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

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

#51

Post by rusk »

simonw wrote: post #32
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.

Indeed, and the title itself contains an operational definition of AI as “this” (LLM’s) - if AI becomes more than “this” then the question has been answered in the affirmative.

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

#52

Post by II2II »

piskov wrote: post #7
fuzzfactor wrote: post #3

>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This? What if it does? There's a certain type of fear . . . "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . " It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . " -- David Fahl Same fear, different day.

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.

> 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.

To someone who did not understand what flight is, perhaps. For anyone who understood the laws of physics, no. A similar thing can be said of Moore's Law. The main difference is we likely exceeded the rational expectations derived from Moore's Law (though that was based more on computer performance, rather than the actual expression of Moore's Law in terms of transistor count) while the more rational expectations of flight (routine supersonic, perhaps even suborbital) are still flights of fancy. But that is more a product of cost than technical ability. Simply put, we figured out how to make semiconductors extraordinarily inexpensive. Flight is still expensive.

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

#53

Post by rudedogg »

energy123 wrote: post #25

How can you say progress has stalled two weeks after LLMs won gold medals at IOI and IMO? How can you say progress has stalled without having visibility on the compute costs of gpt-5 relative to o3? How can you say progress has stalled by referring to changes in benchmarks at the frontier over just 3.5 months?

All that feels like specialized stunts like IBM’s Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.

The rate of improvement has slowed significantly. And chasing benchmarks is making everything worse IMO. Opus 4.1 is worse than Sonnet 3.7 to me :/.

I think the future will be:

1. Ads and quantization/routing to chase profits

2. Local models start taking over. New companies will slide in without the huge losses and provide what Claude/OpenAI do today at reasonable margins

3. Apple/Google eat up lots of the market by shipping good-enough models with iOS/Android

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

#54

Post by bee_rider »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My current intuition on this topic is that they are right about scaling but they are training on the wrong data. LLMs were not intended to be the core foundation of artificial intelligence but an experiment around deep learning and language. Its success was an almost accidental byproduct of the availability of large amount of structured data to train from and the natural human bias to be tricked by language (Eliza ef…

Definitely smarter people than me have thought about this already, but I’ve been trying to think about human language and how thoughts form in my head lately. How does thinking feel to you?

I feel like thoughts appear in my head conceptually mostly formed, but then I start sequentially coming up with sentences to express them, almost as if I’m writing them down for somebody else. In that process, I edit a bunch, so the final thought is influenced quite a bit by how English ends to be written. Maybe even constrained by expressability in English. But English has the ability to express fuzzy concepts. And the kernel started as a more intuitive thing.

It is a weird interplay.

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

#55

Post by 9rx »

rossdavidh wrote: post #15

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

> If they don't find a way to make LLMs do significantly more than they do thus far...

They only need two things, really: A large user base and a way to include advertising in the responses. The market willing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars will soon follow.

The businesses are currently in the user base building stage. Hemorrhaging money to get them is simply the cost of doing business. Once they feel that is stable, adding advertising is relatively easy.

> and some kind of "moat" to prevent DeepSeek and the like from undercutting them*

Once users are accustomed to using a service, you have to do some pretty horrendous things to get them to leave. "Give me your best hamburger recipe" -> "Sure, here is my best burger recipe [...] However, if you don't feel like cooking tonight, give the Big Mac a try!". wouldn't be enough to see any meaningful loss of users.

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

#56

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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.

I hope the necessary bailout fails due to political fighting in Congress.

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

#57

Post by garyrob »

It appears that Cal Newport has decided to be the one to most publicly initiate the inevitable Trough Of Disillusionment stage of the Hype Cycle. I'm not sure it'll last very long, though, considering (for starters) Google DeepMind's gold medal at the recent International Math Olympiad. Also, while he criticizes the cost-cutting measure which is ChatGPT 5, he doesn't even mention ChatGPT 5 Pro, which is performing excellently.

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

#58

Post by tonyedgecombe »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #41
mgfist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

I'd be surprised if Google weren't closer to profitability than basically anyone else, as they have their own hardware and have been running these kinds of applications for much longer than anyone else.

Google is still investing heavily in data centres. Presumably without the AI they could lift their foot off that throttle.

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

#59

Post by eddythompson80 »

reactordev wrote: post #50
stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My current intuition on this topic is that they are right about scaling but they are training on the wrong data. LLMs were not intended to be the core foundation of artificial intelligence but an experiment around deep learning and language. Its success was an almost accidental byproduct of the availability of large amount of structured data to train from and the natural human bias to be tricked by language (Eliza ef…

Not all AI is LLMs. That's just what's most prevalent right now. There's still great work being done by models that don't "speak" but "perform". The issue is they need to be trained to perform like you said. The more tools like Claude Code are used, the more training they receive as well. I do think we'll see a plateau (if we haven't reached it already) of diminishing returns and we'll seek out new algorithms to impr…

> The more tools like Claude Code are used, the more training they receive as well.

What do you mean? A model doesn't improve because it's being used more. Are you saying Anthropic invests more into Claude Code the more people use it? Or are you saying they collect its output and train it on it?

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

#60

Post by svara »

energy123 wrote: post #25

How can you say progress has stalled two weeks after LLMs won gold medals at IOI and IMO? How can you say progress has stalled without having visibility on the compute costs of gpt-5 relative to o3? How can you say progress has stalled by referring to changes in benchmarks at the frontier over just 3.5 months?

You can't say that with any certainty, but I personally share the impression that growth has not kept up with the hype of 2023. Take the following for example. That's an article from April 2023, that strongly implies that the next version of GPT would be so much more powerful than the current one that it would be dangerous to work on or even release.

Altman specifically used the version number "GPT5" back then. GPT5 is quite good, but is it the kind of technology that requires a word-wide moratorium on its development, lest it make humanity redundant?

"""

(Friedman) asked Altman for his thoughts on the recently released and widely circulated open letter demanding an AI pause. In response, the OpenAI founder shared some of his critiques. “An earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is training GPT-5 right now. We are not, and won’t for some time,” Altman noted. “So in that sense, [the letter] was sort of silly.”

But, GPT-5 or not, Altman’s statement isn’t likely to be particularly reassuring to AI’s critiques, as first pointed out in a report from the Verge. The tech founder followed up his “no GPT-5″ announcement by immediately clarifying that upgrades and updates are in the works for GPT-4. There are ways to increase a technologies’ capacity beyond releasing an official, higher-number version of it.

"""

(from: https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-open-ai-chatbot-gpt4-gpt5-185...)

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