{"id":4483,"date":"2025-08-13T19:43:52","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T19:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/scientists-worried-ai-pleateau\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T19:43:52","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T19:43:52","slug":"scientists-worried-ai-pleateau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/scientists-worried-ai-pleateau\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried That We&#8217;ve Already Hit Peak AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><img width=\"2400\" height=\"1260\" src=\"https:\/\/wordpress-assets.futurism.com\/2025\/08\/scientists-worried-ai-pleateau.jpg\" class=\"attachment-full size-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"Skepticism is mounting as the rate of progress for scalable artificial intelligence models appears to be slowing down.\" style=\"margin-bottom: 15px;\" decoding=\"async\" fetchpriority=\"high\"><\/div>\n<p>The long-awaited release of OpenAI&#8217;s GPT-5 has gone over with a <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/gpt-5-disaster\">wet thud<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Though the private sector continues to dump billions into artificial intelligence development, hoping for exponential gains, the research community isn&#8217;t convinced.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/open-questions\/what-if-ai-doesnt-get-much-better-than-this\"><em>The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Gary Marcus, a neural scientist and <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/sam-altman-ai-skeptic\">longtime critic<\/a> of OpenAI, said what many have been coming to suspect: despite years of development at a staggering cost, AI doesn&#8217;t seem to be getting much better.<\/p>\n<p>Though GPT-5 technically performs better on AI industry benchmarks \u2014 an already unreliable measure of progress, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2024\/11\/26\/1107346\/the-way-we-measure-progress-in-ai-is-terrible\/\">experts have argued<\/a> \u2014 the critic argues that its use beyond anything other than a virtual chat-buddy remains unlikely. Worse yet, the rate at which new models grow against those dubious benchmarks appears to be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2492232-gpt-5s-modest-gains-suggest-ai-progress-is-slowing-down\/\">slowing down<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I don\u2019t hear a lot of companies using AI saying that 2025 models are a lot more useful to them than 2024 models, even though the 2025 models perform better on benchmarks,&#8221; Marcus told the magazine.<\/p>\n<p>Since at least 2020, the researcher has been carrying water for a more <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2002.06177\">practical approach<\/a> to AI development, one with a much narrower focus than the current &#8220;general consumer&#8221; strategy.<\/p>\n<p>In the US, tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been focused on &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2001.08361\">scalable AI<\/a>,&#8221; a development approach that prioritizes rapid financial growth over useful tech. Even the term &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/terms\/s\/scalability.asp\">scalable<\/a>&#8221; as we know it has its roots in the world of <a href=\"https:\/\/grammarphobia.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/scalable.html\">finance capital<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In practice, this has meant plugging in as many graphics processing chips as possible, which requires more data centers, which require more energy, which requires more capital.<\/p>\n<p>The payoff, OpenAI CEO <a href=\"https:\/\/moores.samaltman.com\/\">Sam Altman theorized<\/a> in 2021, should be near-exponential improvements to AI&#8217;s capabilities \u2014 if you spend the money, there&#8217;s no reason the tech can&#8217;t get better. And if you spend enough money, you might just be able to unlock artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where our little chatbots achieve human-level intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s just one little wrinkle: the tech\u00a0<em>really<\/em> isn&#8217;t getting better.<\/p>\n<p>Though Marcus&#8217;s more realistic view of AI made him a pariah in the excitable AI community, he&#8217;s no longer standing alone against scalable AI. Yesterday, University of Edinburgh AI scholar <a href=\"https:\/\/www.miragenews.com\/gpt-5-has-ai-hit-plateau-1512925\/\">Michael Rovatsos wrote<\/a> that &#8220;it is possible that the release of GPT-5 marks a shift in the evolution of AI which&#8230; might usher in the end of creating ever more complicated models whose thought processes are impossible for anyone to understand.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in March, a survey of <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-researchers-tech-industry-dead-end\">475 AI researchers<\/a> concluded that AGI was a &#8220;very unlikely&#8221; outcome of the current development approach.<\/p>\n<p>And as far back as 2023 \u2014 before even GPT-4o, let alone GPT-5 \u2014 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told the German publication <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.handelsblatt.com\/technik\/ki\/bill-gates-mit-ki-koennen-medikamente-viel-schneller-entwickelt-werden\/29450298.html\">Handelsblatt<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>that scalable AI had &#8220;reached a plateau.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Several years later, even AI&#8217;s ride-or-die backers in the financial sector are starting to come back down to Earth.\u00a0Despite a better-than-expected\u00a0second quarter for OpenAI&#8217;s\u00a0datacenter partner\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2025\/08\/12\/coreweave-crwv-q2-earnings-report-2025.html\">CoreWeave<\/a>, Wall Street is beginning to doubt big tech&#8217;s ability to deliver on its lofty goal of delivering AGI.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, CoreWeave&#8217;s stocks have plummeted <a href=\"https:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/coreweave-stock-plummets-as-ai-cloud-company-reports-deteriorating-operating-income-outlook-151157242.html\">16 percent<\/a> so far at the time of writing, which may be the first sign that AI&#8217;s bloated carcass is starting to rupture.<\/p>\n<p><strong>More on AI: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-bubble-economy-bleak\"><em>Beneath the AI Bubble, the Economy Looks Bleak<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/scientists-worried-ai-pleateau\">Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried That We&#8217;ve Already Hit Peak AI<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The long-awaited release of OpenAI&#8217;s GPT-5 has gone over with a wet thud. Though the private sector continues to dump billions into artificial intelligence development, hoping for exponential gains, the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1539,177,2935,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-hype","category-artificial-intelligence","category-gpt-5","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}