This Yuil Ban thread - Foundations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution - explains it best. While I recommend reading the entire thread, if you don't want to, here are some quotes:

"The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the upcoming/current one. And this goes into my second point: we won't know when the Fourth Industrial Revolution started until WELL after it's underway.

Next, "inter-revolutionary period" refers to the fact that technology generally progresses in inter-twining S-curves and right as one paradigm peaks, another troughs before rising. This is why people between 1920-1940 and between 2000 and 2020 felt like all the great technologies of their preceding industrial revolutions had given way to incremental iterative improvements and great laboratory advancements that never seemed capable of actually leaving the laboratory. If you ever wondered why the 2000s and 2010s felt indistinguishable and slow, as if nothing changed from 1999 to the present, it was because you were living in that intermediate period between technological revolutions. During that time, all the necessary components for the Fourth Industrial Revolution were being set up as the foundations for what we're seeing now while simultaneously all the fruits of the Third Industrial Revolution were fully maturing and perhaps even starting to spoil, with nothing particularly overwhelming pushing things forward. You might remember this as "foundational futurism."

As it stands, a lot of foundational stuff tends to be pretty boring on its own. Science fiction talks of the future being things like flying cars, autonomous cars, humanoid servant robots, synthetic media, space colonies, neurotechnology, and so on. Sci-fi media sometimes set years for these things to happen, like the 1990s or 2000s. Past futurists often set similar dates. Dates like, say, 2020 AD. According to Blade Runner, we're supposed to have off-world colonies and 100% realistic humanoid robots (e.g. with human-level artificial general intelligence) by now. According to Ray Kurzweil, we were supposed to have widespread human-AI relationships (ala Her) and PCs with the same power as the human brain by 2019. When these dates passed and the most we had was, say, the Web 2.0 and smartphones, we felt depressed about the future.

But here's the thing: we're basically asking why we don't have a completed 2-story house when we're still setting down the foundation, a foundation using tools that were created in the preceding years.

We couldn't get to the modern internet without P2P, VoIP, enterprise instant messaging, e-payments, business rules management, wireless LANs, enterprise portals, chatbots, and so on. Things that are so fundamental to how the internet circa 2020 works that we can scarcely even consider them individually. No increased bandwidth for computer connections? No audio or video streaming. No automated trading or increased use of chatbots? No fully automated businesses. No P2P? No blockchain. No smartphones or data sharing? No large data sets that can be used to power machine learning, and thus no advanced AI.

Finally and a bit more lightheartedly, I'd strongly recommend against using this to predict future industrial revolutions unless you're writing a pulp sci-fi story and need to figure out roughly when the 37th industrial revolution will be underway. If the Fourth Industrial Revolution pans out the way I feel it will, there won't be a Fifth. Or perhaps more accurately, we won't be able to predict the Fifth, specifically when it'll take place and what it will involve."

if there’s a 10% chance that existing trends in AI continue, its the only news story worth covering. It’s like seeing a 10% chance of aliens heading towards earth.

The last Ai winter was caused by insufficient compute. We now have sufficient compute, and we've discovered that no new algorithmic advances are necessary, all we have to do is scale up compute for existing algorithms and intelligence scales along with it.

There are no longer any barriers to scaling compute because internet speeds are high enough that all compute can be server farms that are continually expanded. Energy costs are coming down towards zero so that's not a limiting factor.

The feedback loop now is Ai makes money, money is used for more compute, Ai becomes smarter and makes more money.

The expert systems of the 80s and 90s, grew too complex for dumb humans to manage. This is no longer a bottleneck because again, all you have to do is scale compute. Smart programmers can accelerate that by optimizing, and designing better data curation systems but again it's not even necessary. It's now a manual labor job that almost any one can be hired to do (plugging in more computers).

The poster addressed both of your points.

Your points seem to be:

1:People you've meet in the ML field don't talk much about AGI.

2: You don't believe that LLMs will lead to an AGI or a singularity.

This poster is saying that neither of those things matter if the trend of exponential technological growth continues. Technological growth will progress in a rapid and nonintuitive fashion such that things that seem possible in the next few hundred years could occur in just the next few decades.

It's true that trend is not guaranteed to continue, but it seems unlikely (at least in my mind, and clearly in others) that even significant economic or societal shifts could alter it's course.

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An actual AI winter at this point is about as likely as society instantaneously collapsing.

An AI winter is not an actual, valid concern for anyone in the industry for the forseeable future.

I get wanting to have a critical discussion about this, but then when someone talks about exponential growth, you need to do better than parroting a talking point that mainstream journalists who have no idea what they are talking about spew out.

I'm all for critical discussion, but talking about another actual AI winter like the 70s or early 2000s is kind of a joke. I'm really surprised anyone with even a little bit of knowledge of what is going on in the industry would say something this out-of-touch.

And none of that is to say AGI is immenent, just that an AI winter is literally the most out-of-touch counterpoint you could possibly use.

You are not the master of this subreddit 🙄 why does everyone think they can decide what others talk about?