Where AI does make consistent progress is in domain-specific tasks. Science, engineering, mathematics, and coding, if you match a model with enough reinforcement learning with humans who know how to manage them, there are startling results. You don’t get much innovation, not much newness, which is the true driver of progress.

Better than humans is highly contextual. Computers have been better at chess for decades, but there isn’t a better chess. Horses run faster than humans, and that’s been useful for four millennia, but we got to peak horses quite some time ago.

So the question is, have we reached peak AI, where the cost of future developments don’t match the risk they won’t work well enough to justify? If ChatGPT already writes a perfectly good business letter in a couple of seconds, there is no meaningful improvement to be had for users. Most AI is profoundly annoying, in ways that have nothing to do with the models and everything to do with perverted UX in an attempt to justify growth. That is both unsustainable and a tacit admission that AI hasn’t solved its use case problem.

When there are no more public collective shared databases of human interaction to strip mine and AI techbros have convinced everyone the humans are worthless who create, add to and curate those public, collective shared databases… AI will have obliterated its own runway.

Welcome to that future!