Jolting Ahead: Why AI’s Acceleration Is Accelerating
When Ray Kurzweil first proposed the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” he suggested that technological progress builds on itself, speeding up over time. But what if even that framing is too slow? David Orban’s recent paper, Jolting Technologies: Superexponential Acceleration in AI Capabilities and Implications for AGI, pushes the discussion into new mathematical territory. Instead of modeling AI progress as exponential (where capability growth accelerates at a constant rate), he proposes something more radical: positive third-order derivatives — or in physics terms, jolts. ...