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Surely transformer-based architecture is not what superintelligences will be running on. Transformers have many limitations. The context window for one, can this be made large enough for what a superintelligence would need? What about learning and self-improvement after training? Scaling and improving transformers might be a path to superintelligence but it seems like a very inefficient route.
We've demonstrated that roughly human-level intelligence can, in many ways, be achieved by Transformer architecture. But what if there's something way better than Transformers, just as Transformers are superior to what we were using before? We shouldn't rule out someone publishing a landmark paper with a better architecture. The last landmark paper came out in 2017!
And there might well be discontinuities in performance. Pre-Stable Diffusion AI art was pretty awful, especially faces. It went from awful to artful in a matter of months, not years.
The medieval lord doesn't get to see New York. He's asking about things he knows well: troops, castles, woodland, farmland. Towns and cities are small and less significant remember? All societies are agrarian! He doesn't get to see what we want to show him, he's asking us questions and we're answering and wishing we could say 'yes but you should be asking about our arsenal of nuclear submarines that fire 12 missiles each with 8 warheads that can incinerate an entire army anywhere in the world within 30 minutes'
We're looking at stars, the things we know well. Stars, black holes, planets and dust are 5% of the universe. The entire visible universe is not huge nor does it have much energy, it is dwarfed by the dark stuff we don't understand.
The entire universe is being torn apart by two mysterious forces that we cannot identify! We are staring at something enormously powerful. If we can't identify life in the 5% we understand well, life is very likely in the other 95%.
Why do we think aliens would do things with stars? How can we be sure that our reasoning isn't similar to that of a medieval nobleman trying to gauge the power of the US today?
"How many castles are in their realm? No castles? What, they can field hundreds of thousands of men-at-arms but no horse? What sort of backwards land is this? Is this another realm like the Aztec empire I heard rumours about? Enormous gold reserves and huge armies but none of the refinements of the civilized world! Let's invade!"
You can see how they would make incorrect assumptions if they got to ask the questions!
95% of the universe is 'dark'. What if there's some special method that makes Dyson Spheres obsolete?
The medieval would be confused by all our fields left fallow for the grass to grow, all the woodland right next to cities. It must be a desolate land, laid waste by war. People need to cultivate food, people need to burn wood for fuel. Maybe there was a plague?
I think aliens are supremely obvious and outweigh the visible universe. I think they have some superior method of manipulating matter and energy. Maybe they are using pre-existing stocks of dark matter rather than tapping stars. We would see them disappearing if they did that. Or maybe they have some way to generate matter ex nihilo (which does admittedly go against thermodynamics).
Anyway, we must be many tiers below them. Maybe if you increase the energy of your particle accelerator 100,000,000x you find something exciting that breaks all the rules! Maybe you have to be a superintelligence to get a grasp of what's really going on (quantum gravity) and do some unfathomably complicated technical feat with the resources of a Type 1.5 civilization to unlock the next tier of technologies.
Either there isn't any life or nanotech and Dyson Spheres aren't the final level of achievement. We can't even unite the fundamental forces. So I think the latter is the case.