We’re living a very special moment in Generative Artificial Intelligence. Frontier models, including soon-to-be open-weight ones, are becoming very capable and effective at sustaining days-long tasks (burning several million tokens along the way).
AI-inflated expectations are not new. The history clearly marks at least two major “AI Winter” periods where Artificial Intelligence as a practice field retracted due to limited real-value creation — or simply very high inflated expectations.
With the current advancements, what is happening is a bit different: Instead of skeptics, we’re seeing the rise of Doomsday Prophets of GenAI. Those think current GenAI systems are the ultimate and final stage of technology evolution. Those also think there will be one lab/model to rule them all. And they also believe the only possible outcome is unparalleled unemployment, poverty, and uncontrolled cybercrime. In essence, they don’t believe humans will triumph over a technology humans had created. Spoiler: that never happened before in the history of our civilization. Humans dominated Earth due to reasons, including our biological sense of survival combined with our collective wandering and inventiveness.