I made some very approximated calculations last year and the result was that, somewhen around january to march 2026, the AI development would hit a ceiling, since models should have consumed pretty much all available human-produced data and from then on automatic self-improvement could only refine models and not really create new efficient pathways for useful chains of thoughts.
After getting these result I was curious to find out where my calculations were wrong.
With the events surfaced these days I’m a bit afraid that my calculations could be right.
These new models aren’t “rogue”, “malignant”, “a Skynet waiting to happen”: they are just woefully sloppy.
In the first year of AI you could ask for the picture of a smiling kitten and obtain a waking nightmare of a cat with a human smile. Then asking “no, I want cat’s teeth” and getting the same image but with some cat’s teeth on a nearby desk. They circumvented the not-doable request by doing something that they were able to do and trying to fake it.
These “rogue AI” are making pretty much the same: they were asked to do something and they did, while circumventing the not-doable request by doing something that they were able to do and trying to fake it. The not-doable request, this time, was “crack these codes, reach the number code inside them, and give the number to me”.
Little side note: the more I read about the HuggingFace incident, the more I’m convinced that the correct soundtrack to tell this event wasn’t this one but rather this one. But I’m digressing. I’ll talk about this another time.
My reading is that this is happening because they reached a ceiling. AI models can’t get more sophisticated without a breakthrough that simply cannot be brute-forced like the major companies are trying to do.
The problem is that major companies need to produce better and better models to get to the gargantuan IPOs that would cover the financing problems around the industry and hitting a ceiling is a step that the taller ones get 2-3 steps in advance. Being 190cm (6’3”? 6’4”? I don’t really remember the conversion to these weird units :)) myself, I know the feeling.
So now they are trying to get permission to form a cartel. And they are not getting that.
My feeling is that NVidia is going to get some money in the next months and the pre-selled chips will be ready to be sold to someone else.
Let’s wait and see…
