I’m not an expert in anything of what I’m about to talk about now, this is just what I think

As human history progressed, technology has given us great products at scale that not only cover our basic biological needs but that make our lives better. One really basic example that I appreciate very much is plumbing, and of course hot water.

But also there are more complex ones, like digital entertainment. It’s more complex in the sense that, think for a minute how much technology it’s needed for you to be able to laugh your ass off over a video of Biden, Trump, and Obama playing minecraft on a social platform.

First, you need electricity generation and distribution, then extremely complex to manufacture semi-conductors, a bunch of electronic components, lithium batteries, pack that into a super light glass brick that fits into your pocket, a network of giant optical fiber cables that go under the ocean from continent to continent, a massive network of antennas, massive data centers, ai generative models for both audio and video and a million things more. And that’s just at an extremely high-level analysis. And it all has to happen at scale. In turn, to take a shower, you need a water source, plumbing, a pump, and a heater. There might be more to it, but it’s definitely more simple.

And after growing with technological benefits like your phone or the internet, do you think you could live without them? I bet that if you ask some random person the question: Would you rather never be able to use your phone again for the rest of your life, or never take a shower again?

Most people will prefer to use their phones instead of taking a shower ever again in their lives. Of course, it’s a stupid question, but it just shows how our needs have a tendency to complexity. Because that is what we use tech for. We, humans, build better products with tech, and we sell them at scale. But in that process, our needs get more complex to produce.

With so much complexity, the barriers to entry into the market with a competitive product are extremely high in most sectors of the tech industry. We thought that making software was the true industry of knowledge, while you have a computer with access to the internet you can make big money. But now with the accelerating rate of development in ai, we are seeing more and more high-qualification jobs being menaced.

Now maybe it’s the entry-level positions, but tell me that LLMs and generative models are not going to be better in the future. That they will stagnate their pace of development. Just as the whole market asks for more training capacity, the new GPUs train models up to 5x faster at the same price, and the research publications on ai are at an all-time high. The cost of training neural networks is dramatically reducing, and the interest and investment are raising rapidly.

And even if you want to train your own models, we have seen that for some time now that big improvements in the model’s performance are not so much given by game-changing architecture but by brute forcing your way to agi with big money increasing your parameters and expanding your dataset to giant levels.

So there is technology, increasing once more the entry barriers to the market, increasing the efficiency of a company by means of injecting a giant load of money into a few engineers and data centers. This of course will also have very positive consequences, but ¿How will it change society forever? We will see

¿Does this mean that our fate is that all products and services are served to us by ai managed corporations and that the only solution left for policymakers to unemployment will be taxing these corporations to finance Universal Basic Income? ¿Will the policymakers be able to keep up with the pace of AI development? ¿Should I drop out of college? ¿Should I be telling everyone that I created an AGI and start a cult with myself as the leader?

I don’t know, I guess we will see how things go. But I’m sure that open-source models and ai systems availability will play a major role in this process.

The future is very interesting. Keep repressing your inner nihilist <3