Recursive self-improvement only takes off when the improvements are large enough.
We could set an LLM loose on itself now, self-improving its own code, but it's going to only make small improvements, and those will quickly peter out. If you think of it in terms of calculus, the sum of the improvements converges to a finite value, or at least the rate of improvements drop with time.
And even if we build a much better AI capable of performing substantial self-improvement, a burst of such improvement might peter out quickly. Maybe the AI makes fundamental breakthroughs in computing technology once, and then even with its newly improved capabilities, the next breakthrough is smaller, and the one after that is smaller still. Or maybe we hit a period of S-shaped growth, which seems super-exponential at first but then tapers off.
It's wise to be a bit skeptical in our dreams about the future. Yes, society might transform quite radically quite quickly, or on the other hand, maybe the "singularity" isn't even possible. We don't yet know what the scientific limits are.
We could set an LLM loose on itself now, self-improving its own code, but it's going to only make small improvements, and those will quickly peter out. If you think of it in terms of calculus, the sum of the improvements converges to a finite value, or at least the rate of improvements drop with time.
And even if we build a much better AI capable of performing substantial self-improvement, a burst of such improvement might peter out quickly. Maybe the AI makes fundamental breakthroughs in computing technology once, and then even with its newly improved capabilities, the next breakthrough is smaller, and the one after that is smaller still. Or maybe we hit a period of S-shaped growth, which seems super-exponential at first but then tapers off.
It's wise to be a bit skeptical in our dreams about the future. Yes, society might transform quite radically quite quickly, or on the other hand, maybe the "singularity" isn't even possible. We don't yet know what the scientific limits are.