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Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

julian.ac

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Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#51

Post by thegrim33 »

AI company employee whose livelihood depends on people continuing to pump money into AI writes a blog post trying to convince people to keep pumping more money into AI. Seems solid.

The "exponential" metric/study they include is pretty atrocious. Measuring AI capability by how long humans would take to do the task. By that definition existing computers are already super AGI - how long would it take humans to sort a list of a million numbers? Computers can do it in a fraction of a second. I guess that proves they're already AGI, right? You could probably fit an exponential curve to that as well, before LLMs even existed.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#52

Post by izacus »

Ah, employee of an AI company is telling us the technology he's working on and is directly financially interested in hyping will... grow forever and be amazing and exponential and take over the world. And everyone who doesn't believe this employee of AI company hyping AI is WRONG about basics of math.

I absolutely would NOT ever expect such a blog post.

/s.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#53

Post by breuleux »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

I'd argue all of them. Any true exponential eventually gets to a point where no computer can even store its numerical value. It's a physically absurd curve.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#55

Post by saretup »

breuleux wrote: post #53
crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. I'd argue all of them. Any true exponential eventually gets to a point where no computer can even store its numerical value. It's a physically absurd curve.

You clearly haven’t played my idle game.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#56

Post by Ambolia »

I will worry when I see Startups competing on products with companies 10x, 100x, or 1000x times their size. Like a small team producing a Photoshop replacement. So far I haven't seen anything like that. Big companies don't seem to be launching new products faster either, or fixing some of their products that have been broken for a long time (MS teams...)

AI obviously makes some easy things much faster, maybe helps with boilerplate, we still have to see this translate into real productivity.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#57

Post by FrustratedMonky »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

"I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too."

But there are others that keep going also. Moore's law is still going (mostly, slowing), and made it past a few pinch points where people thought it was the end.

The point is, that over 30 decades, many people said Moore's law was at an end, and then it wasn't, there was some breakthrough that kept it going. Maybe a new one will happen.

The thing with AI is, maybe the S curve flattens out , after all the jobs are gone.

Everyone is hoping the S curve flattens out somewhere just below human level, but what if it flattens out just beyond human level? We're still screwed.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#58

Post by Nevermark »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

Progress in information systems cannot be compared to progress in physical systems.

For starters, physical systems compete for limited resources and labor.

For another, progress in software vastly reduces the cost of improved designs. Whereas progress in physical systems can enable but still increase the cost of improved designs.

Finally, the underlying substrate of software is digital hardware, which has been improving in both capabilities and economics exponentially for almost 100 years.

Looking at information systems as far back as the first coordination of differentiating cells to human civilization is one of exponential improvement. Very slow, slow, fast, very fast. (Can even take this further, to first metabolic cycles, cells, multi-purpose genes, modular development genes, etc. Life is the reproduction of physical systems via information systems.)

Same with human technological information systems, from cave painting, writing, printing, telegraph, phone, internet, etc.

It would be VERY surprising if AI somehow managed to fall off the exponential information system growth path. Not industry level surprising, but "everything we know about how useful information compounds" level surprising.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#59

Post by tehjoker »

fhe wrote: post #45
crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

I am getting the sense that the 2nd deriative of the curve is already hitting negative teritory. models get updated, and I don't feel I'm getting better answers from the LLMs. On the application front though, it feels that the advancements from a couple of years ago are just beginning to trickle down to product space. I used to do some video editing as a hobby. Recently I picked it up again, and was blown away by how…

What are some examples of tasks you no longer have to do?

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#60

Post by naasking »

crazygringo wrote: post #7

> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped. I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors. With LLM's at the moment, the limiting fac…

> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

S curves are exponential before they start tapering off though. It's hard to predict how long that could continue, so there's an argument to be made that we should milk that while we can.

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