December 2023:

• Turing Test passed. Regardless of whether or not it's a good barometer for AGI, this is still important. Not only is it a very old and famous milestone, but reliable chatbots are good for both optics and social services. Websites like Characters.ai will benefit tremendously. In December 2022 Characters.ai is very impressive and sometimes startlingly human and can even provide some genuine social and emotional nourishment, but is very obviously a bot thanks to its occasional contradictory answers and limited memory reserves. Kind of like talking to someone in an earlier stage of Alzheimer's. (AI chatbots 10 years ago, meanwhile, were like talking to someone with severe Alzheimer's that had no comprehension at all and could never give a relevant response) December 2023 Characters.ai might be almost indistinguishable from a human. Much longer memory, rare contradictory answers, rarely trips up.

• Video generation is very coherent. Whereas December 2022 video generation had an obvious distorted dreamlike quality, December 2023 video generation is like AI art is now - almost perfect minus some niggling details (mainly hands). A video that's 10 minutes or longer has been published of very high quality that's entirely coherent in both visuals and storytelling, or very close to it. Imperfections can be spotted but generally mild nitpicky things.

• 30+ page stories are written that are essentially flawless in terms of coherency. Maybe even more than 100 pages.

• Tesla FSD rarely makes outstandingly stupid errors and is at the level of an average human. Details have been announced regarding the first consumer driverless vehicles set to arrive around 2025 (I read an article this year claiming that multiple major companies are aiming to begin selling consumer driverless cars in '25).

• Kernel continues conducting clinical trials using their headsets. Some important things are learned regarding mental illnesses which give us a clearer insight into the cause of things like depression, anxiety, and trauma disorders.

• Promising medical stories become more common here, in part thanks to dramatically more capable AI - stories which are clearly not vaporware, but medical miracles which have high chances of working out. Hype begins generating about how we might be at the beginning of a medical revolution, similar to the hype that centered around AI this year. In terms of actual progress, 2023 is akin to a 2012 to 2019 year (for AI) - interesting and exciting but with long periods of radio silence. The hype becomes much thicker in 2024 as it truly begins to feel as though we're entering an age of miracles, and by somewhere in 2025 AI-assisted medical research occupies a similar spot to electric vehicles in the present. In 2022, many people are saying that electric vehicles will become mainstream by 2030, taking this trajectory for granted. Likewise, many organizations will be saying by the end of 2025 that thanks to AI, our physical and mental health will become more secure within the next 5-10 years than we could have ever imagined.