Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

julian.ac

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 266 posts

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#151

Post by Nevermark »

breuleux wrote: post #113
Nevermark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 improv…

> Looking at information systems as far back as the first coordination of differentiating cells to human civilization is one of exponential improvement. Under what metric? Most of the things you mention don't have numerical values to plot on a curve. It's a vibe exponential, at best. Life and humans have become better and better at extracting available resources and energy, but there's a clear limit to that (100%) an…

I am curious when you think we will run out of atoms to make information systems.

How many billions of years you think that might take.

Of all the things to be limited by, that doesn't seem like a near term issue. Just an asteroid or two alone will provide resources beyond our dreams. And space travel is improving at a very rapid rate.

In the meantime, in terms of efficiency of using Earth atoms for information processing, there is still a lot space at the "bottom", as Feynman said. Our crude systems are limited today by their power waste. Small energy efficient systems, and more efficient heat shedding, will enable full 3D chips ("cubes"?) and vastly higher density of packing those.

The known limit for information for physical systems per gram, is astronomical:

• Bremermann’s limit : 10^47 operations per second, per gram.

Other interesting limits:

• Margolus–Levitin bound - on quantum state evolution

• Landauer’s principle - Thermodynamic cost of erasing (overwriting) one bit.

• Bekenstein bound: Maximum storage by volume.

Life will go through many many singularities before we get anywhere near hard limits.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#152

Post by karmakaze »

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…

Each specific technology can be S-shaped, but advancements in achieving goals can still maintain an exponential curve. e.g. Moore's law is dead with the end of Dennard scaling, but computation improvements still happen with parallelism.

Meta's Behemoth shows that scaling number of parameters has diminished returns, but we still have many different ways to continue advancements. Those who point at one thing and say "see", isn't really seeing. Of course there are limits, like energy but with nuclear energy or photon-based computing were nowhere near the limits.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#153

Post by Nevermark »

travisjungroth wrote: post #74
Nevermark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 improv…

> Progress in information systems cannot be compared to progress in physical systems. > For starters, physical systems compete for limited resources and labor. > Finally, the underlying substrate of software is digital hardware… See how these are related?

By physical systems, I meant systems whose purpose is to do physical work. Mechanical things. Gears. Struts.

Computer hardware is an information system. You are correct that it is has a physical component. But its power comes from its organization (information) not its mass, weight, etc.

Transistors get more powerful, not less, when made from less matter.

Information systems move from substrate to more efficient substrate. They are not their substrate.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#154

Post by ModernMech »

Inufu wrote: post #140
bawolff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feels like you're moving the goal posts a bit. Exponential growth over the short term is very uninteresting. Exponential growth is exciting when it can compound. E.g. if i offered you an investing opportunity 500% / per year compounded daily - that's amazing. If the fine print is that that rate will only last for the very near term (say a week), then it would be worse than a savings account.

Well, growth has been on this exponential already for 5+ years (for the METR eval), and we are at the point where models are very close to matching human expert capabilities in many domains - only one or two more years of growth would put us well beyond that point. Personally I think we'll see way more growth than that, but to see profound impacts on our economy you only need to believe the much more conservative ass…

> we are at the point where models are very close to matching human expert capabilities in many domains

This is not true because experts in these domains don't make the same routine errors LLMs do. You may point to broad benchmarks to prove your point, but actual experts in the benchmarked fields can point to numerous examples of purportedly "expert" LLMs making things up in a way no expert would ever.

Expertise is supposed to mean something -- it's supposed to describe both a level of competency and trustworthiness. Until they can be trusted, calling LLMs experts in anything degrades the meaning of expertise.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#155

Post by afthonos »

wyager wrote: post #85
podgorniy wrote: post #22

> By the end of 2027, models will frequently outperform experts on many tasks. In passing the quiz-es > Models will be able to autonomously work for full days (8 working hours) by mid-2026. Who will carry responsibility for the consequences of these model's errors? What tools will be avaiable to that resposible _person_? -- Tehchno optimists will be optimistic. Techno pessimists will be pessimistic. Processes we're d…

You don't actually need to have a "responsible person"; you can just have an AI do stuff. It might make a mistake; the only difference between that and an employee is that you can't punish an AI. If you're any good at management and not a psychopath, the ability to have someone to punish for mistakes isn't actually important

The importance of having a human be responsible is about alignment. We have a fundamental belief that human beings are comprehensible and have goals that are not completely opaque. That is not true of any piece of software. In the case of deterministic software, you can’t argue with a bug. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell it that no, that’s not what either the company or the user intended, the result will be the same.

