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The sigmoids won't save you

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Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#41

Post by throwaway27448 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #31

I think an interesting thing about recent AI developments is that its all happening right as we hit the diminishing returns side of another "exponential that's actually a sigmoid" which is Moore's law. The naive expectation is that AI will slow down b/c Moore's law is coming to an end, but if you really think about the models and how they are currently implemented in silicon, they are still inefficient as hell. At so…

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.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#42

Post by zkmon »

The curve is a smoothed step curve (y=1 if x>1 otherwise 0). Nature doesn't allow any change to happen instantly at any degree of rate of change. The curveis just a manifestation a change with exponential smoothening of the sharp corners.

For example, When a car starts, it's speed and acceleration become more than zero. But what about rate of change in higher degrees? It suddenly doesn't change from zero acceleration to non-zero. That means the car has a non-zero derivative at all degrees. In other words, the movement is exponential. The same thing happens in reverse when the car reaches a constant speed.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#43

Post by clickety_clack »

cyanydeez wrote: post #33
LarsDu88 wrote: post #31

I think an interesting thing about recent AI developments is that its all happening right as we hit the diminishing returns side of another "exponential that's actually a sigmoid" which is Moore's law. The naive expectation is that AI will slow down b/c Moore's law is coming to an end, but if you really think about the models and how they are currently implemented in silicon, they are still inefficient as hell. At so…

they already did put a model into the silicon and it's crazy fast. https://chatjimmy.ai/ I'm pretty sure there's a 3 year design goal starting this year that'll do that to any of the qwen, deepseek, etc models. There's a lot you could do with sped up models of these quality. It might even be bad enough that the real bubble is how much we don't need giant data centers when 80-90% of use cases could just be a silicon c…

It would be pretty cool to have interchangeable usb keys with models on them.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#44

Post by throwaway27448 »

gm678 wrote: post #6

I 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.

> more than double the intelligence/capability/whatever

I'm curious what people really mean when they say this. Intelligence is famously hard to define, let alone measure; it certainly doesn't scale linearly; it only loosely correlates to real-world qualities that are easy to measure; etc. Are you referring to coding ability or...?

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#47

Post by cyanydeez »

lukan wrote: post #23
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC that graph tracks capabilities as time_to_solve a task for humans (i.e. the model can now handle tasks that usually take a human ~8h). Which, depending on what tasks you look at, could be a reasonable finding. I could see Opus 4.6 handling tasks that take ~8h for humans, and that 5.1 couldn't previously handle (with 5.1 being "limited" at 4h tasks let's say). It is a bit arbitrary, but I think this is what they'…

"It is a bit arbitrary, but I think this is what they're tracking." I don't know if they can get their numbers right this way, but this seems a way more useful metric, than theoretic capabilities.

ok, but arn't you just measuring efficiency and not the big I in AGI improvements.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#48

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

kubb wrote: post #27

If the scary AI is so inevitable, why do you feel such an overwhelming need to convince people about that? Surely you can just wait a bit, and they'll see for themselves.

By that reasoning, why even warn people about anything? Why do road construction crews put up signs saying "ROAD CLOSED AHEAD" when you can just drive on and see for yourself?

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#49

Post by jrumbut »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #11
gm678 wrote: post #6

I 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.

IIRC that graph tracks capabilities as time_to_solve a task for humans (i.e. the model can now handle tasks that usually take a human ~8h). Which, depending on what tasks you look at, could be a reasonable finding. I could see Opus 4.6 handling tasks that take ~8h for humans, and that 5.1 couldn't previously handle (with 5.1 being "limited" at 4h tasks let's say). It is a bit arbitrary, but I think this is what they'…

Without knowing more about their methodology, it seems like a lot of the recent improvements have involved the AI itself taking time to complete the task.

At first the models turned a 5 minute task into a 5 second task (by 5 seconds I mean a very short amount of time, not precisely 5 seconds). Then they turned a 15 minute task into a 5 second task.

Opus 4.6 completes 8 hour tasks all the time but (at least in my experience) it isn't spitting the answer out in 5 seconds anymore. It's using chain of thought and tools and the time to completion is measured in minutes or maybe hours.

In my experiments with local LLMs, a substantial part of the gap between frontier and local (for everyday use) is in tooling and infrastructure.

That is why I am sympathetic to the idea we are leveling off. But to bring in the air speed example from the article, I don't think we've reached the equivalent of the ramjet yet. I suspect in the coming years there will be new architectures, new hardware, and new ways to get even more capable models.

Re: The sigmoids won't save you

#50

Post by kubb »

adleyjulian wrote: post #35
kubb wrote: post #27

If the scary AI is so inevitable, why do you feel such an overwhelming need to convince people about that? Surely you can just wait a bit, and they'll see for themselves.

1. It's not inevitable. 2. Those that see AI as an existential risk don't generally think it's a guarantee, but if it's say a 5% chance then that's worth addressing/mitigating. 3. That's not what this article was even about.

Sounds like the burden is on you to explain either

  1. If you're not treating my claim as a black box, explain explicitly what is your model of what the article was about? Are you aware, for example of the last paragraph of the article? I think that WAS what the article was about. Do you have specific opinions on e.g. how I went wrong and where my model differs?
  2. If you are treating it as a black box, what's your default expectation based on the law of Nothing Ever Happens?
Just kidding, you don't need to explain anything. A"I" fearmongers should though.
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