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AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

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Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#61

Post by esafak »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #35
TimPC wrote: post #20

People should be worried because right now AI is on an exponential growth trajectory and no-one knows when it will level off into an s-curve. AI is starting to get close to good enough. If it becomes twice as good in seven months then what?

I was worried about that a couple of years ago, when there was a lot of hope that deeper reasoning skills and hallucination avoidance would simply arrive as emergent properties of a large enough model. More recently, it seems like that's not the case. Larger models sometimes even hallucinate more [0]. I think the entire sector is suffering from a Dunning Kruger effect -- making an LLM is difficult , and they managed…

really? I find newer models hallucinate less, and I think they have room for improvement, with better training.

I believe hallucinations are partly an artifact of imperfect model training, and thus can be ameliorated with better technique.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#62

Post by roadside_picnic »

TimPC wrote: post #20

People should be worried because right now AI is on an exponential growth trajectory and no-one knows when it will level off into an s-curve. AI is starting to get close to good enough. If it becomes twice as good in seven months then what?

People don't consider that there are real physical/thermodynamic constraints on intelligence. It's easy to imagine some skynet scenario, but all evidence suggests that it takes significant increases in energy consumption to increase intelligence.

Even in nature this is clear. Humans are a great example: cooked food predates homo sapiens and it is largely considered to be a pre-requisite for having human level intelligence because of the enormous energy demands of our brains. And nature has given us wildly more efficient brains in almost every possible way. The human brain runs on about 20 watts of power, my RTX uses 450 watts at full capacity.

The idea of "runaway" super intelligence has baked in some very extreme assumptions about the nature of thermodynamics and intelligence, that are largely just hand waved away.

On top of that, AI hasn't changed in a notable way for me personally in a year. The difference between 2022 and 2023 was wild, between 2023 and 2024 changed some of my workflows, 2024 to today largely is just more options around which tooling I used and how these tools can be combined, but nothing really at a fundamental level feels improved for me.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#63

Post by esafak »

nwienert wrote: post #26
TimPC wrote: post #20

People should be worried because right now AI is on an exponential growth trajectory and no-one knows when it will level off into an s-curve. AI is starting to get close to good enough. If it becomes twice as good in seven months then what?

Let's look: GPT-1 June 2018 GPT-2 February 2019 GPT-3 November 2021 GPT-4 March 2023 Claude tells me this is the rough improvement of each: GPT-1 to 2: 5-10x GPT-2 to 3: 10-20x GPT 3 to 4: 2-4x Now it's been 2.5 years since 4. Are you expecting 5 to be 2-4x better, or 10-20x better?

How are you measuring this improvement factor? We have numerous benchmarks for LLMs and they are all saturating. We are rapidly approaching AGI by that measure, and headed towards ASI. They still won't be "human" but they will be able to do everything humans can, and more.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#64

Post by bayindirh »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #58
bayindirh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, Boxen is a permutation of Boxes, not Oxen.

There seems to be a pattern of humorous plurals in English where by analogy with ox ~ oxen you get -x ~ -xen: boxen, Unixen, VAXen. Before you call this pattern silly, consider that the fairly normal plural “Unices” is by analogy with Latin plurals in -x = -c|s ~ -c|ēs, where I’ve expanded -x into -cs to make it clear that the Latin singular comprises a noun stem ending in -c- and a (nominative) singular ending -s, w…

Yeah. After reading your comment, I thought "maybe the Xen hypervisor is named because of this phenomena". "xen" just means "many" in that context.

Also, probably because of approaching graybeard territory, Thinking about boxen of VAXen running UNIXen makes me feel warm and fuzzy. :D

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#65

Post by throwawayoldie »

smiley1437 wrote: post #31
LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

There are some things that you still can't do with LLMs. For example, if you tried to learn chess by having the LLM play against you, you'd quickly find that it isn't able to track a series of moves for very long (usually 5-10 turns; the longest I've seen it last was 18) before it starts making illegal choices. It also generally accepts invalid moves from your side, so you'll never be corrected if you're wrong about…

> people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice. I have friends who are highly educated professionals (PhDs, MDs) who just assume that AI\LLMs make no mistakes. They were shocked that it's possible for hallucinations to occur. I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise?

My experience, speaking over a scale of decades, is that most people, even very smart and well-educated ones, don't know a damn thing about how computers work and aren't interested in learning. What we're seeing now is just one unfortunate consequence of that.

(To be fair, in many cases, I'm not terribly interested in learning the details of their field.)

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#66

Post by pdntspa »

erlend_sh wrote: post #10

Only for the people already affluent enough to afford the ever-more expensive subscriptions. Those most in need of a floor-raising don’t have the disposable income to take a bet on AI.

It's very easy to sign up for an API account and pay per-call, or even nothing. Free offerings out there are great (Gemini, OpenRouter...) and a few are even suitable for agentic development.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#67

Post by lubujackson »

stillpointlab wrote: post #29

This mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1]. I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article. He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he sugge…

Oo, the "pets vs. livestock" analogy really works better than the "craftsmen vs. slop-slinger" arguments.

Because using an LLM doesn't mean you devalue well-crafted or understandable results. But it does indicate a significant shift in how you view the code itself. It is more about the emotional attachment to code vs. code as a means to an end.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#68

Post by gruez »

Calavar wrote: post #52
gruez wrote: post #50

The blog post has a bunch of charts, which gives it a veneer of objectivity and rigor, but in reality it's just all vibes and conjecture. Meanwhile recent empirical studies actually point in the opposite direction, showing that AI use increases inequality, not decrease it. https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250215_FNC... https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/13/h...

The graphic has four studies that show increased inequality and six that show reduced inequality.

Read my comment again. keyword here is "recent". The second link also expands on why it's relevant. It's best to read the whole article, but here's a paragraph that captures the argument:

>The shift in recent economic research supports his observation. Although early studies suggested that lower performers could benefit simply by copying AI outputs, newer studies look at more complex tasks, such as scientific research, running a business and investing money. In these contexts, high performers benefit far more than their lower-performing peers. In some cases, less productive workers see no improvement, or even lose ground.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#69

Post by margalabargala »

leptons wrote: post #44
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #37

The greatest use of LLMs is the ability to get accurate answers to queries in a normalized format without having to wade through UI distraction like ads and social media. It's the opposite of finding an answer on reddit, insta, tvtropes. I can't wait for the first distraction free OS that is a thinking and imagination helper and not a consumption device where I have to block urls on my router so my kids don't get suc…

I don't find the "AI" answers all that accurate, and in some cases they are bordering on a liability even if way down below all the "AI" slop it says "AI responses may include mistakes". >It's the opposite of finding an answer on reddit, insta, tvtropes. Yeah it really is because I can tell when someone doesn't know the topic well on reddit, or other forums, but usually someone does and the answer is there. Unfortuna…

I agree with the whole first half, but I disagree that LLM usage is doomed to ad-filled shittyness. AI companies may be hemmoraging money, but that's because their product costs so much to run; it's not like they don't have revenue. The thing that will bring profitability isn't ads, it will be innovations that let current-gen-quality LLMs run at a fraction of the electricity and power cost.

Will some LLMs have ads? Sure, especially at a free tier. But I bet the option to pay $20/month for ad-free LLM usage will always be there.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#70

Post by verelo »

Oh man i love this take. It's how I've been selling what I do when I speak with a specific segment of my audience: "My goal isn't to make the best realtors better, it's to make the worst realtors acceptable".

And my client is often the brokerage, they just want their agents to produce commissions so they make a cut. They know their top producers probably wont get much from what I offer, but we all see that their worst performers could easily double their business.

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