alt Hacker NewsI believe it's already well accepted in these labs that we're in the Singularity. It happened on a Tuesday back in February. No one seemed to really notice and life went on... for now.
I believe it's already well accepted in these labs that we're in the Singularity. It happened on a Tuesday back in February. No one seemed to really notice and life went on... for now.
That's probably correct. It's unlikely there will be any single hard line we cross the defines the pre-singularity vs post-singularity moment.
I'd accept AI likely became somewhat helpful to frontier AI research & development in early 2026.
I think for me though the real game changer moment will be when AI working autonomously is able to hypothesis and test algorithmic improvements at a faster rate than humans. This will be done to some extent by scale – lots of parallel agents coming up with lots of hypotheses and running the best candidates as tests. But also (and perhaps more importantly) by making more consequential algorithmic discoveries in the field of machine learning than humans – a bar we appear to have crossed or are crossing with math.
I suspect AIs today are super-human at finding performance improvements and minor iterations on current approaches. Whether they can solve some of the larger algorithmic challenges in the field however I'm not yet sure, although it seems likely that unreleased models are starting to make progress here.
An algorithm breakthrough on par in significance with the attention mechanism, primarily driven by automated AI research in say a field like continual learning would in my opinion be extremely significant and should leave no doubters that the singularity is here and will rapidly alter the world as we have known it.