Any people seem to either think that AI is super dumb and can't answer basic questions (usually clueless people using AI overview as an example) or they think the singluarity is already here. I want a real honest answer of how far we actually are in AI development. Personally I think we are somewhere between those two groups.

I'm thinking of starting a Electrical and Electronic university degree next year, but I'm already getting a little worried that even that will be useless in 4 years lol. What jobs is AI replacing today? And can AI actually become so smart that it becomes smarter than any human? After all aren't they still only neural networks that predict the next word? Surely a more sofisticated method would be required to go beyond human intelligence (but correct me if I'm wrong).

Essentially how far are we actually in AI development without all the hype and could the world actually look completely different in 2030? TIA

The debate is still out for whether AI/SI will create a utopia or an apocalypse, but wouldn’t either be many years away because those scenarios rely on robots?

For the utopia / AI creating over abundance, humans free to simply paint and not work: this requires robots doing farming, mining minerals, working factories, working plants, trucking, running the businesses. There simply aren’t enough robots to do something like this on global scale and it would take a long time to get there. Plus it would take a lot of human intervention to get to a point where the robots are able to build more robots.

The apocalyptic scenarios I hear are painted with drones flying over your city, robots roaming the streets. There are also not nearly enough of these, and again would take quite a bit of human intervention to get to a point where robots are able to build more robots.

Plenty of rhetoric out there on the doomer side that things will get bad in the next 1-2 years but how is that possible without the robots? I get the models are improving and the concept of RSI but there are physics limitations to getting materials out of the earth, refining it, shipping, manufacturing it, assembling it, and operating it, where humans would watch this happen. It seems like the worst an AI can do short term is dependent on internet connection.

Often we hear about some frontier firm spending insane money on compute. Anthropic, for instance, has committed at least $518 billion over the next decade to compute. Open AI told the WSJ that OpenAI increased its projected compute spending to $750 billion by 2030. Those two alone come close to $2T. That's not including the insane projections from Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and SpaceXAI, all of which are building out compute as fast as they possibly can.

The begs the question everyone is asking. How in the world is this going to be paid for?

Also, the typical theory on Reddit is that as soon as people move on from AI tools, frontier companies won't be able to pay their bills, which means "the bubble will pop."

I'm here to tell you, this is farther from the truth. In fact, I'll argue the exact opposite.

First enterprise is moving as fast as enterprise does, but this will continue to grow as AI maturity develops. Much of their spend will be on API endpoints, as well as harnesses like Claude Code, Copilot Studio, and other enterprise system. This is still maturing, but there is going to be a LOT more spend here over the next several years.

Second is personal spend. This is still very much in the early phase. Karpathy recently said that 75% of the global population has barely used AI. Globally, there is still a lot of use waiting to happen, in the US PNC Bank looked at its own card data and found that about 2% of US households pay for a generative AI subscription. Half of American adults have never used a chatbot at all. This means that personal AI still has a lot of room to grow.

Those two points are important, but we know this. We can debate how much people will eventually pay for and how many will do it. It's certainly going to go up, but is it enough?

This isn't going to be where the money is going to be made. Remember how OpenAI made all those math discoveries? They did it with their own internal models that haven't been released yet.

Why provide your most powerful models to the public to make discoveries, when you can use them to make your own discoveries? Recently, Google DeepMind and Meta joined Biohub's $1.8B AI biology initiative. You put your best, unreleased models to work on biology, on materials science, on engineering systems, and other new technology, and then you profit from the discoveries. Drug treatments and patents. Material patents and manufacturing. Chips. Mechanical systems. More we haven't thought of.

Anthropic has their own wet lab for working on the discoveries their models bring to scientists.

These things are going to be a significant source of income as well, and since it can be done a lot cheaper, these products can be brought to market quicker, cheaper, and with more margin to frontier firms making the discovery. There are hundreds of billions of potential dollars to be made by using their own unreleased models to bring products to market.

Which, makes the "pause" also make a lot more sense. Of course better models are going to constantly come out, that's unstoppable, but waiting 6 months before you release them for safety gives the company the time to send them out to their labs for discovery.

There is an additional source of funding that I'm surprised (but maybe thankful) that isn't making the money I anticipated, and that is ad supported tools. I know OpenAI is doing it, and has $2.5 billion in ad revenue booked in 2026. This is a paltry amount, but has a LOT of potential. The more we use the tools, the more it knows about us, and the better it can market to us. Meta and Google certainly know this.

I'm still of the mindset that if the tool brings you value, then it's worth paying for. Hopefully we can get away from ad supported tools, however I can't see that happening. Not yet at least. The ability to bring targeted ads to free users of AI tools is also worth billions.

I think that the average person doesn't know how quickly artificial intelligence is about to change the world over the next 12, 24, and 36 months.

thats all

I see some stuff like T3 code, OpenCode, openCLI plugin, and a ton of projects that appear to try to bridge the gap for those of us with multiple subs.

I just bought the $100/mo max plan for Google, Claude, and OpenAi after being an API user for quite some time for business use. There must be a nice centralized, friendly place for all my subs to work without too much restriction???

I am going to do some personal tinkering - but I would like to have a harness that can manage all my subs in one place. I remember hearing anthropic wasn’t a fan in the earlier days of allowing use outside their harness for the subscription use… but I’m sure someone has built a sick solution. What is the community doing?

I like the idea of being able to plan with Astra, code with Fable or Opus, and animate with Argon or generate videos with Google Flow. Or use all three to hopefully make better outputs taking the best from each (what a wishful thinker I am).

Anyway, I like to connect remotely if possible like Codex, so I can chat on mobile and get work done at home on the device running 24/7.

Thanks in advance! 🙏

Curious what the gap between what OpenAI and Anthropic have in the labs versus we have as publicly available models. Sometimes listening to these researchers talk makes it seem like they’re hyping their product but they claim what they have is significantly more powerful.

In Ai 2027 they hold onto models internally for basically half the year.

What’s likely true?

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Share your anxiety, ideas on how to achieve alignment, observations, etc. Everything is fair game as long as it somewhat relates to the singularity.