Advent of the Machine God
By now, if you haven't used coding assistance with AI yet, you must be living under a rock. If you have, you have an opinion on them, ranging from a feeling of doom or a feeling of euphoria (if you're selling them) or if you're like me, a bit of both.
At this moment, I'm amazed at a few things:
How rapidly the industry is scaling compute. These "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will draw ridiculous amounts of power running almost exclusively NVIDIA GPUs (NVIDIA is now ~4% of the world GDP by market cap).
China is the good guy! - In a surprising turn of events, while American AI labs have been clutching their pearls about safety and regulation about big models, China has repeatedly churned out the best high parameter count models. Deepseek, Qwen and now Kimi 2 are amazing and useful models. Infact, I would argue the real positive economic impact of AI is going to be on the back of these models.
One architecture changed everything - the transformer. My belief is that this would be as important an invention as NNs themselves. Specifically this beautiful equation for attention: Makes you think what other inventions would seem so simple yet so powerful for the current hot area of research - RL.
How quickly everything is moving - 6 months ago, I wouldn't use AI assistants. Now I can't live without them, but I need to still be in control to actually do a task. But I find myself trusting the AI more and more, which is a bad thing - because I have no mental model of the code anymore when I actually need to debug.
We live in exciting times, but at what point do our leaders need to understand and regulate these risks? Jobs will be automated away, more will come but there might be major displacement in the process.