tricks, some of them even useful, but the investment is not for the demonstrated capability or realistic extrapolation of that, it is for the sort of product like OpenAI is promising equivalent to a full time research assistant for 20k a month. Which is way more expensive than an actual research assistant, but that's not stopping them from making the pitch.
AI isn't going to figure out what a customer wants when the customer doesn't know what they want.