If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
The monkey’s typing and generating Shakespeare is supposed to show the ridiculousness of the concept of infinity. It does not mean it would happen in years, or millions of years, or billions, or trillions, or… So unless the “AI” can move outside the flow of time and take an infinite amount of time and also then has a human or other actual intelligence to review every single result to verify when it comes up with the right one…yeah, not real…this is what happens when we give power to people with no understanding of the problem much less how to solve it. They come up with random ideas from random slivers of information. Maybe in an infinite amount of time a million CEOs could make a longterm profitable company.