and these aren’t normies, they work on tech, high paying 6 figure salaries, very up to date with current events.

If you are a true normie not working in tech, it makes sense to be unaware of such details. You are missing out, but I get why.

If you are in tech, and you don’t even know GPT-4 versus GPT-3.5? Oh no.

Is it just me, or do you also feel intellectually lonely lately? 

I think my relatives and most of my friends think I'm crazy for thinking and talking so much about AI. And they listen to me more out of respect and politeness than out of any real interest in the topic.

Ege, do you think you'd update if you saw a demonstration of sophisticated sample-efficient in-context learning and far-off-distribution transfer?
 

Yes.

Suppose it could get decent at the first-person-shooter after like a subjective hour of messing around with it. If you saw that demo in 2025, how would that update your timelines?

I would probably update substantially towards agreeing with you.

DeepMind released an early-stage research model SIMA: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/sima-generalist-ai-agent-for-3d-virtual-environments/

It was tested on 600 basic (10-sec max) videogame skills and had only video from the screen + text with the task. The main takeaway is that an agent trained on many games performs in a new unseen game almost as well as another agent, trained specifically on this game.



Seems like by 2025 its really possible to see more complex generalization (harder tasks and games, more sample efficiency) as in your crux for in-context learning.

Since OpenAI are renting MSFT compute for both training and inference.. 
Seems reasonable to think that inference >> training.  Am I right? 

Is there a cheap of free way to read Semianalysis posts? 
Cant afford the $500 subscription sadly