I’m pretty sure this sort of thing was tried with the prior era of neural nets too. When the field hits a ceiling they grasp at the make-AI-teach-itself straw. It’s the Hail Mary pass. What if we keep stacking AIs on top of each other. Maybe they’ll somehow break out of their own limitations.

There’s a cadence. Once in a while a breakthrough happens. The tech is incorporated into the world. There are variations of the tech, but all have the same fundamental ceiling.

The AI Effect takes place. People forget about AI for a while. Time passes. A breakthrough paper is published. AI is upon the world once again.

Only this time with LLMs, it’s seemingly passed the Turing Test so people think it’s close to the fictional AGI. Not just recognizing handwriting, speech, or images. Or putting an annoying animated character on your desktop. This time it’s being freakishly good at predicting what the next words should be based on known sum total of human knowledge. Making it be creative isn’t it this time. That’s the ceiling.