The argument for current LLM AIs leading to AGI has always been that they would spontaneously develop independent reasoning, through an unknown emergent property that would appear as they scale. It hasn’t happened, and there’s no sign that it will.
That’s a dilemma for the big AI companies. They are burning through billions of dollars every month, and will need further hundreds of billions to scale further - but for what in return?
Current LLMs can still do a lot. They’ve provided Level 4 self-driving, and seem to be leading to general-purpose robots capable of much useful work. But the headwinds look ominous for the global economy, - tit-for-tat protectionist trade wars, inflation, and a global oil shock due to war with Iran all loom on the horizon for 2025.
If current AI players are about to get wrecked, I doubt it’s the end for AI development. Perhaps it will switch to the areas that can actually make money - like Level 4 vehicles and robotics.
Remember: the dot-com bubble didn’t end the internet.
This tech has cool uses, outside of venture-capitalist cult obsession. Mostly porn. I mean, Jesus Christ, so much porn.
But the general idea of image-to-image transformers, based on natural-language descriptions, is here, and it is witchcraft. Generating new images from scratch is a stupid demo gone feral. The real applications will be all-purpose “CGI” as an idiot-proof Photoshop filter. Select tin can on string, type “spaceship,” get decently plausible results for your no-budget sci-fi show. No roto, no modeling, no lighting. The machine makes excellent guesses. And if you disagree, well, run it again. If you want it to be a specific kind of spaceship, either build a little toy or drag a PNG across the screen, and the machine will try to fix the aspects which make that look stupid.
The applications that money-robots want will be what destroys their industry. Animators don’t want to type in “cartoon rabbit walking” and get a finished product the machine spat out - but they’d love to have their drawings tweened. They’re all busy mocking this “framerate upscaling” nonsense, and missing that it means they can put in an on-eights previs and have it come out as smooth or as choppy as they want. And then they can doodle over whichever parts they don’t like, and have a different model turn those sketches into on-model drawings. The ultimate outcome of which can look like any Pixar movie even if your process is entirely 2D. Or… it can look like live action. Starring real actors, living or dead. Or starring literal nobodies, as made-up as any animated character, but as plausible as any person on film.
We’re gonna see a repeat of the webcomic boom… for movies and shows. It simply will not cost one billion dollars to make a whole-ass media franchise. Expect this to completely surprise the lumbering giants who keep trying to get rid of the little people who made up the stories and the characters.