Live data from Hacker News

The sigmoids won't save you

astralcodexten.com

91–100 of 297 posts

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at orders of magnitude greater speed, we've still hit diminishing returns for quality of output. We simply haven't found anything like superhuman reasoning ability, just superhuman (potentially) reasoning speed.

I disagree with this. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards training is actually the secret sauce that is leading Claude and GPT to automating software engineering tasks. All the easily verifiable domains such as mathematics, coding, and things that can be run inside a reasonable simulation are falling very very fast. By next year if not sooner, mathematicians will be wildly outpaced by LLMs for reasoning.

[deleted]

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at orders of magnitude greater speed, we've still hit diminishing returns for quality of output. We simply haven't found anything like superhuman reasoning ability, just superhuman (potentially) reasoning speed.

It's not that easy to assess diminishing returns with saturated benchmarks where asymptoting to 100% is mathematically baked in. I could point to the number of Erdos proofs being solved by AI going from 0 to many very recently as evidence for acceleration.

That is not evidence of acceleration, just of some measurable improvement compared to a previous model. After all, humans have made these breakthroughs since before recorded history—that never by itself implied accelerating intelligence.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#93
post #17

News flash: predicting the future is hard

The individual who is the best at predicting the future is predicting ASI and full labor automation by 2040: https://xcancel.com/peterwildeford/status/202963666232244661...

> The individual who is the best at predicting the future

Yeah well my prophet says he can beat up your prophet in a fight.

---

Here in reality, I'm not accustomed to taking random predictions without backing evidence as if they were truth.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is the tiring arguments from AI skeptics saying “things are flattening, they have to” which while technically correct says nothing because no one knows when that will happen and we see no mechanism for this yet. Lindy’s law as a reasonable prediction under total uncertainty is interesting and insightful and a lot of people don’t know about it or why it holds. I did enjoy the reference to this!

But those skeptics are initially responding to the constant AI hype claims that we are exponentially growing to AGI. So this article is in fact just a (very poorly thought through) attempt at saying “nuh uh, the hype might be true, you can’t prove it’s not yet!

Yet the evidence is on the side of the hype? We don’t see any mechanism or cogent framework for what limits exist here theoretically that I’m aware of, are you? Epoch had a great article a year ago looking at several bottlenecks in terms of scale and back then we were about 4 orders of magnitude away from hitting them. We’re probably now closer to 3. Yet scale is only part of the performance equation, a fairly big chunk of progress is from algorithmic or curation related contributions. The point of the article is:

> But those skeptics are initially responding to the constant AI hype claims that we are exponentially growing to AGI.

This is a meaningless statement or at best just strawmanning.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#95
post #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 sa…

The point is the tiring arguments from AI skeptics saying “things are flattening, they have to” which while technically correct says nothing because no one knows when that will happen and we see no mechanism for this yet. Lindy’s law as a reasonable prediction under total uncertainty is interesting and insightful and a lot of people don’t know about it or why it holds. I did enjoy the reference to this!

Nah this is making a category error. You're assuming that AI skeptics agree that models are demonstrating intelligence along the same axis as humans and that with further improvement they will become equivalent to humans. I am an AI skeptic, and I disagree with this assessment.

Model reasoning is on an s-curve, which is improving.

Model intelligence is not the same as reasoning. It's a different axis, and one I have not seen much movement on.

See, humans have a recursive form of intelligence which is capable of self-reflection and introspection. LLMs can only reason about tokens which have already been emitted. Humans and LLMs do not share the same form of reasoning, and general human-like intelligence will not arise from the current architecture of LLMs. Therefore it is a mistake to assume that continual improvement on the reasoning scale will result in something that is equivalent enough to humans on the intelligence axis to replace all labor.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#96
post #37

Lindy’s Law is an absolute gem, that I'm keeping. If we don't understand the fundamental limits to any particular kind of trend, our default assumption should be that it will continue for about as long as it has gone on already. We can, in fact, easily put a confidence interval on this. With 90% odds we're not in the first 5% of the trend, or the last 5% of the trend. Therefore it will probably go on between 1/19th l…

I feel like Lindy's law doesn't work for things whose observation is partly controlled by the thing itself.

