61–70 of 266 posts
I'm bullish on AI, I don't think we've even begun to understand the product implications, but the "large language models are in context learners" phase has for now basically played out.
I use AI in my coding for many hours each day. AI is great. But AI will not replace me in 2026 or in 2027. I have to admit I can't make projections many years in the future, because the pace of progress in AI is indeed breathtaking. But, while I am really bullish on AI, I am skeptical of claims that AI will be able to fully replace a human any time soon.
Exponential curves don't last for long fortunately, or the universe would have turned into a quark soup. The example of COVID is especially ironic, considering it stopped being a real concern within 3 years of its advent despite the exponential growth in the early years. Those who understand exponentials should also try to understand stock and flow.
What is this limit on AI? It is technology, energy, something. All these things can be over-come, to keep the exponential going.
And of course, systems also break at the exponential. Maybe AI is stopped by the world economy collapsing. AI advancement would be stopped, but that is cold comfort to the humans.
> 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.
If we suppose this tech rapture does happen, all bets are off; in that sense it's probably better to assume the curve is sigmoidal, since the alternative is literally beyond human comprehension.
> 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…
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 remain optimistic and milk that while we can lest pessimism cut off investment top early.
> 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…
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 remain optimistic and milk that while we can lest pessimism cut off investment too early.
> Again we can observe a similar trend, with the latest GPT-5 already astonishingly close to human performance: I have issues with "human performance" as single data point in times where education keeps to excel in some countries and degrades in others. How far away are we from saying, better than "X percent of humans" ?
You'd think that boosters for a technology whose very foundations rely on the sigmoid and tanh functions used as neuron activation functions would intuitively get this...
Exponential curves don't last for long fortunately, or the universe would have turned into a quark soup. The example of COVID is especially ironic, considering it stopped being a real concern within 3 years of its advent despite the exponential growth in the early years. Those who understand exponentials should also try to understand stock and flow.
It's possible to understand both exponential and limiting behavior at the same time. I work in an office full of scientists. Our team scrammed the workplace on March 10, 2020. To the scientists, it was intuitively obvious that the curve could not surpass 100% of the population. An exponential curve with no turning point is almost always seen as a sure sign that something is wrong with your model. But we didn't have a…