Scott Alexander shows how he won his 2022 bet about AI image generation capabilities, tracking the progress from early failures to complete success in 2025, using this to argue against AI skeptics.
Longer summary
Scott Alexander describes the resolution of a bet he made in June 2022 about AI image generation capabilities. The bet claimed that by June 2025, AI would master image compositionality and be able to accurately generate specific complex scenes. The post shows the progression of AI image generation from 2022 to 2025, starting with early failures by DALL-E2, through various partial successes with Google Imagen and DALL-E3, and ending with ChatGPT 4o's complete success in May-June 2025. Scott uses this to argue against critics who claimed AI was just a 'stochastic parrot' that couldn't achieve true understanding, though he acknowledges some remaining limitations with very complex prompts.
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