For example, take something like a fad or trend; they don't have a hard end date like human lifespan, so it should follow Lindy's law.

However, the likelihood, on average across the population, that you observe a trend is going to be higher at the end of a trend lifecycle than at the beginning. This is baked into the definition - more and more people hear about a trend over time, so the largest quantity of observers will be at the end of the lifecycle, when the popularity reaches its peak.

In other words, if you are a random person, finding out about a trend likely means it is near the end rather than the middle.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is the tiring arguments from AI skeptics saying “things are flattening, they have to” which while technically correct says nothing because no one knows when that will happen and we see no mechanism for this yet. Lindy’s law as a reasonable prediction under total uncertainty is interesting and insightful and a lot of people don’t know about it or why it holds. I did enjoy the reference to this!

Nah this is making a category error. You're assuming that AI skeptics agree that models are demonstrating intelligence along the same axis as humans and that with further improvement they will become equivalent to humans. I am an AI skeptic, and I disagree with this assessment. Model reasoning is on an s-curve, which is improving. Model intelligence is not the same as reasoning. It's a different axis, and one I have…

> You're assuming that AI skeptics agree that models are demonstrating intelligence along the same axis as humans and that with further improvement they will become equivalent to humans.

No definitely not saying this and I don’t quite know what it means

> Model reasoning is on an s-curve, which is improving.

Is this saying two different things? I think I might agree with this in principle as in maybe there is some sort of s curve or something like it but do we see evidence of this? Where?

> Model intelligence is not the same as reasoning. It's a different axis, and one I have not seen much movement on.

Can you clarify this? What is the distinction and what makes you say you have “not seen much progress?”

> See, humans have a recursive form of intelligence which is capable of self-reflection and introspection. LLMs can only reason about tokens which have already been emitted

LLMs do self reflection and introspection in context, and tweaks such as value functions (serving a similar purpose to intuition or emotion) may make this better? Why do you feel self reflection and introspection are a fundamental limitation here? Models reason over tokens they have emitted and also with their own sense and learned behavior already. Are you just talking about continual learning? Also I feel people just latch onto LLMs as if this is all of AI. Why? SSMs, memory networks, recurrent neural networks etc etc etc are all part of AI but aren’t as popular because they can’t yet compete with LLMs in terms of scaling laws and training efficiency due to e.g. hardware and software optimization and investment being focused on LLMs. If something else comes along that works better we’ll just start scaling that.

> Humans and LLMs do not share the same form of reasoning, and general human-like intelligence will not arise from the current architecture of LLMs.

Very strong statement, any theoretical or experimental basis for this? I also don’t particularly care personally other than as a point of curiosity. Why does it matter if AI systems will develop equivalent reasoning mechanisms as humans? In fact it may be much better not to.

> Therefore it is a mistake to assume that continual improvement on the reasoning scale will result in something that is equivalent enough to humans to replace all labor.

Idk I didn’t say this explicitly but I also dont think it matters if we have a system “equivalent to humans” or one that “replaces all labor”.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#98
Such a long article to say that neither side has a fucking idea about what will happen next.

While we're at it, the "exponentials are actually sigmoïds" meme is not necessarily true. While exponentials are never exponentials, sigmoids are not guaranteed. Overshoot-and-collapse examples also happen in tech, e.g. the dotcom bubble, or the successive AI winters.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#99
FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I don't think you can use lindy on trends as if trends are static objects, but that's another conversation.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#100
post #37

Lindy’s Law is an absolute gem, that I'm keeping. If we don't understand the fundamental limits to any particular kind of trend, our default assumption should be that it will continue for about as long as it has gone on already. We can, in fact, easily put a confidence interval on this. With 90% odds we're not in the first 5% of the trend, or the last 5% of the trend. Therefore it will probably go on between 1/19th l…

While this is very fun as a mathematical exercise, it's completely irrelevant as a real tool for getting a better understanding of unknown processes in the real world.

The law only applies for certain types of processes, and is completely wrong for other types (e.g. a human who has lived 50 years may live 50 more, but one who has lived 100 years will certainly not live 100 more). So the question becomes: what type of process are you looking at? And that turns out to be exactly the question you started with: is there a fundamental limit to this growth curve, or not.

Post reply on HN