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Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

julian.ac

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Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#241

Post by tim333 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #184
tim333 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> There is no particular reason why AI has to stick to language models though. There’s no reason at all. But that’s not the technology that’s in the consumer space, growing exponentially, gaining all the current hype. So at this point in time, it’s just a theoretical future that will happen inevitably but we don’t know when. It could be next year. It could be 10 years. It could be 100 years or more. My prediction is…

Yeah, quite possible.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#242

Post by senordevnyc »

coldtea wrote: post #226
senordevnyc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we didn’t. We had the GPT-3 API available in 2020, and approximately no one was using it.

Seems like you missed most of my comment

I stopped once it became clear that the first half was both wrong and irrelevant.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#243

Post by anonymars »

adornKey wrote: post #240
anonymars wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easily disproven by looking at all-cause mortality. E.g. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7150a3-F2.g... Did that look like normal seasonal deaths? It's even more stark if you look specifically at the harder hit areas.

Well, the shapes look very seasonal... Do you know something about epidemiological curves?! The wave 2020 in Europe was often smaller than 2018. And the data was perfectly seasonal. If you know people working in nursing homes and hospitals, you can ask them what happened later in 2021... I heard a lot of stories - from first hand... They parked old ladies in the cold in front of open windows for fresh air - until the…

This repeatedly confuses correlation and causation. The shape is seasonal - of what relevance is the shape? Why shouldn't we expect there to be a seasonal component of an airborne virus?

Do you see that the all-cause mortality rate is 50-100% higher than prior years? I'm not going to try to suss it out in German but the same pattern holds in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/....

Similarly, to say "deaths increased when vaccines happened" is the most clear illustration. Why did the vaccines exist? Could that be related to the mortality increase? You can see charts here for Switzerland, US, UK: https://science.feedback.org/review/misleading-instagram-pos...

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#244

Post by imtringued »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #88
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. They'd be wrong, of course - for not realizing demand is a limiting factor here. Airline speeds plateaued not because we couldn't make planes go faster anymore, but because no one wanted them to go faster . This is partially economical and partially social factor - transit times are bucketed by what they enable people to do. It make…

Starship produces deadly noise in a large radius around it, whatever space port you're going to build, it's going to be far away from civilization.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#245

Post by adornKey »

anonymars wrote: post #243
adornKey wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the shapes look very seasonal... Do you know something about epidemiological curves?! The wave 2020 in Europe was often smaller than 2018. And the data was perfectly seasonal. If you know people working in nursing homes and hospitals, you can ask them what happened later in 2021... I heard a lot of stories - from first hand... They parked old ladies in the cold in front of open windows for fresh air - until the…

This repeatedly confuses correlation and causation. The shape is seasonal - of what relevance is the shape? Why shouldn't we expect there to be a seasonal component of an airborne virus? Do you see that the all-cause mortality rate is 50-100% higher than prior years? I'm not going to try to suss it out in German but the same pattern holds in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... . Si…

The shape is relevant if you want to evaluate measures.

If you can get your hands on some good data you'll find perfect mathematical seasonal functions. This is a serious criterion to exclude any measures from having any influence on the curve. It was just the seasonal thing happening. The data proves that measures were all useless - you could have worn any fancy hat for government measures instead. There are no trend changes in seasonal data you can corrolate to measures. The only trend changes you can find are in the reporting data. There's a decrease in reporting delay before a measure and there's a lot of reporting delay after the measure. Accidentally or intentionally reporting delay tried to make government measure look good.

For vaccines I know 3 cases where people died and 2 who have serious health problems after vaccines. There is a reason, why there's no good official data on vaccine efficency - and why all placebo groups were killed as soon as possible.

Why did vaccines exists? The answer is simpler: Because of Money!

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#246

Post by ben_w »

imtringued wrote: post #244
TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too. They'd be wrong, of course - for not realizing demand is a limiting factor here. Airline speeds plateaued not because we couldn't make planes go faster anymore, but because no one wanted them to go faster . This is partially economical and partially social factor - transit times are bucketed by what they enable people to do. It make…

Starship produces deadly noise in a large radius around it, whatever space port you're going to build, it's going to be far away from civilization.

Yes, though "far" isn't so large as to be inconceivable: the city of Starbase is only 2.75 km from the Starship launch tower.

That kind of distance may or may not be OK for a whole bunch of other reasons, many of which I'm not even qualified to guess at the nature of, but the noise at least isn't an absolute issue for reasonable scale civil infrastructure isolated development in many places.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#247

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Inufu wrote: post #111
hnlmorg wrote: post #30

Just because something exhibits an exponential growth at one point in time, that doesn’t mean that a particular subject is capable of sustaining exponential growth. Their Covid example is a great counter argument to their point in that covid isn’t still growing exponentially. Where the AI skeptics (or even just pragmatists, like myself) chime in is saying “yeah AI will improve. But LLMs are a limited technology that…

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…

So it's an argument impossible to counter because it's based on a hypothesis that is impossible to falsify: it predicts that there will either be a bit of progress, or a lot of progress, soon. Well, duh.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#249

Post by fjdjshsh »

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…

>the limits of LLMs will be hit long before we they start to take on human capabilities.

Why do you think this? The rest of the comment is just rephrasing this point ("llms isn't suited for AGI"), but you don't seem to provide any argument.

Re: Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

#250

Post by gettingoverit »

On top of other criticism here, I'd like to add that the article optimistically assumes that actors are completely honest with their benchmarks when billions of dollars and national security are at stake.

I'm only an "expert" in computer science and software engineering, and can say that - neither of widely available LLMs can produce answers at the level of first year CS student; - students using LLMs can easily be distingished by being wrong in all the ways a human would otherwise never be.

So to me it's not really the question of whether CS-related benchmarks are false, it's a question of how exactly did this BS even fly.

Obviously in other disciplines LLMs show similar lack of performance, but I can't call myself an "expert" there, and someone might argue I tend to use wrong prompts.

Until we see a website where we can put an intermediate problem and get a working solution, "benchmarks show that our AI solves problems on gold medalist level" will still be an obvious BS.

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