AI Omens: Signs of AI acceleration

A friend recently asked me what my “AI timelines” were. Especially with recent progress in image generation, language modeling, code generation, robotics, protein folding, and other areas, this has become an increasingly popular question amongst those who are paying attention. However, I find trying to answer this question pretty frustrating. There already exist long, thorough reports (another) which build quantitative models and carefully define terms to make sure there’s as little ambiguity as...