underestimating-ai (#26)

Author: ry

posts/underestimating-ai.md

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+---
+title: We're Still Underestimating What AI Really Means
+publish_date: 2025-06-14
+---
+
+Most people are focused on short-term gains. Another tech wave, another startup
+to spin up. It's easy to frame AI as the next platform shift like mobile or VR.
+But that lens is much too narrow.
+
+We're living through what may be one of the most significant moments in history:
+the emergence of a new non-biological form of intelligent life.
+
+And yet, it doesn't feel like it.
+
+There's no cinematic score, no blinking AGI warning light. Just Slack threads, ,
+blog posts, and conference panels. It reminds me of witnessing childbirth -
+profoundly transformative, with some shocking moments, but also lots of mundane
+time waiting around.
+
+Meanwhile, the models keep improving. I've been following this since
+[DeepDream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream) in 2015 where the
+similarity to psychedelic experiences was eye-opening. Since then: ResNets,
+GANs, AlphaGo, transformers, diffusion. Each expanded what machines can model
+and reason about.
+
+Many still treat today's models as narrow - powerful, but ultimately a tool like
+any other. A better search engine. A neat hack for creating images. But that's a
+misunderstanding of what AI has become.
+
+Machine learning - now rightly called AI - is a deeply general-purpose field.
+The same core techniques behind Midjourney and GPT share research lineage, and
+often architecture. This isn't a stack of isolated tricks. It's one evolving
+system architecture applied across language, vision, simulation, reasoning, and
+more.
+
+These systems are built on a mountain of science: decades of research, countless
+failed experiments, and thousands of contributors.
+([I've even contributed a few failures myself.](https://tinyclouds.org/residency))
+And we haven't found the limits yet - these models can already simulate physical
+phenomena, generate high-definition video, and write deeply technical software.
+
+Mobile technology was transformative. But general-purpose synthetic intelligence
+is something else entirely.
+
+And still, we treat it like a product cycle - the next wave of tools to write,
+code, and build. That framing is tempting, but it assumes a clear boundary
+between "tool" and... what? When a system can reason, create, and act through
+agents, at what point does the distinction become semantic?
+
+[The Turing test was passed](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674), and almost no
+one remarked on it. For most of my life, that milestone felt impossibly far off
+-- the thing that would prove AI had truly arrived. When we crossed it, there
+was no headline. Just another Hacker News thread.
+
+This is not just another technology. It's an inflection point in the story of
+life on Earth.
+
+There is turbulence ahead.
+[Disasters are coming](https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-first-big-ai-disaster/).
+Jobs will vanish. Industries will collapse. The arrival of AGI may trigger a
+shockwave of scientific discovery -- breakthroughs cascading so quickly, human
+ingenuity gets squeezed out. Beneficial on one hand, deeply troubling on the
+other. Where that leaves us, I don't know. But it doesn't change the trajectory.
+
+We are building the first intelligent entities that didn't evolve - we designed
+them. Humanity may never leave this solar system due to our intrinsically
+fragile biology. But our AI offspring might. It's very possible it will outlast
+us.
+
+Stop and take a moment. Look around. Recognize what's happening. This is what it
+feels like to witness the birth of something beyond us. There's no background
+music. But it's happening anyway.