What are these guys smoking?

A couple of decades ago I remember sitting in a bar in Maine (US) with a good friend. We came up with a perfect plan. We'd work in the Corporate world for a while to save some money. Then we'd buy a car and drive to Tierra del Fuego for the adventure. After that we'd open a bar restaurant and live the good life.

It was a perfect twenty-something plan as it had no grounding in reality and was just fuelled by hopes, dreams and mudslide cocktails.

Pretty much the same kind of plan these Billionaires are coming up with when it comes to AI.

Apparently the Softbank CEO (Masayoshi Son) has predicted with 10 years, $9 TRILLION, 200 million chips and 400GW of power then 'Super AI' can be created that will be 10,000 times smarter than a human being:

Softbank CEO says super AI will be here in 2035 and cost $9T
Oh, and it’ll need the total current US power output

What annoys me about this is there will be people applauding it. There will be people saying "Absolutely!".

But it's plainly and obviously - feckin insane.

Let's put aside the sheer power and investment requirements. Not a small thing to put aside but bear with me. You really can't put 'Super' in front of something and then say it can be made real. We already know the current push for LLM's and GenAI will NOT create super intelligence. Yann LeCun has already said this:

"LLMs had “very limited understanding of logic . . . do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot plan hierarchically”

We need a whole new science of AI before we can start planning for super intelligence. That's even assuming it's not in the same bracket as Cold Fusion.

That's still in the hopes and dreams arena.

In 10 years time we are going to have far bigger problems as the environment a lot of us live in will be a dangerous place and potentially hostile. The climate is not going to wait for hopes and dreams. Look at what happened in Spain this week:

At least 95 people die in devastating flash floods in Spain
Authorities say flash floods in Spain turned village streets into rivers, ruined homes, disrupted transportation and killed at least 95 people.

Any push to realise these insane Billionaire plans are just going to make it worse. More people really do need to start saying "Nope, that's nuts"

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