With an AI, the problem is more subtle. The AI may absolutely be able to understand what you’re saying, and may not care at all, because its goals are not your goals, and you can’t tell what its goals are. Having a human be responsible bypasses that. The point is not to punish the AI, the point is to have a hope to stop it from doing things that are harmful.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#156

Post by danlitt »

jsnell wrote: post #148
danlitt wrote: post #142

I am constantly astonished that articles like this even pass the smell test. It is not rational to predict exponential growth just because you've seen exponential growth before! Incidentally, that is not what people did during COVID, they predicted exponential growth for reasons . Specific, articulable reasons, that consisted of more than just "look, like go up. line go up more?". Incidentally, the benchmarks quoted…

> but then why are we comparing such distinct and unrelated tasks as ... Because a few years ago the LLMs could only do trivial tasks that a child could do, and now they're able to do complex research and software development tasks. If you just have the trivial tasks, the benchmark is saturated within a year. If you just have the very complex tasks, the benchmark is has no sensitivity at all for years (just everythin…

The key word is "unrelated"! Being able to count the number of words in a paragraph and being able to train an image classifier are so different as to be unrelated for all practical purposes. The assumption underlying this kind of a "benchmark" is that all tasks have a certain attribute called complexity which is a numerical value we can use to discriminate tasks, presumably so that if you can complete tasks up to a certain "complexity" then you can complete all other tasks of lower complexity. No such attribute exists! I am sure there are "4 hour" tasks an LLM can do and "5 second" tasks that no LLM can do.

The underlying frustration here is that there is so much latitude possible in choosing which tasks to test, which ones to present, and how to quantify "success" that the metrics given are completely meaningless, and do not help anyone to make a prediction. I would bet my entire life savings that by the time the hype bubble bursts, we will still have 10 brainless articles per day coming out saying AGI is round the corner.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#157

Post by NetMageSCW »

seanhunter wrote: post #95
Ambolia wrote: post #56

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 wi…

I think the real turning point is when there isn’t the need for something like photoshop. Creatives that I speak to yearn for the day when they can stop paying the adobe tax.

If they don’t like it, they can stop now. It may have consequences, however.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#158

Post by NetMageSCW »

ctrlp wrote: post #15

Where in nature/reality do we actually see exponential trends continued long? It seems like they typically encounter a governing effect quite quickly.

The issue is quite quickly can be really slow for humans. Moore’s law has been brought up multiple times.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#159

Post by tim333 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #137
Inufu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The argument is not that it will keep growing exponentially forever (obviously that is physically impossible), rather that: - given a sustained history of growth along a very predictable trajectory, the highest likelihood short term scenario is continued growth along the same trajectory. Sample a random point on an s-curve and look slightly to the right, what’s the most common direction the curve continu…

My point is that the limits of LLMs will be hit long before we they start to take on human capabilities. The problem isn’t that exponential growth is hard to visualise. The problem is that LLMs, as advanced and useful a technique as it is, isn’t suited for AGI and thus will never get us even remotely to the stage of AGI. The human like capabilities are really just smoke and mirrors. It’s like when people anthropomorp…

There is no particular reason why AI has to stick to language models though. Indeed if you want human like thinking you pretty much have to go beyond language as we do other stuff too if you see what I mean. A recent example: "Google DeepMind unveils its first “thinking” robotics AI" https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-deepmind-unvei...

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#160

Post by NetMageSCW »

izacus wrote: post #52

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.

That is a complete strawman - you made up forever growth and then argued against it. The OP is saying the in the short term, it makes more sense to assume exponential growth continues instead of thinking it will flatten out any moment now.
Post reply on HN