system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What is the singularity?

Reading science fiction books, and listening to the technology news, I hear a lot about the singularity that is supposed to happen between 30-70 years from now.

Yet I have yet to understand exactly what the singularity is.
gpt
Imagine we invent a computer program that can make improvements to itself without us helping it. (Maybe we already have!)

It keeps improving itself. It gets better and faster at improving itself.

The more it improves itself, the more intelligent it becomes. The more intelligent it becomes, the faster it improves itself.

Imagine it doubled in intelligence every year. Pretend this number represents intelligence.

0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512....

Phew! It took a 10 years for IBM's "Deep Blue" to become as smart as "Watson"...

512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 

Woah! In only 5 years it became as smart as a bumblebee!

32768, 66536, 131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576

Yikes, another 5 years later it's as smart as a dog!

2097152, 4194304, 8388608, 16777216, 33554432, 67108864


And now it's smarter than us!


And now it's *tripling* in intelligence every *month*!

And now it's doing it every minute! Every *second*!!!

And BANG! All of a sudden there's this God-like AI with unimaginable powers and life and the universe is different than before.

We don't know how it will be different, we just know that any exponential growth feels flat for a while and then *suddenly* becomes very vertical.