The sigmoids won't save you
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The sigmoids won't save you
1–10 of 297 posts
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#2But they do explain the improvement of AI driving 2017-2021 vs 2022-2026.
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#3A lot of words to say "The initial part of a sigmoidal curve is not very informative about the parameters of the sigmoid function in question."
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#4Well, curve shape aside, the high watermark might be lower than where it tapers off.
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#5If you use the log scale you'll see that the time horizon of opus 4.6 was as expected...
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#6I don't know what the Y-axis is supposed to be on that Wharton AI capabilities graph, but I am not really convinced that Opus 4.6 has more than double the intelligence/capability/whatever of GPT 5.1 Max.
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#7"Exponentials all tend to become sigmoids but you can't predict exactly when" is a true statement, but I'm not sure it needed an article.
This doesn't say much, and the author fights their own points a couple times, suggesting that they maybe didn't think through what they wanted to write until they were in the middle of writing it and started realizing their assumptions didn't match what they expected the data to say.
I really don't get the point of what I just read.
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#8I don't know what the Y-axis is supposed to be on that Wharton AI capabilities graph, but I am not really convinced that Opus 4.6 has more than double the intelligence/capability/whatever of GPT 5.1 Max.
https://metr.org/time-horizons/ on linear scale. Clickbait garbage article as most of his in the last year.
Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#9Re: The sigmoids won't save you
#10Hmmm, this is quite an interesting take by Scott.
Lindy's Law is not actually a law and many exact minds will be provoked by the very name; it also fails spectacularly in certain contexts (e.g. lifetime of a single organism, though not necessarily existence of entire species).
But at the same time, I am willing to take its invocation in the context of AI somewhat seriously. There is an international arms race with China, which has less compute, but more engineers and scientists. This sort of intellectual arms race does not exhaust itself easily.
A similar space race in the 1950s and 1960s progressed from first unmanned spaceflight to a moonwalk in mere 12 years, which is probably less than what it takes to approve a bicycle lane in Chicago now.