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What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

newyorker.com

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Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#31

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #13

OpenAi has 700+ million users. Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)!!! That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o! Clearly the OpenAi leadership saw these stats and understood the main initial goal of GPT5 is to introduce this auto-router, and not go all in on intelligence for the 3-7% who care to use it. This is a genius move IMO, and will get tons of users to flood to ChatGP…

> Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)

Thinking or just o3, and over what timeframe? There were a lot of days where I would just rely on o4-mini and o4-mini (high) b.c. my queries weren't that complex and I wanted to save my o3 quota and get faster responses.

> That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o!

Also potentially 4.1 and 4.5?

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#32

Post by simonw »

brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

If the New Yorker published a story titled "What if LLMs Don't Get Better Than This?" I expect the portion of their readers who understood what that title meant would be pretty tiny.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#33

Post by monkpit »

bbqfog wrote: post #9

AI is so new and so powerful, that we don't really know how to use it yet. The next step is orchestration. LLMs are already powerful but they need to be scaled horizontally. "One shotting" something with a single call to an LLM should never be expected to work. That's not how the human brain works. We iterate, we collaborate with others, we reflect... We've already unlocked the hard and "mysterious" part, now we just…

I think you’re right - even if we accept the premise that there’s only room for minor marginal improvements, there’s vast amounts of room for improvement with integrations, mcp, orchestration, prompting, etc. I’m talking mostly about coding agents here but it applies more widely.

It’s a completely new tool, it’s like inventing the internal combustion engine and then going, “well, I guess that’s it, it’s kinda neat I guess.”

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#34

Post by dasil003 »

DanHulton wrote: post #11
brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

That battle was long-ago lost when the leading LLM companies and organizations insisted on referring to their products and models solely as "AI", not the more-specific "LLMs". Implementers of that technology followed suit, and that's just what it means now. You can't blame the New Yorker for using the term in its modern, common parlance.

Agreed, and ultimately it's fine because they're talking about products not technology. If these products go in a completely different direction and LLMs become obsolete the AI label will adapt just fine. Once these things hit common parlance there's no point in arguing technical specificity as 99.99% of the people using the term don't care, will never care, and language will follow their usage not the angry pedant.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#35

Post by bee_rider »

DanielHB wrote: post #10
brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

The computing power alone of all these gpus would bring a revolution in simulation software. I mean 0 AI/machine-learning, just being able to simulate much more things than we can. Most industry-specific simulation software is REALLY crap, most from the 90s and 80s and barely evolved since then. Many stuck on single core CPUs.

It could be a nice side-effect of having all this “LLM hardware” built into everything, nice little throughput focused accelerators in everybody’s computers.

I think if I were starting grad school now and wanted some easy points, I’d be looking at mixed precision numerical algorithms. Either coming up with new ones, or applying them in the sciences.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#36

Post by danjl »

kerblang wrote: post #22

They didn't answer much of the "What if," though... Am just imagining the massive financial losses taken by so many, and if a bailout becomes necessary, because too-big-to-fail now means Microsoft, Google, Facebook et al since we transferred so much of financial engineering economics onto them since '08.

Those three companies have products outside AI and won't die quickly. The ones that will collapse are betting exclusively on improvements in AI. It will be fun to watch the VC money burn.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#37

Post by CagedCoder »

marviio wrote: post #24
piskov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start. I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050. Meanwhile planes are basically the same last 60 years. LLMs are great but I firmly believe that in 2100 all is basically the same as in 2020: no free energy (fusion), no AGI.

OTOH: First flight: 1903. Moon landing: 1969. Humanity went from ”Look, we’re 3 meters off the ground!” to “We just parked on the Moon” in barely a lifetime. 66 years.

And how much further have we gotten past the moon since then?

This isn't an OTOH, it's just another example of looking at the exponential part of the S-curve.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#38

Post by woodpanel »

kerblang wrote: post #22

They didn't answer much of the "What if," though... Am just imagining the massive financial losses taken by so many, and if a bailout becomes necessary, because too-big-to-fail now means Microsoft, Google, Facebook et al since we transferred so much of financial engineering economics onto them since '08.

Last time I've checked each of these companies were still hugely profitable. So it's not going to be your average FANG in trouble here, but rather VCs and others who've jumped onto the AI-craze

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#39

Post by brookst »

DanHulton wrote: post #11
brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

That battle was long-ago lost when the leading LLM companies and organizations insisted on referring to their products and models solely as "AI", not the more-specific "LLMs". Implementers of that technology followed suit, and that's just what it means now. You can't blame the New Yorker for using the term in its modern, common parlance.

Sure I can. If someone writing for the New Yorker has conflated the two concepts and is drawing bad conclusions because of it, that’s bad writing.

A good writer would tease apart this difference. That’s literally what good writing is about: giving a deeper understanding than a lay person would have.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#40

Post by jcfrei »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #18
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #13

OpenAi has 700+ million users. Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)!!! That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o! Clearly the OpenAi leadership saw these stats and understood the main initial goal of GPT5 is to introduce this auto-router, and not go all in on intelligence for the 3-7% who care to use it. This is a genius move IMO, and will get tons of users to flood to ChatGP…

If they're not paying users then they're just a liability.

monetizing those will come eventually - it's just hard to get right
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