What will GPT-2030 look like?

GPT-4 surprised many people with its abilities at coding, creative brainstorming, letter-writing, and other skills. Surprises in machine learning are not restricted to GPT-4: I was previously surprised by Minerva’s mathematical abilities, as were many competitive forecasters. How can we be less surprised by developments in machine learning? Our brains often implicitly make a zeroth-order forecast: looking at the current state of the art, and adding on improvements that “feel reasonable”. But wha...