....and The Browser Company has already released a beta version of their own "AI browser" named Dia for macOS, remember...
It's insane how much change is happening in the AI field...wasn't it just 2 years ago when we were barely able to generate a realistic video using AI? Now, halfway through the 3rd year with LLMs, we are already seeing competition on who can come out with an AI-first browser.
Just an insane pace of progression of AI...when will it slow down?
I remember thinking this same thought when the iPhone was first introduced, and Apple was showing those graphs at WWDC or at their annual iPhone events every year showing at the rapid performance advancement of the A-series chips and the hockey-puck curve...now, Apple doesn't show that slide anymore because the A-series chips/M-series chips have basically matured and the performance curve has plateaued. Not the case the AI. Who knows what is going to happen to our society once AI has matured and the performance has plateaued and tech has moved on to the next thing...
Unimaginable times we are living in folks...
Just wanted to vent a little and put down my 2-cents.
Thanks for reading...
Separating the wheat from the chaff is extremely difficult because we are in a hype cycle but you are right with the level of progress. Deepseek was known among the research community roughly 9 months ago and that feels like ancient history now.
I think there's a chance that without a major fundamental discovery we will see a cooling-off period within 18-36 months, then an extreme ramp up again afterward toward the end of the decade as the longer-term research starts to pay off. But honestly, a lot of people used Siri regularly even though it didn't really improve – the same thing may happen with current GenAI tech and the demand may outpace supply until the next generational breakthroughs happen.
I saw deterministic code generation including full test cases in one shot about 5 years ago at a research company, this was well before GitHub Copilot and also performed much better in the domain it targeted.After that presentation I kind of stared into the middle distance for a while just absorbing the ramifications of what I saw.
I have posts as recently as ~6 months ago in this forum where I vehemently argue that AI cannot summarize because it misses key points, and there was research to back that up. That is no longer the case although there are still some errors and issues they are drastically reduced.
With the current technology we won't ever perfect things (World Models will likely be necessary, not LLM + tools), but they are now to the point where they can
often accelerate rather than detract. What's really crazy to me is if you used the latest models in February of this year and based your judgments on that, you are already woefully out of date. I have
never seen anything move at this speed, and while there are scaling limits I wonder how much they can be minimized with tool use and agentic workflows etc. that kind of suppress the drawbacks.
18-24 months ago ChatGPT was widely being torn down as being a stochastic parrot which
was true in some sense. Now, with scaling and some additional breakthroughs there are many more tokens that are intermediary and actually
do function as a sort of "reasoning" in a high-level metaphorical (not biological!) sense. Emergent behavior is real, but don't let anyone tell you that will lead to AGI or some similar nonsense, it will not.
Unimaginable is a good word for it, and I don't love the implications of any of this GenAI technology on the world. As a larger public, we are not prepared at all, and I don't mean from a safety perspective, I mean from a societal one.
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On-topic, integrated web search dramatically improved the utility of LLMs since you can point them at documentation or have them search for up to date information which helps get around knowledge cutoff limits in their training data. It's smart for OpenAI to release a browser and if they product manage it correctly I could imagine it competing at a pretty high level, probably surpassing Firefox within a year if they have a fully fledged and well thought-out product.
Many of us switched to Chrome
rapidly when it launched, OpenAI is wise to pursue this avenue, particularly as "there is no moat" to some degree. They need propriety offerings to help lock-in customers.