Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

Post by tim333 » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

Post by tim333 » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #262

tim333 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the limits of LLMs will be hit long before we they start to take on human capabilities Against that you have stuff like Deepmind getting gold in the International Collegiate Programming Contest the other week, including solving one problem where "none of the human teams, including the top performers from universities in Russia, China and Japan, got it right" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/17/google-…

I don’t see that as a contradiction but I do appreciate how some might. You can train anything to be really good at specialised fields. But that doesn’t mean they’re a good generalist. For example: you can train anything child to memorise the 10 times table. But that doesn’t mean they’re can perform long division. Being an olympic-class cyclist doesn’t mean you’re any good as an F1 driver nor swimming nor Fencing. Be…

Post by tim333 » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #264

tim333 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though in your examples cyclists can learn to drive as humans have similar abilities. I'll give you current GPT stuff has it's limitations - it can't come fix your plumbing say and pre-trained transformers aren't good at learning things after their pre-training but I'm not sure they are nowhere near human capabilities such that they can't be fixed up.

You cannot use an LLM to solve mathematic equations. That’s not a training issue, that’s a limitation of a technology that’s at its core, a text prediction engine.