AI singularity (as flawed or as hyped as the human upload drivel)

 the new kid on Hype Block is recursive self-improvement for AI.

so of course software tools & die has always been about making tools that can make more refined tools, that can make more refined tools - from stone, to iron/bronze to steel, carbon, and on to  high level languages with optimising compilers and so on - nothing new there

but the steps require scaling up the tooling, and re-tooling - so famous numbers for new chips and new biotech are we're around £500 billion to build the new fab for the new thing. so if you wanna go meta on that, lets assume add a 0 for each generation (actually, each generation usually takes a decade to really bed in, and that's 3 orders of magnitude more infrastructure).

so what about the AI singularity - i.e. the point at which it just self-improves ("recursively" is a bit of extra hype-sauce)? couple of challenges

1. we're out of chips right now

2. we're out of new data right now.

Aint gonna happen

sure you can use synthetic data, and then some randomizing hacks to avoid model collapse (kind of).

but if you can't buy the memory for love or money, just forget it.

the opposite direction of travel (millions of really small, specialised AI boxen, running on smart phones, or worst case £1000 laptops) makes a lot more sense. and cents.

there's a book about people that invest in cryogenics for keeping their body on ice for when the medical tech can grant them immortality - see Mark O'Connell's fun read.

back to the football...