Artificial Intelligence

 Artificial Intelligence is the frontier technology of our era.  For that reason alone, I think most people today are more interested in it than they are in the average technology.  The first large language model I used was, like most people, ChatGPT 3.  I was at a friend's house in late 2022, working on a group project for our science class.  We didn't use it for the project, it was too primitive if human-like output was your goal, I was amazed, however amazed by it.  I was amazed by its speed and its ability to express ideas in a way totally unlike the results of a Google query.  AI developed much more quickly than I expected, prompts which once output a single poorly composed paragraph, with model updates, emitted well organized and well compiled responses.  The thing which struck me the most about AI in 2023 and 2024 was its ability to answer questions of mine that were too specific for a general search engine to answer.  I was never sure of the response’s authenticity, it was to me unfalsifiable against a Google result containing irrelevant answers, but the fact that the sort of questions I once considered unanswerable online found a willing host was compelling.  Then came predictions of doom, the incredible financial growth, and the world’s seeming desire to pour itself into accelerating the transcendence of AI to become Earth’s smartest entity.  Starting in late 2024, but increasingly in 2025, a diverging outlook towards AI manifested itself.  The government and elite classes made some negative predictions, perhaps there would be markedly higher rates of unemployment in the short and medium terms but weighted them as lesser than the assured bounty AI would bring.  On the other hand, all across society people viewed Recession era unemployment as a lower bound of the negative externalities AI would surely bring, many worried it would turn violently against humans should it achieve super intelligence.  Surprisingly though, to me, despite the massive quantities of investment made into the technology over the preceding year and a half, and reports that the AI sector has contributed nearly all of our economy’s growth, nothing has really happened.  Unemployment is marginally up, and AI is more visible than ever, but its rate of improvement has slowed.  New models arrive less frequently, and optimists and pessimists alike have pushed back knowledge and consciousness-based benchmarks.  Writing this at 10:27 on the 6th of February 2026, I can’t tell what is likely to happen next.  I was once relatively optimistic, both on AI’s timeline and its economic effects.  Today I am less so on both counts, skeptical that it will make an impact even as economically large as the information technologies boom of the early 2000s.  All I can remain committed to is; that I will remain an interested observer and will update my estimation as best I can.