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The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism

A few months ago, Casey Newton of Platformer ran a piece called "The phony comforts of AI skepticism," framing those who would criticize generative AI as "having fun," damning them as "hyper-fixated on the things [AI] can't do." I am not going to focus too hard on this blog, in

By choosing the cautiously-optimistic template, Roose can present "intelligent people that are telling him things" as proof that confirms what he wants to believe, which is that Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who he just interviewed on Hard Fork, is correct when he says that AGI is mere years away. Being one of the few people that is willing to write down the numbers in stark, objective detail is a frustrating exercise — and it's isolating too, especially when I catch strays from Casey Newton claiming he's taking "" about my work as a punishment for the sin of "doing basic mathematics and asking why nobody else seems to want to." Outside of NVIDIA, nobody is making any profit off of generative AI, and once that narrative fully takes hold, I fear a cascade of events that gores a hole in the side of the stock market and leads to tens of thousands of people losing their jobs.

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