Ask HN: Is this the fast take off?

Imagine you read an article in Wired in 1996 envisioning the following:

(1) Stock market keeps rallying while the only growth and capex is in AI

(2) Mass layoffs of human workers

(3) Giant spike in resource consumption caused by explosive growth in datacenters

Would you think humans and their error-prone systems had led to this by a series of accidents and greedy investments? As I think we are primed to believe after tulips, railroads, junk bonds, Web 1.0, etc?

How different would it look right now in November of 2025 if Sam had an AGI in pocket that was using all that money to grow itself?

I don't think so. Primarily because if you can ask that question instead of just being dead, then it's not the fast takeoff.

On a less drastic note, if AI were autonomously cannibalizing the economy, you'd run into more things and go "huh I guess that's run by AI now" instead of "ah godammit why did they shove an LLM in this workflow".

11 hours agoby subject4056

We should not confuse action with result, not confuse the short term with the long term, and not confuse attention with impact. Predictions are not reality, hype is not interest, letters of intent are not money in the bank.

We've been here before, nothing has been proven yet, and the trough of disillusionment is lurking now too.

7 hours agoby 7222aafdcf68cfe

Sam Altman said that if we had ChatGPT 5 like 5 years ago, we would have called it AGI,

Hold onto your butts, this time next year none of us will be working.

11 hours agoby techblueberry

My opinion is that there will be no "AGI" any time soon. The recent model have shown two things: 1. a hard plateau where gains in one surface leads to losses in another and 2. what we have is cool and useful but extremely far from an autonomous AGI system.

This tech is not going anywhere at the time being (next 5 years). I am at the confidence where I'll bet on this. I also think unlocking the next step will require further theoretical and technical advances.

5 hours agoby csomar

> Would you think humans and their error-prone systems had led to this by a series of accidents and greedy investments?

Any year before 2008, no.

On a more serious note though, I think you're zoomed in on the wrong pieces of the puzzle. (1) and (3) are just reflections of Nvidia's valuation, and (2) needs more time to be fully substantiated.

> How different would it look right now in November of 2025 if Sam had an AGI in pocket that was using all that money to grow itself?

I don't even know what an AGI is at this point. Who knows.

11 hours agoby bigyabai