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A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

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Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Hmm, I don’t know, maybe the fact that 4.6, 4.7, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 3.0, 3.1 are all marginal improvements?

Gemini 3.0 wasn’t just a marginal improvement over 2.5.

And if you take that out: 1. All of those releases happened literally in the last 3-ish months. 2. They’re all intentionally marginal releases, hence the minor version bumps instead of major versions.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Not that I agree with them, but your tone could be more constructive as well.

You know what? I agree. I should have avoided falling into the same trap.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#383
> LLMs have got to the point where if a problem has an easy argument that for one reason or another human mathematicians have missed (that reason sometimes, but not always, being that the problem has not received all that much attention), then there is a good chance that the LLMs will spot it.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nausea aside, what evidence does anyone have that “super intelligence” of the sort your argument alludes to is even possible? Because that’s what we’re really talking about; greater than human intelligence on this sort of academic task. For example; When llms start contributing meaningfully to their own development, that would be a convincing indicator imo.

Well, a decent GPU runs on 20x the wattage of a human brain. That's evidence humans are constrained in ways artificial intelligences will not be.

You're comparing a gpu to a human brain?

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> over-hiring For how long should you be allowed to use this excuse? It’s nearly 5 years since the peak of COVID hiring. What’s an acceptable limit - 10 years? Of course at that point you can just switch over to outsourcing and “stupid MBAs”, the other two of Reddit’s favorite scapegoats. I find a lot of the AI skepticism to be totally unfalsifiable.

> I find a lot of the AI skepticism to be totally unfalsifiable. A lot of the discourse around AI in general is unfalsifiable. It's just a bunch of people "predicting" the future. Seems smarter to just avoid making assumptions about it at this point.

facts!

but we can see trends and for your livehoood it is important to be able to make educated predictions based on trends. not saying everyone should start making AI predictions (though many already do)

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#386
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Agreed. For all we know, humans are only considered intelligent locally among ourselves, not universally. Every time we learn more about the universe, we seem to also learn how insignificant and wrong we are.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#387
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a decent GPU runs on 20x the wattage of a human brain. That's evidence humans are constrained in ways artificial intelligences will not be.

You're comparing a gpu to a human brain?

Why wouldn't you? From both emerge intelligence.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#388
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Because the premise that the singularity is just around the corner is far less likely than the premise that artificial intelligence is a lot harder than most people think it is and we're not that close.

Especially because the companies telling us the first premise is true are the companies which need investors to prop up their business.

I mean, it is possible the first premise is true, but the absolutely bonkers credulity in it really mystifies me. It is an incredibly unlikely thing to be true and we should be demanding quite extraordinary evidence to back it up. But based on some neat tricks by current LLMs, some people are all in.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#389
This jives with what I've experienced in the brief time I had access to 5.5 Pro. It's the very first LLM that I feel like I can wrangle into solving tedious, but straightforward, problems correctly. It still makes a ton of mistakes and needs to be very rigidly guided, but it does a pretty good job of tracing its own reasoning and correcting itself in a way that the other models do not.

The downside (not noted in the article, but noted by others here) is cost. It uses tokens at an insane rate, the tokens cost a lot, and using it with subagent flows that you can use to have it tackle large problems with high accuracy costs even more. It is also much "slower" for large scale problems because of context limitations -- it has to constantly rediscover context for each part of the problem, and in order to make it accurate you need to wipe its context before progressing to the next small part, or launch even more agents. For mathematical proofs like these, where the required context to understand the problem and proof besides stuff that's already available in its training set is small and the problems are considered "important" enough, this might not be a problem, but for many of the tasks I would like to use it for (ensuring correctness of code that affects large codebases, or validating subtle assumptions) it definitely is one.

So I think it will be a while before the impressive capabilities of these models really percolate into our lives as programmers, unless you're one of the lucky ones given unlimited access to 5.5 Pro.

Re: A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

#390
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. You see a shape in graphs. And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon ? If you have no reason, then it sounds like you agree with OP. Which makes the patronizing sarcasm all that much more nauseating.

Because the premise that the singularity is just around the corner is far less likely than the premise that artificial intelligence is a lot harder than most people think it is and we're not that close. Especially because the companies telling us the first premise is true are the companies which need investors to prop up their business. I mean, it is possible the first premise is true, but the absolutely bonkers cred…

> > And that shape tells you that _at some unknown point in the future_ progress will slow (but likely not stop). Now back to the point, what reason do you have to believe progress will stop soon?

> Because the premise that the singularity is just around the corner is far less likely than the premise that artificial intelligence is a lot harder than most people think it is and we're not that close.

I see no claim that the singularity is around the corner, so I'm not sure your reply meets the comment that you're replying to.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that AI will be significantly more capable 6 months from now than it is now. Even if there's little progress in the models, just the rate at which tooling is moving will make a big difference. And models still seem to be improving, so I'd be a little surprised if we hit a model brick wall.

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